A thought provoking thread recently was created at WebmasterWorld under the title of Oh, I hate anchor text importance so much. Interesting enough, someone just emailed me a question on this topic as I began typing this entry. Here are my thoughts and some of the thoughts in the thread.
The thread discusses how its "unfair" that Google puts so much weight on the anchor text pointing to your Web site. As the thread creator said, normal people who link to external sites link in the format of "url only or "click here" anchors". I am all for this logic but we know why Google uses anchor text. If I link to site A with the anchor text "keyword phrase", this text implies the site is on the topic of "keyword phrase." The more links with the keyword phrase pointing to the site, the more, in Google eyes, this page is about keyword phrase. But like anything, if someone finds out about this then it will be abused.
So some tips on how to encourage people to link to you with the keyword phrase of your choice?
- Have a link to me page describing how you want the person to link to you. - Make sure to use the proper title tag so that people might use that when linking to you - Keyword rich domain names, kind of enforce quality links - Simply ask people to change your link from abc.com to keyword phrase
