Probably one of the most important elements of keyword use is in anchor text.Anchor text is text found on a given web site that appears to be a hyperlink. Figure6-4 illustrates how anchor text appears on a page.

Chances are, you see anchor text every day. In fact, anchor text has become such a major inclusion on web pages that companies often use it without any thought as to how it could affect their search engine rankings.

How you use anchor text does matter, however, because anchor text is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. When a search engine looks at your web page, it automatically follows all the links that you have on the page. If those links (or even a large portion of those links) are text-based links, that’s even better, because then what the search engine sees is not just the link to another page, but also your keywords. It’s not enough just to make all your links text-based, however. There’s a fine science to taking advantage of the power of anchor text.

The first thing you should understand is that there are two kinds of anchor texts: yours and everyone else’s. I’m not being facetious here. It really is important that you consider not only how you link with other people, but also how they will link back to you. For example, if you do a Google search for the term “click,” you’ll find that the Apple QuickTime web site is at the very top of the list. This isn’t because Apple loded down the QuickTime site with the keyword “click.” What’s actually happened is that many people link to QuickTime using the word “click” in their anchor text. This isn’t hard to believe, because most web sites that use the QuickTime application usually include a text link to “Click here to download” or something similar. As you can see, it’s not just your own anchor text that matters. How your site is included in others’ anchor text is also important.
We’ll come back to how other people link to you. For now, let’s consider how you use anchor text in your web site. As we’ve already established, anchor text is the linked text on your web site. This text can be linked either to other pages within your own web site, or it can be linked to others’ web sites that are relevant to the content of your site. And that’s the real key to how anchor text can be so powerful — the relevance of the link and the words used to create the link.

When a search engine crawls your site, it’s looking at several different factors — the topic of the site as indicated by the words used in the text, the links leading away from the site, and the links leading into the site. Of course, these aren’t the only factors that matter, but they’re among the top-ranking factors, because how these elements are handled determines how user-friendly (and authentic) your site is. So if your site caters to gourmet cooks, the information on your site might include articles about gourmet techniques, gourmet recipes, and links to web sites where site visitors can purchase gourmet ingredients or tools.

When the crawler examines your site, it’s going to see that the topic of the site is gourmet cooking (which will be determined by the keywords you use in the site text). Then it’s going to follow all the links on your site. If those links happen to be text-based links that use your keywords, and they lead to web sites that are relevant to the topic of your site, you’re going to score well with the search engine crawler. The result is that you’ll appear higher in SERPs than you would if you didn’t have relevant keywords in your text and links.

You should use care when creating anchor text links, however. If you use the wrong words, you won’t get nearly the mileage that you need from the links. One mistake some web-site owners make is to create web pages with the anchor text “click here.” That phrase is in no way related to the content of the site, so when a crawler examines the anchor text, it doesn’t see relevant keywords, even if the links are relevant to web sites that are relevant to the content of the site. Think of your anchor text as a chance to showcase the relationships you have with related companies.

What works best is to use as many of the keywords as you can from the list of relevant keywords that you developed during the planning process. Going back to our gourmet cooking example, if you use an anchor text link that reads Gourmet Ingredients and links to a web site that sells gourmet foods, a search engines sees your key phrase (Gourmet Ingredients) and it sees a link that leads to a web site that sells gourmet ingredients. So for the effort of creating that small piece of anchor text, you not only have a valid reason to use your keywords and phrases, but you also have a link that leads to a relevant web site.

So if you’re adding the anchor text for Gourmet Ingredients to your web page, you must add a
piece of HTML like this in each spot where you want the anchor text to appear:

GourmetIngredients

Then, on your web site, what the user sees is shown in Figure6-5.

One more strategy for anchor text that you should consider is varying the anchor text. When you repeat the same anchor text over and over again on a given web page, it begins to lose its effectiveness, and in fact can cause a search engine crawler to rank your site lower in the SERPs. It’s much more effective to use multiple keywords and phrases as anchor text on a web page. This allows you to vary the anchor text, but to maintain a consistency in the keywords and phrases you use.

The other type of anchor text is that which others use to link back to your site. Many times, this
anchor text is overlooked as an SEO strategy; however, it’s one of the most effective types of optimization that you can use. Here’s an example: One savvy marketer on the Internet decided to see how quickly he could make his site rank high in the Google SERPs. So he used anchor text links on his page, and then solicited reciprocal links, based on highly targeted keywords and phrases that were relevant to his site. The result was that within four days, the web site had shot to the number four position in the Google SERPs.

There are two elements to consider in this story. The first is that the web-site owner sought reciprocal links. These are links to your page from another web site, in return for your site linking to them.

The reciprocal links are most effective when they come from sites that are relevant to your web site. But most often, you’ll have to seek the links out. Furthermore, in order to take advantage of all the value of reciprocal links, you also need to ensure that your site is linked to in a certain way. Instead of having another site just link to your main page, it’s most effective to provide a potential linking site with the code that includes the anchor text you want to use.

