Anchor Text in Backlinks

As you undoubtedly already know, other websites linking back to yours helps with your SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) so are key in any SEO campaign, but an important aspect of this is which keywords the other site uses for that link, if you can encourage them to use the keywords which you want to rank for, this will seriously help with your results in Google.

What you need, are for your keywords to appear as the link, like this SEO Services.  Another example will appear as Homepage, however this is the wrong anchor text to use (unless you really want to appear for the word “homepage”). Both these links take you to our homepage, but the first would help towards ranking it for the term “SEO services”

However there are some instances when the backlink may not give you any, or much credit, here are a few things to watch out for:

No Follow Attribute
This is a piece of code which webmasters can use to tell the search engines not to follow the link, they therefore do not get the credit from the link. This can be for genuine reasons, such as on a Blog, where comments are automatically tagged with No Follow, this helps prevent spam, in fact we use it on comments for this blog. It can also be from unscrupulous webmasters who exchange links with you, so look out for this code rel=”nofollow” in links on pages or at the page level.

Spaces at the End of Links
If the link to a website has a space in the code at the end of the link like this: www.example.com “>your keyword the link will work fine for site viewers, but may not be indexed by some search engine spiders, so therefore not pass you the credit for that link.

301 Redirects
Recently Matt Cutts from Google has confirmed that Google will not consider all anchor text for links using 301 redirect. I will post more about this at a later stage, as this topic really warrants it’s own dedicated post.

Multiple Links on a Page
If a single page on the web links to a single page on your website multiple times, Google only follows the first. So if the first link used the keyword “homepage” then the second and third contain some great keywords, you will lose the benefit of the latter links, so make sure you either have the links pointing to multiple pages, or make the first one the keyword rich version.