So you have heard the term “anchor text” but don’t know what it means. Very simply put, it is any word or phrase on a website that has a link leading to another page.
For example, when I tell you to click here, you click that highlighted term “click here” and it takes you to another page. In this example, it takes you to www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html .
Why did I link there? Well, this is a very often cited example of how anchor text works. You probably know that Adobe is the creator of PDF and PhotoShop as well as several other products, but they don’t sell “click here.” However, when you do a search for “click here” on Google, you get the Adobe link I showed above as the first result. How did this happen if they don’t sell “click here” or even have the term “click here” on that page?
You have probably noticed many websites in which there is information that is in a PDF format have a link that says something to the effect of If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat, click here to download. So you see, click here across millions of webpages is linked to the download page of Adobe Acrobat. Because of this, Google sees this as the most relevant site for the term “click here” and ranks it number 1. Not really of much use in search terms, but it shows the relevance of anchor text and how it can affect a site’s page rank in Google.
Now what you want to do is focus on getting anchor text on other sites that are linked to your site and that are focused on your niche and not your domain name. Why? Obviously, people are not going to be searching for your domain name - if they had it, they’d put in the address bar. How do you get these links? That is a subject for a whole other post - several actually.
People search with terms that they think will help them. Let’s say your blog or website is geared towards dog training. You want anchor text that relates to what someone is most likely to type into a search engine, such as “dog training” or “dog obedience” if they are looking for a product like yours - so these would both make appropriate anchor text. You definitely don’t want to have “dog” as your anchor text. Why? Use this keyword tool to try some search terms out and look at the three terms I have just written about. Do you see how many searches there are for “dog”? Now go search dogs at in the regular Google search engine. Look at the types of websites that come up when you type in “dog”. Do you really want to be in the competition with all those websites and advertisers if your focus is dog training? I think not.
Why did I have you search with the keyword tool as well as the search engine? Just want to give you something to play with as I use it when doing research. If you type in a search term with the keyword tool, you get a nice big list of other potential keywords, you can see how many times they are searched, as well as the little green bar, which tells you that if you are going to sell something, what your density of competition is (we will cover this later).
Okay, this can go in so many directions from here like getting the anchor text on other sites pointing to yours, or choosing your keywords, but for right now, I just want you to get your feet wet and understand a little bit about anchor text. I will cover the other things in upcoming posts.
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