The second element of the story, to which you should pay special attention, is that the links used
by the webmaster were highly targeted keywords. In order to learn which keywords will be most effective for your site, you should refer to your keyword research. The keywords that are searched for most often, but are as narrowly related to your site as possible, are the keywords that you should consider using in your anchor text. The whole point of anchor text is to optimize your site to gain higher search engine rankings, which in turn brings visitors to your site.

So how often should you use anchor text on a web page? That’s one of those magic numbers that
no one really knows for sure. Different people will tell you different things. Some say no more than two or three times, others say no less than 10 or 12 times. A good rule of thumb is to use anchor text as many times as there is a solid reason to use it. Don’t load your content with anchor text just to have the links, but if you have a relevant link that can be included, don’t skip it just because you’ve used anchor text five other times on the page.

Determining what anchor text is essential and what isn’t is a personal decision. However, if you’re using a good analytics program that tracks the links on your web pages, you should be able to determine which anchor text links are most effective and how using them on a page affects your normal traffic flow. Anchor text is a good way to improve your search engine ranking, but as you’ve seen many times before in this book, your web pages should be designed with the user in mind.

One more note about anchor text before moving on. One of the most effective ways to use anchor text is in dynamic content.Dynamic content is content that changes regularly. Most often, that means blogs. Anchor text is well suited to blogs that change daily or weekly. This is fresh content (which is also a plus for improving your search engine rankings). It gives you an opportunity to change your anchor text regularly. Search engine crawlers get bored, too, and if you can provide them with dynamic content that contains relevant anchor text, those crawlers will look on you with favor.

CAUTION One anchor-text tactic to avoid is Google bombing (or link bombing).Google bombing refers to the methods used by black-hat SEOs to artificially inflate their web-site ranking by connecting an unrelated keyword to a specific web site. For Google bombing to work, more thanone eb-site designer must be willing to participate in a link exchange that will then grow exponentially because of the “apparent” popularity of the site. For example, if in September 2006 a user searched for the phrase “miserable failure,” that user was taken to the George W. Bush web site. A group of web-site designers got together and all of them used the anchor text “miserable failure” to link to Bush’s web site, pushing far more traffic to the site than would otherwise have gone there. Usually, Google bombing is politically related, though it is not exclusively political. And Google bombs aren’t limited to the Google search engine. Any search engine can be affected by Google bombing, which is also sometimes called link bombing.

Header tag content

Another attribute that should be included in web-site design is the header tag.Header tags are the attributes that set up the different levels of headings and subheadings on your web site. There can be as many as six different levels of headings, though most web sites use only about four. The debate about the value of header tags in SEO is a long-standing one. Some feel that header tags have zero value for impressing search engines about the importance of text on a page, whereas others feel that header tags are absolute necessities if you plan to put emphasis on certain keywords in the headings and subheadings of your web site.

The truth probably falls somewhere in between the two points of view. Looking at header tags from a strictly design point of view, you should absolutely include them in your site. Headers tell users what the topic of a page is and what the segments of body text are about. They also give readers an idea of what they should be taking away from the content they’re reading. For example, if you have a web site that contains an article outlining all the medical reasons readers should purchase a new mattress, your level-one header would likely be the title of the article. The level-two headers indicate the main subheadings within the article, and the level-three headers indicate the sub-subheadings. It might look something like this:

Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?
Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake
Too Firm?
Too Soft?
Choosing the Right Mattress


That heading hierarchy reads like this:
H1: (Page Topic) Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?
H2: (Main Topic) Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake
H3: (Sub Topic) Too Firm?
H3: (Sub Topic) Too Soft?

Headings on a web page behave the same way that headings on a page behave. They denote important information, and best of all, on a web page, they give you an opportunity to use your most important keywords in a contextually appropriate manner. Most specifically, search engine crawlers take into consideration the text within a header tag and how it fits with the body text around it (which is dis- cussed in the next section). Again, looking at the different levels of headings, first-level headings then should contain the most important keywords on your web page, assuming they can be used naturally within the heading.

It’s important to make that distinction — keywords should work in your headings. If they don’t,
avoid using them. It’s okay to include headings that contain no keywords at all. What’s most important is that the headers help readers to easily read the content in which the headings are included.

So if you’re using your most important keywords in level-one headings, lower-level headings (levels two through six) should contain decreasingly important keywords.
Don’t fall for the assumption that because level-one headings contain your most important keywords, you should use them all over your web pages. It doesn’t work that way. Most SEOs and web-design experts will tell you that you shouldn’t use a level-one heading on your web page more than one time. Using it more could cause a search crawler to decide that you’re spamming the search engine, which will result in lowered rankings and might even cause your web site to be delisted from search results entirely.

The heading tags are similar in format to other tags that you’ve examined to this point:

Header 1

Header 2

Header 3

Header 4

Header 5

Header 6