Part 8 of 10 of the SEOExciter Series, which you can watch all of them right now at  -> Top SEO Strategies.

So if there is just ONE SEO tip that I felt was the most important, this may be it.  This made SO MUCH difference when it came to getting ranked for the terms that *I* wanted to be ranked for.

This is the concept of the anchor text.

First…

“What is Anchor Text?”

Essentially, it is the clickable text on a web page that takes you to another web page.  Below are three examples of anchor text:

http://www.thewebreviewer.com

TheWebReviewer

Home Based Business Reviews

We identify these as hyperlinks (clickable objects on a website directing us somewhere) by (in most cases) the blue coloring and underline (You can change these styles if you wish, but by default, they are blue and underlined).  The anchor text, therefore, is the TEXT that clickable (in this case, http://www.thewebreviewer.com, TheWebReviewer, and Home Based Business Reviews, respectively).

All three serve the same purpose: they will take you to thewebreviewer.com if you click them.  But the anchor text and WHAT you write here is often overlooked, especially by people new to the internet.

As I have been talking about with off-page SEO, major search engines (like Google) measure your website’s popularity by who is linking to you.  But that is only part of it!  It is also taking note as to WHY that website is linking to you.

The anchor text is the most critical piece of information that a search engine has about your website or web page from an external source!

If your goal is to rank for a specific keyword in Google (which is the whole point of SEO), getting your “money keywords” into these anchor text positions is crucial!

In the example above, it may seem natural to write something like:

..For more information, visit TheWebReviewer.com…

In this case, we are telling the search engines that your site is highly correlated to the keyword “TheWebReviewer.com” (which is true), but are people really doing searches on this???

…For more information, visit Home Based Business Reviews…

In this case, we are telling the search engines that the keyword “Home Based Business Reviews” is most relevant (that is worth a LOT more to me in the search engines!)

…For more information, Click Here…

DON’T DO THIS!!  This is perhaps the worst thing you can do!  Do you really want to rank for the term “Click Here”?  And not only that, you won’t even rank for it since it is used SO much, that this term would actually be hyper-competitive in the search engines.

Few final tips on this:

1)  To define your anchor text in HTML, simply do the following:

<a href=”http://yourtargetsite.com“>Your Anchor Text Here</a>

2)  Sometimes you have no control over what anchor text a third-party website places on their website.  Don’t sweat it!  A backlink is still a backlink!  This DOES improve your over-all popularity, even if the anchor text is not optimized for you specific keyword.  In fact, having a few “un-optimized” anchor text backlinks looks more natural.

3)  Remember that anchor text is also very powerful WITHIN your own website.  Here, you do have control of ALL your anchor text, and therefore, think very carefully about EVERY link you create to yourself (and include your keywords here, too!)

cheers…matt

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P.S.  Do you notice above how I use anchor text to link to the SEOExciter.com???