It’s no secret that anchor text of your links help increase your prominence in Google’s rankings. The simple idea here is that instead of having your links say “click here” or “more info”, you should put your keywords in the the anchor text to increase your relevancy score for those keywords.
This strategy can be applied to internal links on your own website between pages or when asking for links from external websites.
But how many keywords can you put into the link? If you put a whole paragraph of text will Google recognize all the words or just the first few?
According to a new test by Hobo, a Scottish SEO firm, Google stops counting keywords after 55 characters (roughly 8 words).
What does this mean for your efforts to rank on the first page for that all-elusive key phrase? Make sure that your keywords on your links are within the first 55 characters! Check all your internal links and make the necessary changes immediately.
To take it a step further you can also log into your Google webmaster tools to see which other websites are externally linking to your pages. What keywords are they using? Can you contact them and potentially get them to rewords unhelpful anchor text?
For SEO, it’s the usual 80-20 rule: You can get 80% of the way there doing 20% of the work. If you’re not targeting a difficult keyword then just changing title tags, file names, H1 tags and throwing in a few links will get you on page 1 in Google’s results.
If you are battling it out though with your competitors for a really tough key phrase then this anchor text strategy is worth exploring. Happy testing!
