A Word is Worth a Thousand Images

When a website URL is underlined or displayed in a different color than the text around it (i.e. http://www.intelligentwriting.com) it is generally understood that this is a link to the website that is written out. Sometimes when you see a link from one web page to another, the link simply reads, “Click Here,” so it is quite clear that it is a link to click.

Other times you will be reading a sentence, and for what seems no reason at all a word in the middle of a sentence will be underlined or displayed as a link. For example, instead of “Click Here” you will click on a link that reads, “The Best Technical Writer in the Gulf South,” and when you click on the link you are hopefully taken to such a technical writer.

The words used to create the link are what is known as “anchor text.”

The proper use of anchor text can improve your search engine rankings for specific terms.

Using the words “Click Here” can be considered a waste of an opportunity to use beneficial anchor text. However, if you know your viewers are not very web-savvy, then using “Click Here” might be a smart way to hold their hands through your website.

Inbound, External Anchor Text

When other sites link to you, make sure that the anchor text they are using contains search terms for which you want to rank high in search engines.

There is a famous example of a small group of webmasters using the anchor text, “Miserable Failure,” and linking it to George W. Bush’s website. Then when someone searched on Google for “miserable failure” they were taken to the president’s home page. Although this type of manipulative “Google Bombing” can now be better detected by the search engines, anchor text is still a very important part of SEO.

Internal Links

The website Wikipedia.com ranks well for many search phrases not only because of its massive size but because it uses a large percentage of its text as anchor text to other pages on the site. The use of accurate anchor text in the HTML body text of your website will tie your site together nicely.

This is also true of the navigation menu system on your site. It is much better to use HTML text (instead of images or Flash) as the links that direct your internal traffic through your website. There are easy ways of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format the text to make it look just as aesthetically pleasing as any .gif image can.

Contact me if you want your site to perform better in the Search Engine Results Pages. I can provide you with ways of driving more traffic to your site as well as ways of measuring the ROI of these procedures.

If you prefer to learn more on your own, you will be interested in buying Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.