Simple Yet Powerful SEO Tip – Anchor Text

Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself as an SEO expert… I’m just here to share a few things that I’ve picked up over time that I think has worked out for me!

We touched on backlinks in the previous discussion and I hope you have a bit more reading on the internet about them. There is plenty of material online to supplement my experiences. If you wish to have a quick refresher on the topic of backlinks – click here.  If not, let’s get going on today’s discussion.

One extremely effective technique that will help your backlinks efforts is to use anchor text.  I have seen many people drop their full website URL in discussion forums. For example, I may leave DivTag’s URL in a forum like this:

“DivTag is awesome, they have the best Weebly templates for all! Check it out at http://divtagtemplates.com”

A little shameless promotion, thank you very much :)  What I did above is not the best way to drop backlinks.  Not to mention if I did that, the webmaster of the forum will probably mark me as a spammer and rip out the post.

The proper and best practice is to use anchor text. Something like this:

“DivTag is a Weebly templates provider……..”

Now, bring your mouse cursor over the “Weebly templates provider” phrase.  You see that?  It’s a link.  If you click on it, it will literally bring you to our website – the link is buried within the phrase.  This is the text that is “anchored” on the site.  Further, this particular text phrase is an important keyword phrase for DivTag, and is strategically important for DivTag to promote in order to receive better search engine rankings.

It also helps the sentence flow better, somewhat enhancing the reader’s experience.

Now, I can attempt to explain why search engines, especially Google, love anchor text, but I won’t.  This is just the way it is and I’m sure you can find SEO experts that will agree.  Takes a little bit more effort to set up anchor text but it’s really not bad.

Here’s the HTML coding for the anchor text, feel free to copy but replace DivTag’s URL with your own, and the keyword phrase to your own keyword phrase:

      <a href=”http://divtagtemplates.com“>Weebly templates provider</a>

Remember, try your best to promote keywords or keyword phrases that are strategically important to your website.  These keywords should be the ones that really define your website, just like how “Weebly templates provider” defines one part of DivTag’s services.

Look up “Long Tail Keyword” if you have an interest in learning a bit more about the importance of keywords.  Here’s one of the first articles that popped up on Google – http://www.marketinghub.info/long-tail-versus-short-tail-keywords/ (I’m not endorsing this article, just one of the first ones to pop up when I searched “Long Tail Keyword” on Google).

The downside is that not all website forums will accept this HTML coding.  Give it a go, if it works, great.  If not, dropping the full URL (i.e. http://divtagtemplates.com) is better than nothing at all.  But be very careful in how you approach this as the webmaster may mark your comment as spam.  Make sure you leave some insightful and helpful comments to contribute to the forums.

I hope I shared a bit more knowledge through this discussion.  In my view, building quality backlinks WITH anchor texts are very effective techniques in SEO. Persevere and you will be rewarded with higher search engine rankings.

We’ll discuss another SEO technique next time – how to engineer the architecture of your Weebly website using your keywords or keyword phrases.

Did you Like the Tutorial?  

If so, Like us on Facebook, Google+ and Subscribe to our YouTube Channel below to share it with others!

Return to Weebly Templates Page
Return to Weebly Tutorials Page