Phase 3: Anchor Text and Link Reputation
We briefly touch upon the use of anchor text and link reputation on your website as many people forget that internal link structure and the way pages are linked is very important.
Anchor text refers to the text inclusive in a link to another web page. In the HTML link example that follows the words “Buenos Aires Stay” are the anchor text:
<a href=”http://www.bastay.com”>Buenos Aires Stay</a>
Link reputation refers to how closely the anchor text in a link matches the title and content of the page it links to. This is most important and the key words you choose must, MUST reflect the keywords you wish search engines to ‘weight’ with favor.
While optimizing your web page’s content is important, anchor text and link reputation could be one of the most important aspects of on-page-SEO, search engine optimization, since you might be limited by what you can do on a page texturally, however, there is no real limit to the number of links that can point to a particular page and the anchor text you might use to tell both search engines and web page browsers what a linked page is about.
Search engines look at anchor text and link reputation to determine what the link is about and thus the subject of the webpage or site to which the link points. It is widely believed that placing keywords in anchor text helps search engine ranking. In fact Google executive have stated internal links and external links as one of the most important search engine optimization factors.
We will look at this process more in Chapter 8: Link Building & Development.
How do Anchor Text and Link Reputation Work?
The first time optimizing your website be sure to use anchor text using every possible combination for every search term for every page 1 or 2 times. To do this, you will need to link from one page to another using keywords in the anchor text, or text portion of the link.
For example if you are linking from page B to page C to help page C get ranked for “Luxury Vacation Rentals” be sure to put “Luxury Vacation Rentals as the anchor text as in the following example:
Our friends at BA Stay offer a great selection of <a href=http://www.bastay.com>Luxury Vacation Rentals</a> this link is what we also refer to as code – albeit very simple code.
Now page C has some of the link reputation from page B and the page should rank a little bit higher now for people searching the web for “Luxury Vacation Rentals”.
If you are using a keyword or phrase that is very competitive, then you will likely need to go back and add more text links to your page and from additional pages if possible within the context of those pages.
There are two different kinds of links to concern yourself in this process: contextual links, or those that are present in the text of a webpage and navigational links, those that are present in the global navigation of the site or in the navigation of a category page. Navigational links can also include links in the footer of the page, such as where one often finds links to a sitemap.
Global Navigation Links
For the most part, the amount of anchor text you can include in your global navigational links is limited to due the amount of space on the page. You should not concern yourself with that too much as usability for site visitors if paramount when it comes to navigational links.
These global links tend to use the core terms from your research in Chapter 5: Keyword Strategy Development. Since these global navigational links are on every page of the website, or nearly every page, you now have your core elements covered and need only concern yourself with clusters and related keyword phrase in the rest of the site’s linking program.
Category Navigation
Your level 2 pages, as category maps will likely contain links to your level 3 pages. You will want to be sure to include relevant keywords in your anchor text for links going to those level 3 pages to boost the link reputation of those pages.
On your level 2 and level 3 pages you can boost your use of keywords by modifying the anchor text of the link by using another keyword or keyword phrase from Chapter 5.
However, you must insure that the website visitor can easily understand what pages, or information, they are linking to when reading that anchor text.
Contextual Links
Aside from links in the global navigation of a website, you can also link from one page to another webpage using keywords that appear in the text of a page. If you think it relevant to link from one page to another internal page, you can always create and develop the content of a page making sure to include desirable keywords.
Phase 4: Improving Index Penetration
Few people consider creating a one page website. Simply put, the more pages you have on a website, the more search terms and keywords and phrases you can use and the more opportunity you have to appear in search engine results.
However, having a webpage on the site and having it indexed are two separate issues. If a web page is not indexed by the search engines, it might as well not exist as far as they are concerned.
How to improve Index Penetration
So how do you go about making sure all your pages are indexed by the search engines. For starters you can make sure that every page on the site is linked to from at least a couple of other pages on the site. This is particularly important for level 3 and higher pages.
You can also work on getting more links to your website in general as we will discuss in Chapter 8: Link Building & Development or you can focus more specifically on getting links from other sites to pages that are not doing very well on your own site.
At this point, do not get too hung up on this yet. We still have several key stages to optimizing your site to go through and in Chapter 9: Measuring Your Results you will have additional information to assist you in determining ways to fine-tune your optimization moving forwards.