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Click Here to Read More to Find Out More!

Published by Christian | Filed under Links & Viral

Click hereRead moreFind out more! Having optimized anchor text can help establish relevancy for the linked text to its landing page.  Why is this important?  It clues in search engines (and human beings!) as to what that page is about.

Believe it or not, search engines do place weight on the anchor text you use when externally linking.  Moreover, search engines also place weight on the text when internally linking within your site.

You know the saying: first impressions matter.  Well, the anchor text to a link is a search spider’s first impression of that linked page.  Would you rather have that spider’s first impression of your ‘Super Hyper XTREME Energy Drink’ product page be:

A) Read more!

B) Read about our Super Hyper XTREME Energy Drink!

Say you went through and performed keyword research around your energy drink product.  You’ve identified a keyword phrase of “sugar-free energy drink” as a phrase you wish to target.  You build a site specifically around your sugar-free energy drink.  On your home page you have a links pointing to both your regular energy drink and your sugar-free product offering.  It looks like this:

Super Hyper XTREME

Oh boy.  While you’ve got the idea, close doesn’t cut it.  In the Michael Phelps gold medal meter, you would only receive four out of eight Beijing gold medals for that effort:

Gold Medal in colorGold Medal in colorGold Medal in colorGold Medal in colorGold Medal’lessGold Medal’lessGold Medal’lessGold Medal’less

What that text should read (or close to read) is:

Read more about Super Hyper XTREME’s regular energy drink & sugar-free energy drink products.

Optimizing your website’s anchor text is critical to your overall site’s search engine & usability success.  Be descriptive!  Let your visitors (and those nice little search spiders) have the best first impression for all of your site’s pages.

August 18th, 2008


2 Responses to “Click Here to Read More to Find Out More!”

  1. Adam Says:

    I LOVE the Michael Phelps gold medal meter…

    My home page is a very poor example of what you wrote about :*(

  2. Frank Levert Says:

    I also like the Michael Phelps gold medal meter. Nice timing Chris. I wonder if he drank some of that sugar-free energy drink you are talking about!

    Seriously, I can only agree with what is being discussed here and I’ve seen websites improving their ranking for particular keywords just being optimizing this internally. It’s even better if you can control it externally as well.

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