What is the definition of "anchor text"?

The visible, hyperlinked text on a Web page. It’s often underlined and/or a different color than the rest of the copy.

As stated before, search engines see incoming links to your Web site as "votes of confidence." However, like in Florida, not every vote is counted equally. The following variables all affect how important a link is:

• The importance or popularity of the site linking to you…CNN is worth more than Al’s Bait Shoppe.
• The relevance of the linking site to your own site…Al’s Bait Shoppe is worth more than Bill’s Bike World if you are selling fishing lures.
• The number of links on the linking page…if you’re one out of 10 links you’ll get a bigger boost than if you’re one out of 100 links.
• The words in the link, a.k.a. the anchor text…the anchor text gives the search engines a better idea of the theme of your Web page or site. Your ranking will get the biggest boost for the search phrase used in the anchor text, such as "expert fishing lures."

In other words, if the anchor text is your company name that will help when someone Googles your company name; if the anchor text describes a benefit or feature of your products, you’ll rank higher when someone searches on that phrase, such as, "high-quality lures" or "fooling striped bass". This is a benefit when you’re trying to attract business from people who don’t necessarily know your company by name, but would benefit from your services.

Since you can’t always control the anchor text on someone else’s Web site, you should take advantage of the power of anchor text on your own site. Choose your page titles carefully, and when linking to another page, always try and use your most effective keyphrases as your anchor text. For example, "Resources" is too generic to help. But "Fisherman’s Guide to Fishing Lures" is much more effective.

Further Anchor Text Resources:

• SEORank – "…the visible hyperlinked text on the page."
• Webpronews.com – "…the visible hyperlinked text on the page."
• Tamingthebeast.com – "…the text that is visible in a link to a web page."

Rich Brooks
Doesn’t Know Fishing, But Does Know Linking

While it’s interesting to find out who’s linking to your Web site, it may be more helpful to find out who’s linking to your competition.

Most popular search engines, including Google, see incoming links as "votes of confidence." The more you have, the higher you’ll rank on a given search…all other things being equal.

Thus, to improve your rank, you should encourage incoming links. Although good content is the pollen that attracts the bees, you can also track down the Web masters of appropriate sites and request a link.

A good place to start is the sites that are linking to your competition. Your competition may be sites that appear near or above you on a given search, or just your local (or global) competition. How do you discover who’s linking to your competition (or yourself?) Good question.

Visit the following search engines and enter the phase without quotes, replacing yourcompetition.com with your competitor’s domain. (You can also use this technique to find your own link popularity.)

Google: "link:www.yourcompetition.com"

MSN: "link:www.yourcompetition.com"

Yahoo: "link:http://www.yourcompetition.com"

AltaVista: "link:www.yourcompetition.com"

You can also visit LinkPopularity.com to automate these four searches at once.

Once you discover who’s linking to your competition you can contact them and ask for a link to your Web site as well.

Rich Brooks
It’s All About the Linking

You can use 301 redirects to keep traffic flowing to your Web site even after a major redesign.

After a certain period of time, you may have the desire to reorganize your Web site, spin-off part of your site to a new site, or move your entire site to a new domain because of a buyout or company name change.

But what happens to your search engine ranking and the incoming links to from other Web sites that now point to defunct pages? How do you keep from losing this traffic?

The answer is a 301 redirect. A good, in depth article on Changing Domains and Renaming Pages appeared in the High Rankings Advisor Newsletter by Michael Bluejay.

A 301 tells a requesting browser that the page requested has permanently moved, and where it now exists.

In short, a search engine spider or a visitor’s browser requests a page at your site that has been moved. A properly set up 301 Redirect will avoid that nasty 404 error (page not found) and redirect the browser to the new page or location. Michael gives some good examples in his article of how to set the 301 up.

Some of his examples include:

Redirecting an entire Web site to a new domain (assuming the file structure is identical):

Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com

Redirecting a page to a new area of the Web site:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.domain.com/newpage.html

Geek Alert! These changes are made to the .htaccess file that resides on the server. The 301 works on servers running Apache, so Windows-hosted sites need to find an alternate solution.

One item that Michael hadn’t mentioned was how to redirect a whole directory to a new domain. Back in 1997 I left my job to start a Web design company. I also left on a cross-country roadtrip with a laptop and a digital camera. My goal was to create a guerrilla Web site about my travels.

The site had been hosted at http://www.b1com.com/roadtrip (an old domain of mine.) I recently bought a new domain, http://www.roadtrip97.com, which I used to host the travelogue. Unfortunately, most of the traffic was still going to b1com.com/roadtrip or flyte.biz/roadtrip as those sites had been around for ages. Since they were clouding my traffic reports, I wanted those pages removed…permanently.

I had thought that the 301 redirect might be a solution, but I didn’t want to create hundreds of lines of code (one for each page that needed to be redirected.)

I followed up with Michael and he confirmed what I suspected: I could create a wildcard of sorts:

Redirect 301 /roadtrip http://www.roadtrip97.com

That single line would redirect all the traffic going to the roadtrip directory to the matching page at the new domain! Suh-weet!

BTW, if you are looking for a good way to waste an afternoon, please feel free to check out roatrip ’97. I’ve done my best NOT to fix anything on the site, but just to leave it as is. It’s not polished, but it will destroy your productivity for a while.

Rich Brooks
Cross-Country Traveler