Click 'Here' To Be Ambiguous

Imagine you are in a store and you see aisles labeled "Milk", "Sugar", "Fruits", etc. The next store you go into has its aisles labeled "Aisle 1", "Aisle 2", "Aisle 3", etc. Which one will give you more confidence that you are heading in the right direction for what it is you need?

With websites these "aisle labels" are called Anchor Text (also known as Link Text). It is the words you physically place your mouse over and click on to go somewhere else. And believe it or not, these seemingly simple words have a big impact on search engines both inside and outside or your website.

Search engines are just machines. They can only decipher what something is about based on how well it follows the pre-defined rules, not because it can read and comprehend the content. However, somewhere along the line the search engine programmers got smart. They may not have time to read every website that passes through their database, but other people do.

Externally, if someone links to your website then there is a good chance they read your content. The search engine looks to these people to help define what your website is really about. Since the search engine assumes only the link directly pointing to you is actually about you, it looks at the text used when linking to your website to get a clue as to what Website A believes your site to be about.

For example, if Website A said "check out this post about finding keywords" then the search engine would assume by clicking the words "finding keywords" it would land on a page about "finding keywords".

Seems simple, right? However, how many times have you seen this: "Click here to read about finding keywords"? People do this all of the time - both inside of their website and when linking to other websites. A search engine will look at this and think "the page I will get to from clicking this link is about 'here'". This doesn't help strengthen what the page is truly about in the search engine's mind.

In your website, each page should be targeting 2-4 main keywords (more about this later). So every time a link is pointing to that page, make sure at least one of those keywords is represented in the link text. That means don't just point things internally to "here" and when getting links from external sources (blogs, press releases, articles, etc) don't just always automatically hyperlink your URL. Throw some good solid keywords into that anchor text that link to various pages throughout your website. Your rankings will thank you.