SEO and traffic building are some of the most important concepts of creating a good website today. Anyone serious about improving search engine rankings should focus on anchor text they are using while building links back to the website. Anchor text is the keyword phrase you use when linking from some other site to yours, and gives the reader a description about the link destination.

Or simply put, it is the hyperlinked text that is visible to your readers.

Let’s say I wanted to link to Free Spongebob Videos (a site I put up for my grandkids)

I could use - Free Songebob Videos click here 

Or I could use… I created a free video site for my grandkids so that they could watch spongebob anytime they wanted to. When you hover over the click here link what do you see? And when you hover over the link “I created a free video site for my grandkids”   what do you see?

  This is the value of using anchor text, the hyperlinked text that is visible to your readers.

 Here is the html value of the above link:

<a title=”Free Spongebob Videos” href=”http://freespongebobvideos.com/” target=”_blank”>

Simply replace my link with your hoplink or site that you want your visitor to go and replace “Free Spongebob Videos”” with the anchor text you want to use.

To take my reader to a specific video I could use this big ole ugly link:

http://freespongebobvideos.com/watch-video/Wu8w934QF4c/ieda18/spongebob-the-soldier-of-love.html 

or this one

You Gotta Watch this Hillarious Spongebob video: Spongebob the soldier of love.

Buidding links is half of the SEO/Traffic battle. By taking advantage of some tried and true link building strategies, you can really help your cause. A link to http://freespongebobvideos.com/ is fine, but it is not quite as good (in the eyes of the search engines) as a text string stating Free Spongebob Videos that serves as a hyperlink back and produces better results than a traditional URL link.

Creating your anchor text on your WP blog is easy:

Highlight the text you want to insert your link into and click the Insert/Edit Link

And up pops your Insert/edit link window

Enter the link information / click Insert and your done!

Click Here

Just do a Google search for the phrase “click here”. The first result that comes up is the adobe site. This is mainly because a lot of sites have linked to the adobe site with the phrase “click here”. This shows the importance of using proper anchor texts while building links.

If some other site is linking to you then you may not have complete control over what text they use with the link. But in cases where you do have control then you have to choose a proper anchor text. When submitting articles to article directories, while doing social bookmarking or doing video submissions etc. you can choose your own anchor text.

The first thing to remember is that you should not use the same anchor text for each link to your website. You should vary it a little bit. Otherwise it will be a red flag in the eyes of Google and it might even penalize your website by dropping your rank. So use a lot of variations and different keywords in your anchor text.

Another important thing to remember is to choose your anchor texts very carefully.

You should choose those keyword phrases that are neither too competitive nor too easy to rank for. If you use too much competitive keywords in your anchor text then building a few links may not help you in achieving top rankings for those keywords. You will probably need hundreds and hundreds of links in such cases.

On the other hand, if the keyword phrase has very less competition then you probably don’t need anchor text links in order to rank for that phrase. Just using that keyword phrase a couple of times in your website article might be sufficient in achieving a good rank for it.

So choose such keyword phrases that are a little difficult to rank for but which you can achieve with a little bit of work. Make a list of such keyword phrases that are relevant to your website, and then try to get as many links as possible with those keywords in anchor text.

Make sure to alternate between different keywords so that you can avoid using the same anchor text too often.

Do not neglect the importance of anchor texts otherwise your link building efforts might not yield the results that are possible by using this strategy.

If you can, ask the website owners who’re linking to you to create their link with good anchor text. A good anchor text is a link that has your keyword in it, rather than just click here.

For example, if you’re selling Hair Styling Made Easy:

Bad: *Click Here* To learn About Hair Styling Techniques

Good: Click This Link to *Learn About Hair Styling Techniques*

Where ** = The Link Text

Make sure your anchor text is clear to understand also keyword rich.  The more creative your anchor text is the more chance of the link and your site being ranked higher in the search engine.

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