Link Building - (and the power of 'anchor text')

Anchor text is weighted highly (i.e. ranked) in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results: this is where ‘anchor text’ helps - as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page that they point to.

So - what is Anchor Text?

• ‘anchor text’ is the visible hyper-linked text on the page
• for example, where you might see…. “please check out our web design portfolio to evaluate our capabilities” the words ‘web design portfolio’ are hyper-linked to the hidden URL
• the words within the hyperlink, ‘web design portfolio’ are called the ‘anchor text’ (i.e. they anchor that particular link)
• the text 'web design portfolio' indicates to visitors that they can reasonably expect to see examples of web design if they follow that link
• this pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance the relevance of the ‘target’ or the ‘landing page’ URL for the keywords appearing within the ‘anchor text’
• ‘anchor text’ enhances the relevance of the target page.

The Power Of Anchor Text

Successful search engine optimisation employs many factors. However, one of the most important factors is the ‘anchor text’ of inbound links; so getting the right keyphrases in the ‘anchor text’ and getting enough inbound links must be a key consideration. Because Google, among other search engines, puts a significant amount of weight on the ‘anchor text’ of inbound links, ‘anchor text’ can be a decisive factor when going after good rankings for key search terms. Precisely how powerful is the ‘anchor text’ of inbound links? It is entirely possible to achieve a top ranking for extremely competitive keywords solely using keyphrase ‘anchor text’ without any hint of the keyphrase within the on-page-elements. It’s not the only solution - but it’s surely one of the most significant components of a Google solution (at this present time).

How Does Anchor Text Work?

(a simple illustration below – inspired by seomoz)

There’s no doubting that through accumulating a significant number of inbound links with the ‘anchor text' 'blackberry'… this will help the Google robot no end to make its mind up and choose your page……. amongst all of the other pages, when somebody searches for 'blackberry'…? But at this point it's not got enough information to make the correct judgement.

 

Latent Semantic Indexing

As can be seen from the simple illustration above, the Robot is being asked to process a request for the keyword 'blackberry' - but classically, in this case, it's just as likely to return a result about, "any of various shrubs of the genus Rubus, having usually prickly stems, compound leaves, and an aggregate fruit of small drupelets" as it is to return a result about, "a technology licensed by Research In Motion (RIM) designed to allow networks to "push" email to wireless devices" - get the idea?

But we can do something about that at SEOptimiser and that's where Latent Semantic Indexing comes in: it's a process that determines the way search engines associate words. So when assessing the relevance of a link, as well as the 'anchor text' a search engine (and they are all liable to do things slightly differently) might take account of other factors such as:

• Context: Search engines could choose to give a lot of weight to where your link was coming from in terms of the relevance of the content of the linking website to the subject matter of your own website.

So if your website is focused on (say) Mosaic Tiles, for example, then a link from a site dealing in the history of deep sea diving might not carry much weight (apart from in the diving boots of course). On the other hand, a link from a web page that was big on Mosaics could be considered a good thing as both ends of the link are likely to have important keywords in common. Alternatively, such contextual relevance could be focused on the text in the immediate vicinity of or in close proximity to, your link.

In the example depicted above, you would wish to incorporate the word 'blackberry'and other associated terms (discovered through latent semantic indexing in Google based on the seed word 'blackberry') and present them clustered together into a sentence and place the sentence strategically on your pages in order to achieve stronger organic rankings for your keywords that you have clearly identified for that page.

That's the theory of it anyway - but if it all sounds too horrid to contemplate, that's what SEOptimiser is here for! We do the hard work - so you don't have to.