jfranktoo

I know that anchor text is critically, overwhelmingly, vitally, important to SEO.
More than that. It is the very essence of life itself. Awesome.

I definitely know that anchor text is the wording you ask someone else to use when linking to you and the phrase goes on their site. And I, being one of nature's nice people, use their anchor text when linking to them.

But that's all I really know.

I think I know that you can vary the words a bit here and there and it is still ok.

But there is something else which seems to be emerging in some of these expert posts.

I get the feeling that the anchor text I use in my site to link to another site or even perhaps another page in my own site might also be important for my own Seo work.

And, not only that. There is a suggestion that Wikpedia type outbound links within body copy are very very important. So the words that I'm using in body copy, in natural language, to link to another site - are those words anchor text too, and important for showing the relevance for my site?

Be gentle, lads, and girls.
John

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Steve Myers

I think you might want to shorten that up there jfranktoo

In other words you're asking if the anchor text is a valued word with the link attached to it? Such as site.com is anchored text as SEO News and it being a major keyword that it's a valued target for your site visibility?

I need some clarification here.

Bagi Zoltán

I guess i know what John want to know, and my answer is yes. I mean it is important what kind of sites you link to and the using anchor as well. The link connections build your brand, they position your site among the thousands of websites marking your neighbours to the search engines.

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NavyCS

My take on anchor text is this;

By varying as much as you can the anchor text to your landing page you increase the keywords you will have the possibility of ranking well for. Say your page is about the blue widgets by the sea in Russia were it is cold and dreary and everyone is a vegetarian.

You decide to go after Vegetarian's blue widgets. You make your title "Vegetarians Blue Widgets".
H1 "Blue Widgets in Russia"
h2 "Russian Sea Widgets"
h3 "Cold and Dreay by the Sea"

Don't try and make sense of the words - these are going to be keyphrases which people are searching for. Your landing page must meet the needs of the searchers (consider this when writing the content and producing the page)

Now the anchor text you want to use is the title and h tags (not all in the same anchor), try to maintain a proportionate balance. The title being the most searched phrase should get the most attention but don't make it the only text coming to the page - that will look un-natural. What this is doing is setting you page up for long tail searches more and more people are doing to try and find what they need/want on the web. You start becoming important for combination of searches containing "Blue Widgets Russia Russian Sea Cold Dreay Vegetarians" as well as the phrases you had directly optimized for. I hope this makes sense.

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NavyCS

Now, on the subject of the anchor text you use to an authority site - don't make it a phrase as much as a word. If they are the widget king, only use the word widget, you are referencing their site, you are not assisting them in optimizing their keyphrases. Only provide out links when it absolutely makes sense to do so, do NOT try and find a site for every page - it isn't that important but it won't hurt you and can add to your "trustrank".

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jfranktoo

Sorry, sorry, folks I put it in the wrong folder. Should have been in SEO. Very penetrating thoughts by NavyCs - never knew any of that, and I bet a lot of other people don't know it either. That's gone into my folder marked "brilliant IWebtool answers".

Steve, the enquiry was provoked by something that the OldWelshWizard said in a post.

He wrote: BODY COPY is the Rolls Royce of links though, ANY links here are going to be the highest rated. On topic links here are priceless and will help BOTH the anchor and text page to rank.

It was this that intrigued me. I did not know whether he meant outgoing or inbound links or both. It was the mention of anchor links in this context that was intriguing.

Bagi, I can see how backlinks build the brand as you say, but the question is, do the outbound links also help the site as far as the search engines are concerned. (I'm not thinking of site visitors here, that is a separate and easily handled issue, building quality for them. The doubt is only about search engines.)

I've tried to give you guys reps but the moderators won't let me do it any more. Bagi, or Steve, pull rank here and give me half a dozen extra reps I can hand out. You are on the staff. If you can't who can?

John

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Bagi Zoltán

John, i was thinking about links globally, outbound as well. I thought it was clear for you

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Zack

Moved to SEO forum. Also, using correctly formed anchor tags are extremely important in SEO.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

Zack

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jfranktoo

Thanks Zak. This is the first time I've come across this www.w3.org site. I now realise that all you experts use it every minute of every day. I've never ever seen a pr10 page before! Not even Google search page.

The reason I'm writing this, is to draw attention to the clarity of the language used in this document. My granny could understand it, and that, for me, is the test of communication.

It requires a very high skill for technical people to write for the lay market, a very rare skill indeed. For perfection, technical stuff needs to be tested on a lay market "Tell me what you do not understand about this, write down your questions as you go, tell me in your own words what you think it means...." etc.

Then, after several re-writes, it needs testing again. Then, and only then, should it be released.

The assumption is that most people understand what you understand, but they don't. If they don't understand they'll either:

Switch to another site in frustration, (and you'll never know) or
Assume they've understood it and make mistakes in their actions

Either way, your brand image is affected badly.

John

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charlesgan

i patent that i seeing now...
anchor text ... is getting less important.
and its good to mix and use variety of anchor text.

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marketing 3fn

i would say that anchor text is important especially if you use keywords as anchors for the link to your websites