Linking with Anchor Text

Linking with Anchor Text is a pretty easy thing to understand, and is important for blogs when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (how high up your blog appears when people use a search engine like Google to search for a particular phrase).

When you make a link, some of the text in your blog post will change to indicate it’s the link. Whatever words make up the link are the anchor text. In the second paragraph of this post “this post to find out what "Help Another blog is about” is the anchor text of my link to BIP Help Another Blog.

Here are a couple of articles that help explain the idea of anchor text in more detail:

• The Blog Herald: Sunday Morning SEO: What is Anchor Text and Why is It Important?
• WebProNews: Anchor Text Optimization
• Linking Best Practices via the Ning Book Blogs group (Thanks to Natasha from Maw Books for starting the topic)

Even if you don’t care about search engine optimization, creating good anchor text is just good blog practice. I would guess people are more likely to click on a link if they have some sense of what it’s about. Making link anchor text clear is a simple way to make your blog easier to navigate and more useful for your readers. With that in mind, here’s this week’s task:

• Read the two articles and one forum topic on anchor text and why you should pay attention to it.

• See if you can find out how to see what words and phrases people use in search engines that gets them to your blog. WordPress makes this easy, I’m not sure about Blogger. Can anyone help me out? Share your favorite keywords and searches here or on your blog.

• Focus on writing good anchor text for all your links. Instead of saying “You can read more here” and linking to “here,” describe your link in some detail and use that for anchor text. Try to make this a regular part of your blog practices.

This week is pretty simple, but anchor text is really a huge part of growing your blog. Getting good search engine rankings can bring more casual readers to your blog who can be turned into regular readers through your great content and other fun features. Anchor text is just a way to help get them there.