What exactly is anchor text?
Well, anchor text is a common term we use in SEO to refer to the text links on a webpage. These links are highly valuable in helping you rank for the search terms you desire.
The concept is fairly simple: make a list of the terms you would like to rank well for in Google or other search engines, and create links to your webpages with that as the linking text. For example, if I want to rank well for “free SEO analysis”, then I would try to put that as linkable text on as many high authority and trusted websites as I could. This is why if you were to copy the script for our free customizable widget for the Website Analyzer, you will see a link like this on the widget: a free SEO analysis by Pear Analytics. The link brings the user to the page I want, and has the proper text in the link. It is important that the copy on the page has to do with the anchor text as well. Try to have the words in the link on the page somewhere, preferably in the title tag as well. If you do any Google AdWords campaigns, you would be familiar with this methodology since this is the same general concept around the Quality Score (the ad has to be relevant to the page it is pointing to).
It works, and we proved it
Last week, my friend Nan Palmero wanted to know how he could rank high for the term “blackberry power user”. If you know Nan, then you know that he really is the ultimate user of the BB. At the time, he ranked somewhere on the third page of Google for this search term. He frequently blogs for some big sites with lots of trust, like blackberrycool.com, mysa.com and others. I found out that he was linking his name to his blog, so I asked him to go back to all of his old blog posts and change the anchor text from “Nan Palmero” to Nan Palmero, Blackberry Power User. The next day he was on the first page of Google.
Try it, and let me know how it worked out for you.
