Anchor Text: the meat of links, the nervous system of the Web

Anchor text is the visible text that is anchored to a hyperlink (web link on a web page).  This is important because the internets primary purpose is to display pages and link them to other pages of relevant content to enhance your browsing experience.  There are many kinds of links, but the primary static text/image linked links are the most common and found on most every web page on the internet.  Further examination of links in XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) of a hyperlink code may look like this:

CODE:
<a href="http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/">WebPaws.com&rsquo;s Internet Marketing Services</a>

HOW YOUR BROSWERS DISPLAYS IT:
WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services

We will now review the XHTML code including the meat of the link, the anchor text.  An “a” tag means the anchor or start of a link, where we start the hyperlink code.  The “href” is the hyperlink reference or the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that tell your computer’s browser where to go for the specific information (linked page) and download and pull it up in your browser.  The anchor text is text sandwiched between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag.  In this example, the anchor text is “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and is the text that is associated with the link “http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/”.

This is an important key factor in increasing your search engine rankings because the search engines use this (anchor) text to aid in determining the relevance of the linked page to the anchor text used as incoming keywords.  The use of this particular anchor text will help the domain, web.marketing.webpaws.com, perform better in search engine results for the keyword “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and similar keyword phrases too (e.g., “Internet Marketing”, “Marketing Services”, WebPaws.com, etc.)

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Increase your website’s popularity with Link Building

Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building race. It’s also a good way to get natural traffic; as these are the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic, they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for investigating a competitor’s links is fairly straightforward, although more complex methods can be used by the advanced researcher.

The best source of linkage data is Yahoo!. Google purposely does not report accurate link data with their link: command, and MSN’s rankings of links can often show less valuable and effective links at the top. Yahoo!, however, currently shows the greatest accuracy in numbers of links, and also sorts well, typically placing more valuable links near the top of the results.

At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages that link to other sites/pages:

1. Linkdomain:url.com
   This command will show you all the pages that link to any page hosted at the domain url.com.
2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
   This command will show only those pages which link directly to the specified page.
3. Linkdomain:url.com word
   This search will show all pages with the term “word” that link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for specific areas.
4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
   Use the – sign to indicate that pages which include a particular term should be excluded from the search; for example, searching for all links that point to a site that don’t contain your company name on the page (i.e. linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can contain multiple – signs and terms if you require very specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy data).
5. Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
   In addition to the – sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the results as well. This can be especially valuable if one large site links to the target site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don’t include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the site itself, (i.e. linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org), so as not to see results from internal pages.

Competitive analysis also includes using the top search results themselves as sources for links. If a site or page ranks particularly well for many related searches, a link from that site can send a healthy number of interested surfers to you. Rankings in the SERPs is also an excellent way to determine the value of a link, so if a page ranks highly for the term or phrase you’re targeting, a link from that page is sure to provide great assistance in your goal to achieve top placement.

Building Personality & Reputation

The cult of personality on the Internet provides excellent opportunities for charismatic, well-written individuals to make headlines, friends, and links through online networking. A variety of social interaction sites operate across industries on the web, delivering ready-made sources for building a reputation and earning links. The keys to this methodology are to provide honest, intelligent contributions to existing discussions while maintaining a connection between yourself and the communities.

Online forums are great places to start, and can frequently lead to additional venues for the engagement of your colleagues. In building a successful reputation in an online forum, honesty, integrity, and openness provide the best chances to be taken seriously and seen by others as an expert on your subject matter. Forums typically offer a built-in system for referring folks to your site – the signature link. Although debate exists on whether search engines count these links for ranking purposes, there can be little doubt about their effectiveness in driving forum visitors to your site. One last tip for forums is to use a single link to your site in your signature – ensuring that people identify you with one unique online property, rather than several. Combining these effective techniques of forum posting and signature links with blogging can also be very valuable.

In addition to forums, outlets like blog comments (which frequently use the “nofollow” attribute, and are thus valuable for live visitors but not search engines), ICQ Channels, chatrooms, Google groups, and privately hosted boards or chatrooms can all serve a similar purpose. Stay consistent in each format – using the same voice, avatar (the accompanying photo on many forums), and username in order to build reputation and recognition.

Highly Competitive Terms & Phrases

For some terms and phrases, even the best websites with the most diligent promotional efforts will have a very difficult time penetrating the top 10-20 results. In these instances, it can be tempting to rely on efforts outside of the search engines’ guidelines. However strong this temptation may be, be advised that search engines do not tolerate spam or manipulation via automated links, nor do they allow such results to flourish for long. Although these methods, commonly referred to as “black hat SEO”, may have some effectiveness in the short term, they have little chance of long-term success in the SERPs and may become permanently banned from search results.

For highly competitive results (from “mortgage” to “car insurance” to “university degree”), targeting the above described “long tail” (the more niche-related search terms for which a smaller degree of heavy competition exists) can be the best method. Search engines are also careful to consider the age of a site and its links and give heavy weight to those sites with long-held, highly trusted links. Thus, while rankings may be sparse at first, over time an enterprising site owner can achieve some measure of notice, even in the most competitive of searches.

reposted from seomoz – http://www.seomoz.org/article/bg6

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