subject: Varying your anchor text usage and getting better results from your SEO [print this page] Varying your anchor text usage and getting better results from your SEO
Anchor text is the text you typically see whenever you look at a hypertext link and the text usually manifests as an indication of what the linked to site is all about. Anchor text is a significantly important ranking factor when it comes to making your website more visible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and it's important to take some caution when comes to optimising your links and ensuring that they appear as natural as possible. The first thing you need to keep in mind about anchor text is to not focus exclusively on your target terms but rather, when building links to your website, to try and vary your anchor text as much as possible. When Google analyses your backlink profile it is looking to pick up on a range of signals and as such your backlinks profile should be presented to appear as natural as possible. For example, say you wanted to optimise for the term "Football Boots" and you are were hoping to achieve a first page position around this term. While optimising using the anchor text "football boots" will obviously produce results, the wise SEO will look to vary this usage as much as possible. A good example of a variation around this term would "nike football boots" or puma football shoes". Any of these terms will help to make you website or page more relevant to the main terms you are aiming to target "Football Boots". Another thing to keep in mind when building anchor text links is your long-tail optimisation. Long-tail terms are generally terms that are four or more words in length and these terms typically make up the aggregate share of visits and conversions to a site. By optimising for your long-tail variations, you can increase the amount of traffic coming through to your site through these variations.
