The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 6 - Link Text
Today I’m going to continue my series on onsite SEO factors. If you haven’t been following the series you can check out the first five posts here:
The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 1 - The Document Title
The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 2 - Meta Tags
The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 3 - Body Text
The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 4 - URLs
The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 5 - Headline Text
Our topic today is link text. Link text, also known as anchor text, is the text that is underlined in blue on a link. For example, in the link above, the link text is “The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 5 - Headline Text”.
Link text is important because if you are going to use the text in the link itself then the content of the page that follows is likely to be highly relevant to the text you used. Therefore Google sees that link text as being extremely valuable and will take it into consideration when ranking your site.
Many website owners make the mistake of using the link text “Click here” or “Learn more”. While it may be a useful method to get people to click through on the link, it won’t help you with your rankings. Chances are you are never going to rank for “Click here” or “Learn more” and even if you did, they aren’t keywords that will drive qualified traffic to your website.
You therefore always want to put your keywords in the link text of all internal links that point to other pages on your site. Make sure that the keywords are actually relevant to the page that you are linking to or the linking benefit won’t help.
You should also make sure to check the people who are linking in to your website from their own. Are they using “Click here” or “Learn more”? Are they just using your domain name which you already rank #1 for?
Ask website owners to use keywords in their link text to help you get higher ranking positions in Google. I would also suggest that you have them come up with what they believe are descriptive keywords for your site to use in the link text. If you get too many links to your site with the exact same link text then you can actually be penalized and dropped from the index for that keyword.
If, instead, webmasters are using their own descriptive keywords then you will have the variety needed to get the positive link text exposure and not get penalized by Google.
Evan CarmichaelYoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager
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2 Comments so far
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Well the factors which you have described here, i must say that if a seo think about them and clear his or her concepts about them , then it will be great.
yeah. most def agree. it can be a bit difficult at times to use relevant anchor text.