Just Be Better

As you learn about promoting websites you’re sure to hear people talking about getting relevant anchor text in links that point to your website, but what exactly is anchor text, and why does it matter?

Links are formed using HTML, the computer language universally used to create websites, and if you view the source of any pages you will see literally hundreds of lines of code with < and > characters separating them.

A typical link will contains two sections, the first has the URL, and the second a slash with an a “/a” both surrounded by < and > arrows, but when you see it in the webpage you will only see the text ‘this is a link’ and it will have an underline or be a different color to indicate you can click it. The text you see on the page is called the anchor text.

Part of the reason good anchor text is so important is that search engines are just computers, they may be smart, but they determine what the link is all about from the anchor, whereas you and I might read the surrounding paragraph and be able to make an assumption about the link.

Because search engines usually look at only the anchor, and maybe a few words either side of the link, any link that points to our website is going to be identified by search engines using the anchor text. So, lets say I own a website about racing cars, I would want people who link to me to use text that had something to do with racing cars, and not text that is irrelevant such as ‘that cool site over there’.

If I get enough links to my website with relevant anchor text, then the search engines will give me better rankings for the terms I most talk about, but if too many people link to me with irrelevant anchor text I’ll probably struggle to get a good ranking. Many website owners choose domain names and website names that don’t really define their topic, so run the risk of getting a lot of irrelevant links.

Knowing how people create links, and knowing what keywords or topics you want to rank for is the best way to ensure that you help your cause in the search engines rather than hinder your cause.

[Ezine]