HowTo optimize anchor links

Anchor links what are they and how should you use them

An anchor link is the text used in a link.  For a vast majority of browsers, this is the phrase of blue underlined text that a person clicks on to get to your site.  An anchor link can be a single word, or an entire paragraph, or even an image.  The use of images is much beyond the scope of this article, and even if you find a webmaster who agrees to use a whole paragraph to create a backlink for you, a method of that sort is strongly discouraged, and not likely to prove beneficial to gaining curious visitors anyway.  Not to mention that a spider crawling the site where such a link exists is not likely to give any credence to such a waste of code, as there is a limit to how long a search entered into a search engine can be.

By and large, the best choice for an anchor link is to use the same words in the link that are the primary keywords used on your site.  If your site deals in motorcycles accessories, and your keywords are “motorcycle safety gear”, then consider making that same phrase your anchor link wherever you are able to do so.  This is considered a descriptive link, meaning that visitors who click the link are informed about what to expect at the site when they arrive. Relevance is extremely important.  Who would want to find motorcycle accessories after clicking a link announcing great 20 minute recipes, after all?  As ridiculous as this may sound, there are a surprising number of directories that will present links to sites which have no
connection at all the keywords they are represented by.

For search engines, your keywords are an association.  When trailing backlinks, they expect the anchor text to have some relevance to the topic of the site they follow it to, and ratings are increased or lowered according to the content of the site.  For SEO purposes, this makes the anchor text in your backlinks critical to the way your site is ranked, and you can be assured that the more unrelated anchor text backlinks you are connected to, the lower your overall relevance your site will have, resulting in lower page ranks and the farther from the top of the search results your site will be.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com