Anchor text is the text that is used to link back to a certain website. Many times this text is underlined or a different color from the text around it. It is most commonly used to anchor the information in an article to a relevant website. Using proper anchor text to draw visitors to your site is an effective and affordable SEO technique that can boost your search engine ranking and increase your website page authority.

Most of the time when your website gets a link back from another site it will be without your knowledge. Therefore, as far as anchor text goes, you are usually at the mercy of the webmaster who decided to link back to you. And in these cases, the text most website owners use is simply “www.YourSite.com”. Unfortunately, this linking method doesn’t provide nearly as much SEO benefit as using keyword related anchor text.

Keyword related anchor text basically means using your keywords or keyword phrase as the text that points back to your website. For instance, if your keyword phrase is “West Ohio dog grooming”, it is more beneficial to use “West Ohio dog grooming” as the link to your website, rather than www.YourSite.com. As you might imagine, to make the most of this technique, it’s extremely important to know exactly which keywords you have a possibility of ranking for Levitra and which keywords will actually drive traffic to your site.

On a few rare occasions, webmasters will actually ask you what text you would like to have linking back to your site. And in these instances, you’ll want to keep these tips in mind:

Keyword Anchor Linking

When other webmasters link back to your site, it can be a tossup whether or not they use relevant keywords as the anchor text. Often, if your website is clearly written and your keywords and phrases are relatively obvious, the other webmaster will be able to deduce relevant anchor text to use. You can make this possible by ensuring that your website is clear and concise. It’s also a good idea to use the keyword meta data in each of your web pages to give other webmasters an idea of the phrases you’re trying to rank for.

The Referring Site Effect

If the site that is linking to your website is reputable, you are likely going to get traffic from it regardless of the relevance of the anchor text used. If they are getting tons of traffic, at least some of those folks are going to click on your link, even if it’s just to briefly check out your site and see what you have to offer.

If the information on the linking site is relevant to the information on your own website, you will also get a boost in your search engine positioning. But don’t worry, if the search engines feel that the linking site is not pertinent to your own site, the link will not hurt your search engine position.

Keywords, Anchoring, and Asking

Sometimes the best way to build up back links is to just ask. Having reputable back links pointing to your site can help to get a higher ranking on Google, so it is a win-win situation. If you have a relevant and reputable site, other webmasters will link back to you if you just ask them to. When this happens you are often able to pick your own link text, so it’s critical to know the most relevant and effective keywords and keyword phrases are for your site. Using these particular words and phrases both on your site and as anchor text to your site will help to boost your ranking in search engines.

Using these methods, combined with other affordable SEO techniques, will help promote your website and greatly improve your search engine ranking with very little monetary investment.

Author Bio: Karen Scharf, small business marketing consultant, works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several papers, reports and checklists, including her FREE 4 Simplest Tactics for Increasing Your Customer Base and Growing Your Bottom Line. Download this and many other small business marketing tips now.

Category: Internet Marketing/Link Popularity
Keywords: anchor text, SEO, internet marketing, affordable SEO