How to link anchor text

If you link anchor text for optimal interconnection between the inner pages of your website, not only will your search engine optimization improve, your site will also become more user-friendly and will increase visitor traffic throughout all your pages.

When you link anchor text, all you are doing is using some of the text or wording that’s found on a website (your own or someone else’s), and create a link with it so that when clicked on, it takes you somewhere else. 

For example, a visitor to an article directory may click on some linked text which takes them directly to your website.  Hopefully, when they reach your site, they aren’t disappointed - that the contents on your website do indeed match whatever it is that the original linked anchor text described.

How to create anchor text

For illustrative purposes let’s suppose that your website is at www.conures.com and a 2nd inner page, discussing breeding is located at www.conures.com/breeding.html.

A 3rd inner page includes the sentence:  “When breeding conures, it’s time …”,

and you wish the words “breeding conures” to be the anchor text linking back to your “breeding” page.  This is how the html code for the anchor text would appear

And your web page will display it as:

So the actual html code for the link itself (including its anchor text) is:

Absolute ....  or relative?

Note that the above code includes the prefixes http://www.  This means that this is an absolute or external link.  You can, if you wish, use relative or internal links to link anchor text from one inner page to another - these exclude the above prefixes.

This is what a relative link would look like:  When <a href=”breeding.html”>breeding conures</a> it's time ...

However the absolute link is better because it reduces the chance of a page showing up twice within Google and thereby incurring a penalty for duplicate content.

If you plan to use an html editor such as Dreamweaver, you will find that Dreamweaver has link functions that will do this for you automatically.  There are also Dreamweaver tutorials that will show you step by step, how to do this.

If html tags leave you in total bewilderment, a good basic html tutorial will quickly remove confusion (it's really quite easy).

If the subject matter of the original linked text and that of its target website (your site) are not relevant to each other, not only will the disappointed visitor quickly hit the exit button, but it’s also viewed poorly by Google.

Google ... aims to please

When searchers type keywords into Google’s search box, Google is most anxious to provide exactly what they’re looking for, so your website’s relevancy to the searcher’s keyword is very important to Google.  If a great many external websites are linking back to your site on a particular topic, it gives Google the message that your website is very relevant on that particular subject and therefore to be highly rated, otherwise why would so many other websites refer to your site for further information.

The question arises as to how does one obtain all these external backlinks?  One way to develop these is by writing articles and submitting them to article directories - Article Submitter Pro is handy for automating this task.  At the end of each article is an Author Bio box in which you place your anchor text linking back to your site, and this in turn improves your site’s PageRank.  Posting comments on forums and blogs will also do this.  We’ve already briefly discussed PageRank in this context.

So when you link anchor text from one inner page to another within your own site, you greatly increase your page's relevancy to a given keyword in the eyes of Google and thus increase your PageRank.