Photo by Gregory Moine
Google “click here” and see what comes up in the top spot. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Now why do you suppose Adobe Reader shows up in that very first spot for the search phrase “click here?” Think about all the times you’ve downloaded a PDF file on the internet. The page always says something like, “This report is a PDF file. You will need Adobe Acrobat to access the file. Click here to download a free copy.”
“Click here” in the example above is anchor text, which simply means the phrase is linked to a URL. In this case the URL is http://get.adobe.com/reader/. Since there are many millions of sites all using the same anchor text for that link, Google has decided that when someone searches for “click here,” they must be looking for Adobe Reader.
What can anchor text do for you?
In the same way that Google returns the Adobe Reader site when someone searches for “click here,” you want it to return your site when someone searches on your keyword phrase.
Okay, that makes sense, but how do you get millions of websites to link to you all using the same anchor text? Well, unless you’re Wikipedia or Brian Clark, you’re not likely to get millions of links. But you can get hundreds, maybe even thousands. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this.
First, write great content. If what you write is good, people on other sites will link to you. This is a kind of natural link building, and even though you can’t control the anchor text other people use, you can bet that some of it will be good, and pretty much any incoming link is better than no incoming link at all.
Another way to get incoming links with great anchor text is to write the links yourself. You can do this either within your own site, by linking to other relevant pages from within articles, or by using article marketing to get your links out there.
What you should never, ever do is to comment on blogs using your keyword phrase as your name. Even though this sounds like a spectacular idea for getting lots of links with prime anchor text, this practice is spammy, and spam is not well tolerated among the blogger set. You should also not stuff links into your comments, since this is also spam, and will get your comment kicked right into the spam filter, never to be seen again.
What the heck is that link about, anyway?
Besides pleasing your local SEO guru, good anchor text has another benefit: It helps your readers know whether they want to click on the link or not. So don’t get so carried away with optimizing your anchor text for Google that your links no longer make sense to your readers. You know, those real people who read your stuff. If the sentence or paragraph containing the link doesn’t make sense, rewrite it. Better to use your second choice keyword phrase than to confuse your reader.
