Anchor Text Matters

How much thought do you give to the anchor text used on your blog or web site? I'm not talking about the anchor text of your incoming links, but the anchor text you use in every post to link out to your fellow bloggers.

All of us are guilty, from time to time, of being lazy with our anchor text. Using descriptive words in your links can actually have many benefits for your readers, your peers, and the search engines. When your anchor text accurately describes the resource you're linking to:

• Your readers gain a better idea of what they'll see when they follow the link.
• The sites you link to may get better search engine rankings (and thus more targeted traffic) for the keywords used in your links.
• Search engines can use your anchor text to better understand what the site or page you link to is really about.

Still, many of us construct our links with less descriptive text such as names (of people and companies), post titles, and generic terms. For example, it's common to use a company name as the link to their web site, such as:

My friend Josh runs Wavefront Web Design, a Half Moon Bay web design company ...

That's certainly an accurate use of anchor text, but it doesn't really give the reader (or the search engines) much information about the site we're linking to. What if we use the description of the site as the link, rather than the company name:

My friend Josh runs Wavefront Web Design, a Half Moon Bay web design company ...

Now we've given our readers a bit more information about the site on the other end of the link, and we've helped the search engines understand what the site is about.

Linking with post titles can also be problematic, especially when when titles are written more to arouse curiosity than to be descriptive.

Check out this great post from Rob Watts called "What’s your tumbleweed ratio?", about using comment counts to measure the success of your blog posts ...

That sentence tells you what the post is about, but not until you've already read past the link. And the title, while it may make you curious, doesn't really tell you anything about what you're going to see on the other end of the link. How about this instead:

Check out this great post from Rob Watts about using comment counts to measure the success of your blog posts ...

The second version conveys the same basic information to the reader, but the new choice of anchor text will help search engines understand what the post is really about. I doubt many people have ever typed "Tumbleweed ratio" into a search engine, but there are probably some people looking for a way to measure their blog's success. Your choice of anchor text can help the search engines return more relevant results, which benefits both searchers and the blogs you're linking to.

The best anchor text simply describes the target of your link accurately. It's usually easy to describe a specific blog post in a few words, but it can be a bit more difficult when you're linking to the front page of a web site that may cover a variety of subjects. Sometimes you may want a little help in choosing your anchor text.

Francesco Mapelli suggests asking bloggers for their anchor text preference. It sounds like an effective tactic, but it's not always practical. I actually sent an email to Francesco to ask what anchor text he prefers, but it must have gotten eaten by his spam filter. Fortunately, most web sites contain very obvious clues to the keywords they're focused on.

Just by looking at the title tags on his blog's front page, I can guess that Francesco would appreciate "blogging tips" as the anchor text when linking to his blog. Similarly, a glance at my front page would reveal that I'm partial to "california web design" for links to the front page. But the best anchor text is your own concise description of the resource you're linking to. It's helpful to your readers and beneficial to the recipient of the link.

Just something to think about the next time you link to another site.