SEO - Anchor Text Optimization
The Anchor Text Optimization SEO Tutorial article to reflect any changes in Google (not a great deal has changed regarding anchor text).
Anchor text is the visible text of a hyperlink, for example the text link below links to our home page
The red text Hospedagem de Sites is the anchor text for this hyperlink (or text link as it is sometimes called).
Anchor Text Importance in Search Engine Optimization
Google (and to a lesser degree other search engines) heavily weight it's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high ranking can ONLY be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors. Googlebombs are probably the easiest examples to find and understand how anchor text effects SERPs.
Miserable Failure GoogleBomb
The miserable failure Googlebomb of late 2003 aimed at the biography page of George W Bush (www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) clearly shows the power of anchor text. The US Presidents biography page which fell victim to the Miserable Failure Googlebomb (and a few other Googlebombs) does not include the words Miserable or Failure anywhere within the code, yet two years on is still at number 1 for the Miserable Failure SERP at Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Its consistent search engine placement at number one for this phrase can only be attributed to the anchor text of links to the page (lots of bloggers linking using the anchor text Miserable Failure).
Googlebombs take advantage of the combined effectiveness of anchor text from thousands of links.
A similar phenomenon is occurring with the Computer and Computers SERPs in Google. As of January 2005 a search in Google for the word Computer ranks www.dell.com as a top 10 result and a search for Computers ranks www.compaq.com as a top 10 result. Looking at the code of these two pages reveal neither use the word Computer or Computers respectively (at least not in a format Google understands).
How to use Anchor Text Effectively?
Anchor text usage should reflect the content (ideally the main SERP) the link is linking to and ideally help the page it is linked from as well (the latter isn't always possible). This means if you can link highly related pages (related SERPs) together they will tend to do much better in their respective SERPs. Most pages on the SEO Gold site would benefit from the addition of the word SEO and so adding a link from every page of the site using anchor text "SEO Other Keyword(s)" is a good idea.
Alt Attribute Text of Image Links
The alt text of image links is the equivalent to the anchor text of text links in SEO terms. This means when a link to a page is part of an image you should add relevant alt text to the alt attribute (looks like this alt="keywords here"). Occasionally you'll find a situation where you just can't use relevant keywords as anchor text, when this happens image links can solve the problem.
For example we could use a Home image link in place of the SEO Gold Home text link on the top menu below (old design) the logo with an alt attribute with keyword rich text. However, in this case we have at least two other links per page to the home page using keyword rich anchor text (the keyword rich copyright link at the bottom) and an alt attribute (the top banner image that says SEO Gold, Search engine Optimization Services is also a image link to the home page with a keyword rich alt attribute, hover over it to see). So two out of three links using highly keyword rich text should be more than enough.
If you have a menu like situation where it's not possible to use good keyword rich anchor text consider using an image link with keyword rich alt text. Take a screen shot of a page showing the menu you'd like better anchor text for. In an image editing program like Paintshop Pro cut out each word associate with the menu, this will give you a bunch of small images that when viewed look like text, there's an example below that we used on an SEO clients site recently-
Hover over the word Home above and you'll see the keyword rich alt attribute in some browsers. The above is just an example, don't keyword stuff your alt attributes with keywords, especially in a situation like this (a menu link).
As a side note until 2005 the alt text of non linked images (so a standard image on a web page that doesn't link to anything) was ignored by Google, didn't matter what you put in your non linked alt text for Google rankings. However, in 2005 Google unexpectedly started to use all alt text as part of the ranking algorithm. So you should take this into account when creating images, give them relevant alt text.
SEO - Anchor Text Optimization
By: Bruno
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