Why Anchor Text is an Integral Part of MD SEO

An ideal MD SEO campaign combines a series of techniques that drive traffic to your website and get more conversions. If you are practicing MD SEO on your business website, make sure you are using anchor text. Anchor text is an integral part of MD SEO but is not talked about very often, therefore making it an easy strategy to miss. Anchor text has two purposes; first, to rank your website pages higher for specific keywords and second, to help you identify your competition.

Anchor Text Defined

You see anchor text on many webpages you visit, whether realizing it or not. Anchor text contains visible, clickable phrases that will point you to another webpage or all together different website. Anchor text is typically seen in MD SEO as blue underlined, hyperlinked text.

In HTML code, anchor text appears like this:
<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com" _mce_href="http://www.yourwebsite.com">Anchor Text</a> Anchor text is used in many MD SEO strategies. Search engines use anchor text to identify what the linked webpages are about and whether they should be indexed. Once a webpage is indexed, MD SEO will help the search engine rank that page higher in search results. In order for search engines to evaluate website content, the anchor text must contain relevant keyword phrases. Take a look at the following examples of anchor text used in MD SEO:

Good Anchor Text: Learn more about MD SEO for your business!
Poor Anchor Text: Click here to learn more.

As you can see, the first example of good anchor text contains a relevant keyword phrase, “MD SEO,” and is even supported by a call to action, “learn more.” In the second example of poor anchor text, it is not clear to what website the link points or why it should be clicked.

Anchor text can also be used in blogging, another great MD SEO strategy. By including high quality anchor text in a blog post, you can naturally point to other websites (including your internal pages), articles, or blog posts.

Evaluating MD SEO Competition – Google’s Free Tool

Google’s Allinanchor Tool helps webmasters, MD SEOs, and business owners identify competition for specific keyword phrases. To use this tool, all you need to do is type the following into the Google Search Bar:

allinanchor:”your keyword term”

Search results display all webpages whose anchor text contains the keyword term for which you search. This tools shows you how strong your competition is for any given keyword phrase as well as which of your own webpages are optimized using anchor text.

Anchor Text Tips for MD SEO

• Don’t be overzealous – too much anchor text with the same keyword phrase could actually hurt your rankings rather than help
• Vary your anchor text keyword phrases, but keep them to 2-3 per web page
• Your target keyword phrase should make up about 50-60% of the links on a given page

Article Posted By : Sue McCrossin Stephanie Aiello is a freelance writer for Maryland Internet Marketing, sharing the latest trends and updates about Maryland SEO. For more information about Maryland Search Engine Marketing, visit at Marylandinternetmarketing.com.