There are a variety of factors you should consider when using anchor text within your website. First of all, for those unfamiliar with the term, anchor text is any text on your page which is visibly hyperlinked—it is colored, usually blue, and when you click on it, it takes you to another page or another site. Normally, anchor text is used to indicate the subject matter of the page it is linking to. In other words, if my website sold solar panels, then if I have a hyperlink within one of my articles of “Austin solar installation,” this link would presumably take the user to a solar installer within the Austin area. There are many consideration when you are adding anchor text to your content, so here are a few of them:
- Include your company name within your anchor text as you manually build links. You can use the company name with and without spaces. Regarding a press release for your company, you would probably have your company name as anchor text, and that anchor text would take the user to your website’s homepage. In the same vein, you can use your URL as anchor text, using variations such as http://www.thesolarinstallers.com or simply www.thesolarinstallers.com or even just the name: The Solar Installers in a hyperlink which takes the user directly to the website.
- Use keywords judiciously in your anchor text in order to greatly enhance the relevance of the target page. Although the page which contains the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree, the target page is even more so. This knowledge can help you build relevance into each and every page of your website through the use of highly optimized anchor text which not only contains your most relevant keywords, but is also theme relevant to your other pages.
- Search engines love anchor text, plain and simple. Because of this, incorporating your highly targeted keywords into your anchor text can make a huge difference in how your site ranks with Google as well as other search engines. Google in particular has a gadget which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages, making it clear how much weight they assign to such text. In its recent algorithm changes, Google actually added even more weight to anchor text, meaning that if you add highly targeted anchor text, you could see your ranking substantially increase.
- Although it may sound technical, it is actually fairly easy to find good places to insert anchor text throughout your website. A caveat, however, when you are linking to your own internal pages, it works better if you hyperlink relevant keywords rather than unrelated words. In other words, it’s not a good idea to hyperlink, say, the word “here,” as in “For more information regarding solar installation, click here.” Although the hyperlink will take you to the same place as the targeted keywords would have, using such unrelated text will only hurt you as the spiders search your site. Always use your best keywords when working on anchor text.
- While your goal is to use your most highly targeted and important keywords in your anchor text, you don’t want it to sound stilted or unnatural. Insert your keyword phrases in ways that sounds as though they were written in from the beginning. If they sound very natural, you will not have destroyed the reading experience of your website’s users. And let’s face it, although getting users to your site is important, keeping them is even more so.
Make sure you have used your keywords in your title and paragraph headings, as well as sprinkling them naturally throughout your content, concentrating the bulk of them above the fold. Anchor text can offer your site a huge boost, you just need to learn how to use them correctly.
Tags: Lawyer Website Design
