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How Anchor Text can improve your blog’s SEO

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So much have been said about search engine optimization but often times little is said about “Anchor Text”. Are you surprised I brought it up? Some will even wonder if it mattered at all. That is exactly the essence of this article to teach you what anchor text is all about, its importance in SEO, anchor text best practices and how you can improve your blog’s SEO with anchor text.

What is Anchor Text?

So many writers have tried to define anchor text in several ways but I prefer to explain it for better understanding. Simply put anchor text is the clickable portion of a hyperlink. See example below;

For more information on Anchor Text click here. (Bad Anchor Text Practice)

 In the example above, “Click here” is an anchor text. Anchor text is the text used in the link to another webpage/website. Search engines use this text to determine the subject matter of the page it is linked to. Search engines gather data by crawling around the web moving from one link to another, so anchor texts give them idea of what the pages they are about to visit is all about.

If several blogs link to a site with “mobile app development company” as their anchor text, this will give the search engine an insight into the kind of content they will meet on such site.

How Anchor Text can improve your blog’s SEO

How is Anchor Text important in SEO:

Just like I said above, Anchor text tells search engines what to expect when they follow a link and not so many people know that Google and other search engines use anchor texts to determine the relevancy of your content based on the sites linking to you. Link relevancy is one of the search engine ranking metrics and this is determined by the content of the web page and the anchor text.

There are two ways one can use links in a site – Internal and External links. Internal links are those links that point to another web page(s) of the same site while external links are links that point to a different website entirely.  In SEO, both internal and external links are important because they create a unique kind of navigation within and outside a website and search engines love them.

But how you link to this pages matter as search engines will use it to determine the content of such pages.  Most bloggers make one unique mistake in using anchor links. Often times words link “Click here” are used as anchor links just link in the example above, other words are pages, posts, article etc. This is bad SEO practice and I think by now you already know why.

Advice:

Avoid using anchor texts link “page”, “article”, “click here” etc as these words do not give search engines any idea of what the web page they are about to visit is all about and this also affects your link relevancy and thus your search engine ranking.

Do not also use anchor text that does not relate with content of the page being linked to.  A page can’t be talking about “Cars” while you are using “food” to link to it.

Anchor Text Best SEO Practices:

Google and other search engines are beginning to clamp down on over-optimized anchor text sites. So if you are trying to get as much links as possible with same anchor text, be careful not to incur the wrath of Google and others. To avoid getting penalized for over-optimized anchor text, attract links from variety of sources with varied anchor texts.

Remember search engines consider the ratio of your external linked pages to your internal linked pages, so try and link to sites with good content and traffic, link within your own sites but do not over do it. Do not buy links and above all do not over-optimize your links with one anchor text.

How you can improve your blog’s SEO with Anchor Text:

If a web page is linked to with the right keywords in the anchor text, such web page has a good chance of ranking high in search engines. Always ensure to add the keyword you want to rank for in your anchor text.

Link to relevant pages within your site in your articles just like I do on this blog, this will help search engines determine the content of the page in relevance to its anchor text and this will improve your search engine rankings. This will greatly boost the SEO of your entire site and help both the visitors and search engines determine what the linked page is all about.

Remember that Google and other search engines only consider only the anchor text used in the first link when two links or more are targeting same URL in a web page, so choose your anchor text carefully and improve your site SEO.

Do I need to tell you that improved SEO = Higher search engine ranking = Higher organic traffic = the more $$$$ you make from your site?

Must Read: Devising The Best SEO Strategies For Your Websites

If you have any contribution or question to ask about anchor texts, use the comment section below. If you have not subscribed to my RSS feed, please do so today so you can receive my posts right on your inbox.

The post How Anchor Text can improve your blog’s SEO appeared first on NetMediaBlog.


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