Anchor Text and Search Engine Optimization

Anchor Text Links - What is an Anchor Text Link? An Anchor text Link is the words that a hyperlink displays when linking to a webpage or file. An example might be "Click Here for more information". That isn't a very good Search Engine Optimization SEO example, but it quite frequently seen on the web. Anchor links are so important that it is possible for a page to rank #1 in Google without the phrase even being listed on the landing page from the search query. As of this writing, one example of this is when you enter the words "Click Here" into Google Search, Adobe comes up #1. I would suppose the reason why this is so are so many websites have the anchor text of "Click Here" to download adobe reader. Thus, Google thinks there site is literally about the words "click here." Pretty cool, heh?

So we may conclude that if many sites, that are of relevant importance, will link to your site with anchor text that tit could help your site in the search engines. They will think that your page is relevant to the anchor text linking to the page. Even though that page may not have the anchor text listed anywhere on it. Does this mean you can use anchor text that is totally irrelevant? I wouldn't count on it. The Search Engine algorithms are being tweaked all the time and I woudl never try to trick them. A few years ago, people use to try to abuse meta tags and when the search engine algorithms were tweaked, many sites went from being listed number one to being totally off the charts permanently. It is always best to rank high in way that is relevant.

When writing articles or blog posts, it may be a good idea to supply the anchor text code and suggest to bloggers and other readers that they are welcome to use it as references in their blog posts, social networking, web sites and any other sources. Here is an example of html code you could offer:

<a href="http://www.WebDesignForEcommerce.com">Web Design - Asheville NC</a>

This would make a link like: Web Design - Asheville NC
or

<a href="http://www.WebDesignForEcommerce.com">Blog Design - Asheville NC</a>

This would make an anchor link like: Blog Design - Asheville NC

Can you make many links on the same page that link to the same page? I have found that as mentioned before that it is not a good idea to try to trick the search engines. I believe you would probably only get credit for the first link and that then 2nd link would either be ignored or possibly you may even get penalized for it. (I've not done the testing to prove this last statement, but remember the search engines have teams of the most brightest minds on Earth tweaking their algorithms every day.) Work with them, not against them :)

Do Internal Links also count as Back Links? No, not in my opinion, but they can help all of your web site pages be crawled, spidered and indexed. An internal link is a link from a domain to the same domain. In particular, your web site should be structured to have the most important pages linked to from not too many pages away from your root page. or home page. (base domain name) Generally speaking, your base domain page will rank highest in Google, then the pages that your root page links to, then the pages they link to and so on. So you should have your most important pages linked to your main page.