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SEO Anchor Text SEO Anchor Text SEO Anchor Text SEO Anchor Text

June 15, 2010 By

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Do I have your attention?

Good.

I’ve mentioned this before, anchor text matters.

If linking is the door to higher search results, anchor text is the key that unlocks that door.

I know this for several reasons. I rank pretty well for a couple of long tail terms. I also watch as many of those free SEO videos as I can from people like Brad Callen, Andy Jenkins and the like. You know, the Stompernet guys and big time internet marketers. They give away a lot of good stuff for free. And if they’re a-givin’ I’m a-takin’.

Using anchor text naturally, such that it doesn’t break the flow of your prose (and sound all weird) is a bit of an art.

But first you have to get the anchor text (if you are linking), or find a way to provide it people who want to link.

1. Ask for anchor text

If you aren’t sure what anchor text to use when linking to an article, ask the article’s author.

If you’re an author, provide anchor text information to people who want to link to you.

If you find yourself being linked to with unsuitable anchor text, here’s what Erica Douglass does:

I send them an email thanking them for linking to my blog, and then say “Instead of erica.biz as your link text, can you put ‘starting your own business‘?” (I’ll also often throw in an entire sentence with the <a href=""></a> etc. already in there.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve gotten most of my good rankings from guest posting and putting the SEO’d text in my blurb. I show how to do this in Guest Post Secrets.

2. Using SEO keyword metadata

STOP.

I’m not going to write what you think I’m going to write about keywords. Instead, I’m going to make an offer. First:

Use your meta keywords to specify your preferred anchor text.

That way, when I want to link to you, I’ll know what you want to rank for. I just look at the source for your page, extract what I need. Easy.

Here’s the offer: if you want to link to one of my articles, and you find that it (the article) has no keyword metadata (there are plenty, too many), email me, I’ll add keywords you can use for anchor text, and send you a free copy of Blog Post Engineering when I get the trackback from your link.

3. Let’s plug it in

If the notion of specifying keyword metadata is simply too repellent, I offer a tiny plugin for your amusement.

Since it’s Tuesday, we can go technical.

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/*
 * Plugin name: Fast Anchor Text
 * Plugin URI: http://website-in-a-weekend.net/seo-anchor-text
 * Description: Set desired anchor text as custom field.
 * Version: 0.1
 * Author: Dave Doolin
 * Author URI: http://website-in-a-weekend.net/
 */
 
function anchor_text_meta() {
 
   if (is_home()) return;
 
   global $post;
   $anchor = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'anchortext', true);   
   if ($anchor) {
      echo "<meta name=\"anchortext\" content=\"$anchor\" />\n";  
   }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'anchor_text_meta');
?>

If you don’t like plugins, and you prefer messing around with functions.php (or custom_functions.php in Thesis theme), you can just paste the functional parts into those files.

Here’s a screenshot of how to use it:

Custom anchor text

Key in blue box, anchor text in red box

Here’s the plugin file: anchor.zip.

Blog Maintenance Challenge

Believe it or not, I am slowly yet surely adding material to the Blog Maintenance Challenge. Dealing with keywords and anchors is definitely on the curriculum.

I’ll have some videos over there too.

Filed Under: Extending WordPress Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Does Google Think You’re a Dirty Rotten Spammer? (Hint: anchor text matters)

April 11, 2010 By

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Ok, listen up people…

I have something really important to say:

Stop effing up your anchor text.

Please, stop it.

Yes, I know we all love (luv) links back from your blog.

Yes, it is a favor and it does bleed you a little Google Juice every link.

And yes, your anchor text will help rank that link for those keywords.

Wait.

Stop.

Do you really understand that last claim?

Honestly, from what I see, you probably don’t.

Most people have no clue about anchor text.

I see it all the time.

Anchor text rules

Here’s the RULE: Anchor text should have 2-5 keywords/phrase for the link.

When you’re not sure how to anchor your link, here’s your procedure:

  1. You want to link to someone. Excellent!
  2. ASK them for their preferred keywords or phrases.
  3. Use what they tell you for your anchor text linking to their article.

Otherwise, you might as well use “Click here.”

Because the alternative is worse: you anchor phrases against the keywords in the article. Dude, that’s what link spammers do! You don’t want to Google to think your friends are link spammers, do you?

(Exceptions: If you link an article by it’s title, it’s ok to anchor the whole title. Lazy, but ok. If you’re pranking, let’s talk.)

Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to figure out appropriate anchor text on your own.

Here’s a hypothetical example.

Suppose your friend writes an article about how nasty bad spammers and the evilness of black hat SEO techniques. Then, your perfectly well-meaning self comes along. You love this article. You want to love (luv) it with links. So you anchor the link with “my friend’s great article.”

Nice.

Now the search is going to attempt to associate “friend’s great article” with evil black hat SEO. That doesn’t really compute. Further, it won’t help drive your qualified readers down that link.

Sure, your friends are the coolest. Everyone already knows that. But if they have a need for specific information about black hat SEO, they’re going to find out by accident, not because you alerted them via keyword-anchored link.

Ok, now that I’ve stirred it all up, here’s more unpleasantry:

  1. Linking is NOT easy. I’ve written on this before: the search engine IS part of your audience. If you only write for yourself and human readers, you’re shortchanging yourself long term.
  2. Your rants will be quickly forgotten by readers and by search engines. Unless your rant is long enough and has enough of a point to carry meaningful keyword phrases, it’s going to be hard get it ranked in search engines. And that kind of stinks because rants are fun and easy to write.

    Conversely, crap like how to implement register_activation_hook in WordPress plugins is hard to write (because it has to be accurate and precise) and won’t do much for your current readers… but it’s easy to anchor and brings in search traffic like crazy in the long term.

Now I can see the smoke pouring out your ears. The gears have seized up, the oil is burning, you have dozens or hundreds of blog posts full of crappy backlinks.

Bummer.

But wait! There’s hope.

See, I’m running this little month-long program starting around the first of May. It’s called the Blog Maintenance Challenge. And one of the Challenges is unscrewing your anchor text. You’re going to choose a couple of your flagship blog posts or pages, and you’re going to fix your links to them. And if you don’t have any links to them (shame), you’re going to learn how to do it right.

Then you’re going to fix your links from your articles to all your nice friend’s articles, so that Google doesn’t think you’re all a bunch of Dirty Rotten Spammers.

That’s doing link luvin’ right!

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Filed Under: Building Traffic Tagged With: , , , ,
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