Anchor Text & Keyword Selection
“Hi Duncan, This one has always confused me a bit: Anchor text and keyword selection for the anchor text link. Do you use the URL for internal pages or what?” ~ Danielle
Hi Danielle,
This is a great question because if you structure this correctly in all of your link building techniques you’re going to see the biggest overall impact on your search engine rankings.
I’ll have to use a hypothetical example here but let’s just say you have 10 primary keyword phrases that you’re working to improve search engine rankings for. Let’s also assume you have 10 pages on your website that are specifically related to each of those respective terms.
What you want to do is link to the exact page (the most relevant for the term) using the exact phrase (or broad match phrase) as anchor text from the website linking to you.
For example your website is about “Dog Training”. You have a page on “Dog Training Advice” and you want to get high search engine rankings for that term.
You want the anchor text of your link to say “Dog Training Advice”, and you want to link directly to the most relevant page on your website related to that i.e. /dog-training-advice.htm
The same goes if you were targeting the term “Dog Training Techniques”. You would get the website linking to you to use that exact term “Dog Training Techniques” as the anchor text and link to the most relevant page on your website i.e. /dog-training-techniques.htm
If it’s not possible to have the exact terms as anchor text (for whatever reason) then a broad match is the next best thing. For example “Free Dog Training Advice” or “Dogs – Free Training Information and Advice” as you still have all the target terms contained within the anchor text.
You should try to do this as much as possible because this does two things.
- It increases the relevancy of the individual pages within your website for their respective strategic keyword terms. This will help increase each pages individual search engine rankings.
- It increases the overall “theme relevancy” of your entire website – strengthening the entire website as an “authority” on the subject of “Dog Training”.
What I mean by the later is that whilst one link passes relevancy for the term “Dog Training Advice”, the other is doing the same for the term “Dog Training Techniques. Combined (and via the internal linking structure of your website / blog) this is going to pass relevancy for the main term “Dog Training” as a whole, back to your website’s home page.
Similarly, if you’re going to link to your home page directly as part of your incoming link building campaign (and you should), then you’d be best to use the anchor text “Dog Training” where ever possible because the reverse happens.
You’ll then be passing that relevancy down into your internal pages via your internal linking structure – further helping all of those individual pages related to “Dog Training ANYTHING”.
Obviously it’s not always possible to be so specific – sometimes you don’t have the flexibility depending on where your incoming links are coming from – and the truth is you don’t need to be 100% of the time. But if you use it as a general rule and implement this as much as possible then you’ll get a much better result.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
