Success on the Internet

Here’s our next summer rerun. Interesting about the references to the new year holiday, here we are in the dog days of summer, it almost makes me feel like turning up the furnace after reading this. Not!

Hello and Happy New Year to everyone reading this! Was one of your resolutions to get your new or existing web site more traffic, so that it can get you more income this year? If so, read on…

One of the least appreciated parts of SEO is the proper use of the anchor text used in links that point to your page. Anchor text is the text that someone clicks on in order to get to your site. When you have control, make sure that you use your preferred keyword phrase in the text, not some worthless phrase such as “Home” or “click here”.

Interestingly, the #1 ranking for “home” goes not to Home Depot, a big real estate company, or something that would make sense, but to www.nasa.gov, for some reason. Perhaps if you could get a zillion links to your page using “home” as the anchor text, you could take over that spot, but what value would that have anyway, unless you did have a real estate related site?

An amusing proof of the power of anchor text in search engine results can be seen in the example of a group of webmasters that used “miserable failure” as anchor text to link to the George W. Bush biographical page at http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

If you look closely at that page, you will see that there is no on-page content for the term “miserable failure”, but if you Google that phrase, you’ll see the #1 ranking. By the way the Jimmy Carter bio is #2 and the MichaelMoore.com homepage is #3, for what it’s worth.

It just goes to show that your anchor text is a powerful part of SEO. Take advantage of it when linking internally. Hint: change all your “home” anchor text to something meaningful that you want to get a good ranking for.

Another caution: there have been some recent studies that some search engines might penalize somewhat if your anchor text is always the same, so mix it up a bit and get some benefit for other keywords also. Be sure to make the text make sense, you might want to add a descriptive word in there to make it so, maybe the word will be “home”, for example “Cheap Web Site Hosting home page”.

Sometimes you have no control over the anchor text that will be used, for example when you’re submitting your site for listing in a directory, often they will just list your domain name. That’s a reason, when you’re choosing a domain name, that you have your important keyword in the name itself.

See you next time, until then get blitzing on your new year’s resolution to help the search engines find your page.