Inbound Links & the Power of Anchor Text…

I want this site to perform well for the search term ‘web design cork’.

It’s not a particularly competitive term, and it while it may not bring a huge amount of traffic, I believe it is an achievable goal and the traffic it brings in would be highly qualified.

But these considerations are not what I want to discuss right now – I want to look at the power of anchor text used in inbound links. In case you don’t know, anchor text is the text used when someone links to your site, and can have a powerful impact on your search results.

There are several things Google takes into consideration when figuring out where your site should be placed in search results pages, and the anchor text in inbound links is one of them. In general inbound links are very important for your search results.

Google looks at your relationship with other websites, and a link from another website to yours is seen as a vote of confidence from that site. Therefore the more ‘votes’, or links, you have the higher Google ranks your site. Links from sites that already rank well in Google are aso worth more than links from sites that perform less well in Google.

The anchor text used in those links also helps Google place your site in the search results pages… and I thought I would do a small test to demonstrate the impact anchor text can have.

This site was at position 50 for a search for ‘web design cork’, and without changing anything else on the site, I placed a link to this site in a blog post from a site that Google ranks quite well, and I used the anchor text ‘web design cork‘.

I then sat back and waited for Google to crawl both sites again. When it had, a search for ‘web design cork’ was returned at position 21. From position 50 to position 21 with one link.

Linkbuilding is an important part of maintaining a website, and while you don’t always have control of the anchor text from external sites it is a good thing to be aware of – and there are certainly ways to control a portion of your inbound links, and ways to encourage people to use particular text when linking to you.

One very good way to build a good proportion of links you can control is to look at what widgets you could offer to people that would bring value to their site, while linking back to your own site with specific anchor text you can control. For example look at the widgets I created for FestivalShirts.net – the link back to the site is completely within my control and could be changed to include any anchor text I thought would benefit the site.

What other creative ways can you influence your inbound links?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.