B. T. Newberg

No, not you, Ted Koppel. Wrong kind of anchor.

The last article explained how to use anchor text to build linkbacks.  Now, let’s make that a little more concrete by looking at some good and bad examples of anchor text.

You see a lot of random anchor text on websites.  Don’t do this!  Here are some bad examples of anchor text usage.

Why shouldn’t an SEO content writer use anchor text like this?

What’s wrong with these examples?

• For travel advice, click here.
• Visit www.SoutheastAsiaTravelAdvice.com for expert travel advice.
• Check out the best place for travel advice.

In the first example, the anchor text is “here”, which says nothing to search engines about the client’s site.  Bad, bad, bad.

The second example uses the client’s URL as anchor text.  Again, this misses the opportunity to tell search engines that it’s relevant to travel advice.

In the final example, the anchor text includes the keyword, but includes a lot of other junk too.  It effectively makes the whole phrase “the best place for travel advice” into one big keyword.  How often will users search using that exact phrase?  Not as often as with the simple two-word phrase “travel advice.”

Now, I threaten to get myself into trouble here, because there are times when you do want longer, less common phrases.  They’re called “long-tail” search terms, and they are relevant to the customer buying cycle, but that’s an advanced keyword research concept and can be safely ignored for our introductory purposes here.  For the most part, as an SEO content writer, you should stick to just your keyword as anchor text.

More things to avoid in anchor text

Be careful not to be deceptive in using anchor text.  If the site has little to do with travel advice, that’s bad etiquette.  Likewise, if the context of the link suggests something other than being taken to the client’s site, that’s bad too.  For example, if a definition of the keyword is suggested, and then user gets transported to a commercial site, that’s deceptive.  Don’t do it.

Another thing usually good to avoid is building linkbacks within the body of the article.  The risk here is that the article will turn into one big advertisement.  Article directories usually want solid, relatively impartial content.  It depends on the site that publishes your work, but most prefer you to save the linkback for the resource box at the end.  Doing otherwise might get your article rejected.

Good use of anchor text

As stated in the previous article (but which cannot be overstated), remember the following points to make the best use of anchor text:

• anchor text is what’s displayed to the user as the hyperlink
• the words of the anchor text tell search engines something about the site to which they link
• use the keyword as anchor text