SEO – Inward Links and Anchor Text – Why Use Them?

Modern SEO techniques are primarily focused on creating relevance so that when a search is conducted using a search engine, the results are exactly what the person searching is looking for or as close to it as possible.

What Other Sites Say About Yours

SEO

Great attention is paid by search engines to what other website’s are saying about yours. Reasons for this include the fact that other sites are generally impartial and in many cases more truthful about other websites than some of their owners. They also pay attention to this as it helps to make search more relevant and the results more helpful to the individual conducting the search.

Inward Links

Inward links are links which point to your website from other sites. They can help search engines to determine what your website is about, which keywords are relevant to your site and your website’s level of importance.

What Do Search Engines Do With This Information?

Most will use this information to assess where they will place your site in their search results. Your positioning will depend on your site relevance compared to the actual search term used.

Links Containing Anchor Text

Search engines crawl hyperlinks and therefore to gain maximum results inward links should contain what we call anchor text. This is a keyword or a search term masking the hyperlink i.e. instead of the link appearing as a non-aesthetically pleasing URL, it is masked with the keyword or search term, however the link still points to the underlying url and subsequently lands on the correct web page whilst at the same time gaining your site some essential points for relevance.

Using anchor text in inward links gives you an opportunity to tell other websites what to say about your website. A perfect example of an inward link containing anchor text is search engine optimization. This link tells not only the search engine that the page it links to is about search engine optimization (SEO) it tells the viewer the same thing.

This type of SEO is referred to as off-site optimization. Adding links to other sites is referred to as link building and is a common strategy.

Considerations When Link Building

When link building you should consider the page rank of the website you are placing your link on, also consider the theme of the site, theme of the page and what anchor text you are going to mask your URL’s with.

SEO – Inward Links and Anchor Text – Why Use Them?

Drew Mitchell is an owner and director of three online businesses in the UK. You can view one of his websites at http://www.keywordimages.com