Anchor Text
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What is anchor text?
Anchor Text is also known as Link Text.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable descriptive text of a hyperlink, located in between the HTML anchor <A> and </A> tags.
For example:
<a href="index.html">anchor text</a>
Should I vary the anchor text?
Yes, you should vary anchor text. This is because as search engine optimizers have learnt that anchor text helps improve search engine rankings they inevitably built incredible number of webpages that link to their websites using identical anchor text. Naturally, search engines soon gotten onto this trick and filter out those links because such linking patterns appear unnatural.
Natural linking patterns may include singular keyword phrases, plurals, "click here", your company name, "website", your domain URL, synonyms, and descriptive terms such as "great product", "cool gear", etc. It looks unnatural for the vast majority of your links to have identical anchor texts.
For example, if your top search term is, "Google", here are some of the most popular searches for "Google" according to the Yahoo Search Marketing Keyword Selector Tool:
- google
- google search
- google search engine
- google search engine home page
- google com
- google .com
- google home
- google home page
- google home com
- google inc
- google site
- go to google
Should I include misspellings in my anchor text?
It may seem odd but it's actually a good idea to include misspellings in your anchor text, especially if the anchor text isn't easy to spell correctly.
For example, here are some popular misspellings of "Google" according to Goggle:
- goggle ("g" instead of "o" - people probably typed it as it sounded to them - this is somewhat verified by these poll results)
- gogle (missing "o")
- googel ("l" and "e" the wrong way round)
- googl (missing "e" on the end)
- googlr (mistyping "r" instead of "e" which are located next to each other on the keyboard)
Britney Spears Spelling Correction
Google does a great job at illustrating just how common misspellings are with their Britney Spears spelling correction webpage. The collected data shows some of the misspellings detected by the Google spelling correction system for the query "Britney Spears" (without quotes), and the count of how many different users spelled her name that way.
Google captured an incredible 592 different ways of misspelling her name. 488,941 users spelled it correctly, yet an astonishing 146,010 or 22.9% of users one of the other 592 collected variations.
Here is a small sample of that list:
I think the large percentage of misspellings probably stem from the fact that the majority of people searching for Britney Spears are kids. So they can be excused for the misspellings. But it just goes to show what your website could be missing out on if it's not optimized for misspellings.
Site Map:
- Text Link Guide - homepage
- Text Links - search engines, link traffic
- Anchor Text - variations, misspellings
- Image Links - image maps, alt text
- PageRank - increase PageRank, attribute
- Link Popularity - authority pages, link quality, quantity, relevancy, reputation
- Sitemaps - XML, Google, generators, Yahoo!
- Linkbait
- Link Seeding - link spam
- Link Exchange - bad neighborhoods, link exchange software
- Sponsored Links - PageRank
- Affiliate Links
- Link Brokers - RON, ROS, Text Link Ads
- Natural Linking - artificial linking, link triangles, www or non-www
- Broken Links - link rot, broken link testing
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