Give a Webpage an Instant SEO Boost
Monday, August 25th, 2008Do you have a keyword phrase that you have been targeting for a while, but you just cannot quite work your way up the search engine results page (SERP)? Here’s a quick tip that takes moments to complete, but can shoot you up a number of positions…
You may or may not be aware that the anchor text of a link (i.e. the text that is clickable in a link) is very important for search engine optimization. Search engines see the anchor text as being a description of the target of the link. For example, if you have a website about “green widgets”, then people are likely to link to you in the following manner:
Here is a link to Green Widgets
This tells the search engines that the phrase “green widgets” is connected to your website, and so when someone searches for that phrase, the search engines will consider your website a good match, and your website will likely rank well.
Anchor text is also important within your own domain. So if you were linking from one page on your website to another, you may choose to link using “small green widgets” if you wanted that page to rank well for that phrase.
And so we come to the tip! All you have to do is add an anchor-rich link from your sidebar or footer to the page on your website that you want to promote. Assuming your sidebar/footer is the same throughout your website, you will now have as many links with your targeted anchor text as you have pages!
And that’s it! With that small amount of work, you should see an improvement in your page’s search engine rank for the targeted text within days or weeks. As with any SEO technique, experiment, and don’t overdo it. If you are obviously trying to game the search engines, don’t be surprised if their alarm bells ring, and your website is penalized!
