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One more strategy for anchor text that you should consider is varying the anchor text. When you
repeat the same anchor text over and over again on a given web page, it begins to lose its effective-
ness, and in fact can cause a search engine crawler to rank your site lower in the SERPs. It’s much
more effective to use multiple keywords and phrases as anchor text on a web page. This allows you
to vary the anchor text, but to maintain a consistency in the keywords and phrases you use.
The other type of anchor text is that which others use to link back to your site. Many times, this
anchor text is overlooked as an SEO strategy; however, it’s one of the most effective types of opti-
mization that you can use. Here’s an example: One savvy marketer on the Internet decided to see
how quickly he could make his site rank high in the Google SERPs. So he used anchor text links
on his page, and then solicited reciprocal links, based on highly targeted keywords and phrases that
were relevant to his site. The result was that within four days, the web site had shot to the number
four position in the Google SERPs.
There are two elements to consider in this story. The first is that the web-site owner sought recipro-
cal links. These are links to your page from another web site, in return for your site linking to them.
The reciprocal links are most effective when they come from sites that are relevant to your web site.
But most often, you’ll have to seek the links out. Furthermore, in order to take advantage of all the
value of reciprocal links, you also need to ensure that your site is linked to in a certain way. Instead
of having another site just link to your main page, it’s most effective to provide a potential linking
site with the code that includes the anchor text you want to use.
The second element of the story, to which you should pay special attention, is that the links used
by the webmaster were highly targeted keywords. In order to learn which keywords will be most
effective for your site, you should refer to your keyword research. The keywords that are searched
for most often, but are as narrowly related to your site as possible, are the keywords that you should
consider using in your anchor text. The whole point of anchor text is to optimize your site to gain
higher search engine rankings, which in turn brings visitors to your site.
So how often should you use anchor text on a web page? That’s one of those magic numbers that
no one really knows for sure. Different people will tell you different things. Some say no more than
two or three times, others say no less than 10 or 12 times. A good rule of thumb is to use anchor
text as many times as there is a solid reason to use it. Don’t load your content with anchor text just
to have the links, but if you have a relevant link that can be included, don’t skip it just because
you’ve used anchor text five other times on the page.
Determining what anchor text is essential and what isn’t is a personal decision. However, if you’re
using a good analytics program that tracks the links on your web pages, you should be able to deter-
mine which anchor text links are most effective and how using them on a page affects your normal
traffic flow. Anchor text is a good way to improve your search engine ranking, but as you’ve seen
many times before in this book, your web pages should be designed with the user in mind.
One more note about anchor text before moving on. One of the most effective ways to use anchor
text is in dynamic content. Dynamic content is content that changes regularly. Most often, that means
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