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What’s Anchor Text and Linking All About?

Posted by Ruth Miller on Thu 23rd August 2007 at 10:10 AM, Filed in FAQ, Glossary, Growing Your Blog, Blogging For Beginners

The value of links to and from your site can not be underestimated in a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) context. Tied into this is the kind of text other sites link to you by. This is otherwise known as anchor text. The frequency of links to your site under certain keyword combinations can determine how highly your pages rank within a search engine. For instance, lots of inbound links from other sites with the words “big apple” would help my sites content appear higher up in searches for those keywords.

This principle is widely accepted as a key, bona fide, SEO techique.

Darren at Problogger recently wrote about how this extends to internal links on your blog

He says:

“When you link to yourself (for example linking to a previous link that you’ve written) you should consider doing so with descriptive words of the post rather than generic words.”

Darren offers the following example:

If I wanted to link to my previous post titled ‘blogging for beginners’ in a post rather than linking like this:

‘you can read my post on blogging for beginners here‘

it would be more powerful in terms of the search engine ranking of the post to link to it as:

‘you can read my previous post on the topic, blogging for beginners‘

This makes perfect sense from an SEO perspective. It is also more meaningful to your readership. i.e their more inclined to click on a link pointing to your archives if they have some idea where it’s going to take them. ’Here’ doesn’t really say much about where a link will take you. I am as guilty as the next man on this point - just to confim that I’m well out of my ivory tower!