The Search & Social Blog From Amplify Interactive

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Click here!  Read more!  Find 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:

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:

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.