How Anchor Text Helps Keep Your SEO Grounded

Let’s face it: search engine optimization has a lot of moving parts.

And while keeping a handle on the all-important (and ever-changing) world of SEO can be an endless challenge for content marketers, there are still plenty of simple steps you can take to increase page value in search.

For example, one of the simplest and most overlooked tactics is to properly use SEO anchor text. What is anchor text? This is anchor text! Basically, it’s the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.

Simple enough, right?

But what many online marketers that are new to SEO don’t realize is that the actual words they hyperlink can have a significant impact on their Google page rank.

Recently, I wrote about the important role backlinks play in SEO. And while the link itself is important, Google is really interested in what SEOmoz refers to as link relevancy.

That’s where great anchor text comes in to play.

Search engines like Google use anchor text to help decipher the relevancy of the content it links to. Or, to put it more simply, the keywords used in the anchor text can add link juice to the page it takes you to.

For example, Dee Barizo at Sunday Morning SEO suggests that a blog about movie reviews can improve its Google page rank by building a lot of links with anchor text that contain the words “movie” and “reviews.”

Now, let me provide an anecdote that’s a little more close to home.

Say I posted a link directing people to a guest article that my colleague Amanda Maksymiw wrote over at Content Marketing Institute. Many online marketers or publishers might do something like this: Click here to see this new article on content curation for online marketing.

While I’ve created a backlink, Google has associated it with the keywords “Click here.” Unfortunately, those words have nothing to do with the targeted keywords for the content itself, which is about curating content as part of an online marketing strategy. A better use of anchor text would be something like this: Check out this new article on content curation for online marketing.

As you can see, the anchor text now includes keywords that are relevant to the page it points to. Why is that important? Because Google will then associate the backlink with phrases like “content curation.” The result is that Amanda’s article will see a boost in page rank around that phrase when people search for it – not only because the page itself is optimized, but because it was “tagged” as being about that keyword topic in the backlink’s anchor text.

Here are some more quick tips for link building as part of your online marketing strategy:

• While quality anchor text in links on your own site is important, you’ll see the greatest value relative to Google page rank from backlinks that come from external sources. So be sure to keep anchor text in mind when submitting your guest posts to other sites.
• When determining page rank, Google also considers the content on the page that hosts the backlink. For example, if I linked to Amanda’s article from a popular webpage on content curation, it would probably carry more weight than if it was linked to by some random blog.
• Using keyword-rich anchor text to link to other pages will likely inspire others to do the same. The result? Higher quality backlinks. SEO expert Ann Smarty provides some tips for doing that, while also recommending that companies don’t overdo it.
• Adding meta titles to all of your hyperlinks (very easily done in WordPress) is also a wise practice.
• The length of anchor text can also play a role in the value Google places on it. A best practice is to keep them as short as reasonably (again, reasonably) possible.

When it comes to SEO, online marketers must understand anchor text and how it can be used to build quality links. If SEOmoz’s 2011 edition of its Search Engine Ranking Factors suggests anything, anchor text’s usefulness in external links will remain relevant in 2011 and beyond.

If you’re an online marketer or the person responsible for SEO at your company, spend a few minutes reading over SEOmoz’s study. It reveals some pretty fascinating data, which was culled from both correlation-based analysis and the opinions of a diverse 132-person panel.

SEO may have a lot of moving parts, but by understanding how the practice is evolving and which trends are emerging, it’ll be much easier to keep up.

Bren­dan is a mar­ket­ing asso­ciate and con­tent man­ager with Open­View Ven­ture Part­ners. You can  fol­low him on Twit­ter @BrenCournoyer and find more from the Open­View team @OpenViewVenture.