The SEO PPC Pros

The Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Okay so I started SEO as an on page specialist. For the longest time I really didn't want to believe that inbound links meant so much, but at some point the evidence became overwhelming and I was forced to deal with the cold hard truth, inbound links are 50% of effective SEO efforts.

Think about, you control your website and everything that's on it, but chances are you don't control hundreds and even thousands of other web pages. So when you tell Google what your page is about with the goal of them ranking you for your keywords of choice they are not going to listen very much. Instead what they listen to is those hundreds or even thousands of other pages that link back to you.

And how do they listen to these pages? They listen to the keywords contained in the link, the link itself, the reputation of the page linking to you, the reputation of the website with a link linking to you, and even the reputation of the server of the website of the page linking to you. But possibly the thing they listen to the most is the anchor text html attribute chosen to describe the website being linked to.

You may remember in days not too long ago people using the keywords “click here” to send their visitors to a website or web page. Were they trying to rank for the words “click here"? Because by using those words as their anchor text that's effectively what they were doing.

Even in today's internet I still often see people sending links to websites with just a website address. That doesn't tell the search engines much; rather it's more like a generic vote for that website. However, if that same link adds the words "anchor text" as the anchor text then that would effectively be a stronger vote for that site having relevancy for the keyword search “anchor text”.

I was once able to get a website highly ranked for a keyword phrase that if you were to bid per click on, would have cost $33.50. I had a strong advantage, there were thousands of websites I controlled linking back to the main site. So all I had to do was figure out a way to manipulate those thousands of websites with keywords in the text that I wanted to rank for. Once I figured that out, it was easy. Within three weeks I was on the first page of Google for a term that is highly coveted within the real estate industry.

It was amazing, all I did was manipulate the anchor text on a few sites, and I started to notice the difference. I ran into other problems where they use images instead of text for links so I manipulated the alt text attribute of the images and inserted my keywords of choice.

The company an ASP.net system, that rendered new websites every time someone published their website again with changes or new content. So I went into the code and I created a bit of code myself that cycled through a list of keywords and variations that I was targeting so that when the website was rendered the keywords would be cycled through and I wouldn't have to worry about 1000 websites pointing back to our main site with exactly the same anchor text keywords.

Moral of the story; whenever possible it is highly advised that you think about your anchor text every time you post a link, ask for a link, or even buy a link.