What is Anchor Text?
Well, it is simply the words that turn your computer mouse cursor to a clicking hand. Usually, the words are underlined and blue unless it’s been specially styled by an internet designer to look different. If this sounds confusing, don’t worry it’s easy to learn the rules of Internet link spam. You see, most search engines (the same ones that spamming your e-mail five years ago) use anchor text to determine where a website should appear in their rankings. The rules are so complicated that I’ll spare you with the details.
But if you want to know how to rank highly for less then let’s talk about the penguin algorithm a little bit more. The Penguin algorithm was actually developed by two guys from Yahoo! Answers! In answer to the question, “Why does Google hate colored text on websites?”
Google has implemented a special algorithm to determine which websites are the most relevant for a search query. The algorithm works by checking to see if the anchor text links contain the target keywords that are contained within the text. If they do, then it is given a higher ranking than all other sites that don’t have the target keywords within their anchor text links. Also, consider the anchor text that is used will affect a web page’s link juice and domain authority.
Google’s Algorithmic Filters
So, why does Google use “penguin” instead of “google” when it comes to their penguin search engine?
I believe the main reason that Google has chosen to use” Penguin” instead of just “Panda” is because penguins only lay eggs once, whereas most SEO techniques attempt to fool Google into thinking that many websites have been around for several years. If the anchor texts on your website do not contain the keywords that Google is searching for, then this will be considered a factor in their algorithm for determining your ranking.
When a webmaster applies a complete suite of Off Page SEO techniques to their site, they are able to make their site seem fresh and new to Google. However, this freshness is deceptive. Because you have so many backlinks already established linking to your website, it is likely that Google will just rank your site lower because it takes so long to search through all of the existing backlinks. This means that you will need to quickly create brand new anchor text links in order to increase your ranking. The easiest way to accomplish this is to add keyword anchor text to each of your web pages that you want to boost your rankings in.
Anchor text links can contain one or several keywords that are relevant to your site. You should always strive to provide as much information as possible within your backlinks in order to help Google understand how well you are linking to other sites. Google looks at backlinks as an indicator of relevancy when it comes to your specific keywords and you want to be found among the top of the first page results whenever you can.
Keyword Research Importance
It is best to use keywords and keyword phrases that are less competitive to find good quality backlinks to your website. In addition, you want to have a few high quality anchor texts sprinkled throughout your links. The higher a page rank you have, the more importance that certain keywords carry in the eyes of the search engines. Therefore, it is important to spread out your keywords throughout your text links so that it is not too obvious where the link actually points to. Many SEO services have a tool that they use called Keywordspy that will allow them to see the competition for each keyword phrase you enter.
The last SEO technique we are going to discuss here is to ensure that your anchor text links are not too general. Google has specific guidelines that they use to determine what generic anchor text is. The anchor text ratio is 1:1, whereas if you go over the recommended ratios, you will lose your ranking. In addition to that, overstuffing your links with generic anchor texts will not only lower your page rank, but it will also take up a lot of valuable real estate on your website.
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