Link Text: Revisited

Link Text: Revisited

Link text, or “anchor text,” as its otherwise known, has been a factor that has had a weighting in Google and other search engines for quite some time now... In this article, I aim at going a little deeper on the subject of link text... I will address how a webmaster can optimize their current internal linking. I will also provide a few tips on how to make sure for example that those linking to you are not just using your URL, but are using your keywords as anchor text, and will share with you some ideas on how to increase the number of internal keyword filled links on your own site. Read the rest of the article . Discuss the article in this thread. You can read the article here .

Cool article. However, I have a question. As Alan said, instead of an FAQ page, one should have a 'Car Sale FAQ' page, assuming that one is into selling cars. Now, since 'Car Sale FAQ' is the link text that points to an faq page, so the faq page is being optimized for 'Car Sale', while one would like to optimize the home page or other important page from sales point of view for the same key phrase. So how can a 'Car Sale FAQ' page help in internal link text optimization?

I've been evaluating open source software the last few days. Often, to ask a pre-sales type question, you have to sign on to the users forum. Now these are standard forums with links to my website and the opportunity to have a signature. I've seen my profile and postings from *some* forums come back to me when I check my inbound links.

Because I have control over my signature I can make sure the keywords are represented properly.

Do forum postings boost your PR or is Google et al bright enough to see that it's a forum and so the link is given a lesser or 0 value?

@maneesh
Your faq and other sub pages do not of course have to be about "Car Sale" therefore you could for example use "auto sale" or use the page to target a 3 word combination. It takes a fair bit of lateral thinking and proper keyword research in order to be able to dsistribute your keywords effectively. In fact I jot down on a piece of paper groups of 3 keyword phrases in order of importance. Clearly the top 3 are for the homepage. Then I'll take a look at the sub pages left on a site to see a. which have the best pagerank/linkpop and also are logical matches for the other 3 word groups. Car sales FAQ may become 'Auto Sales FAQ'. or 'Car parts faq' or even' car accessories faq' I think you get my drift ;-)

@Sarah
Important to have your signature found and followed from a forum thread is that the thread page itself is likely or already is being indexed (pagerank bar). A few tips are
1. Post on threads that have already been indexed (>0 pr + in cache)
2. Pick threads that are new but are likely to be "bumped" (when someone posts a post it movves to the top) up. Controversial long threads normally.
3. Sometimes a forum moderator uses a important or announcement feature which means the thread is always on the first page (automatically bumped). Only post here though if it makes sense to and you have something to say.
4. If you regularly contribute to a forum where the index page has at least a pr of 4, you can count on some good incoming links provided that of coiurse the forum isnt running an outbound tracking script or other backlink/pagerank blocking methods.

Dont whatever you do make forum posting your link pop strategy. its something to add to al the other methods but you wont get far with forum posting alone and of course never post spammy posts and try to give something to the community that may well give you a backlink (although rtarely visible with google due to only pr4+ being shown.)

Alan

@Webby
Ok, that makes sense. I have over 1000 postings at PHPBuilder which has PR8 and moderate at Weberdev - PR 7

I can see backlinks from PHPbuilder but not weberdev. I point them to different sites. I'm going to have a play with this and see how it goes.

Thanks Alan! Makes sense.

Alan,
Thanks for your informative article,
I have a question which you may be able to answer.

We know that when stop words like "from" or "at" are used in searches along with other keywords, the searchengines especially google ignores these keywords.

Now, say the keywords I am targeting with my main page are "widgets from hell" - I have around 7% keyword density for those keywords (including title, h1 and all the other places) and have established lot of external links with this precise text. my site has reached at number 1 when a search is performed for "widgets from hell" with the quotes. But without the quotes, my site appears nowhere ! I searched up to top 1000 - nowhere !
Most of the users do not use the quotes so I have a problem. On further research, I found that most of the result pages that appear for my keywords without the quotes, are all optimized for "widgets at hell" ! I also found the results to be same for the keywords "widgets from hell" and "widgets at hell" - so I am thinking of changing my optimization to target "widgets at hell" and thereby get a good position for "widgets from hell" as well.

What do you think ? Is it possible that since the stop word from is ignored, the search is effectively conducted for "widgets somestopword hell" and since "at" is a 2 letter word, the search engine may find widgets and hell that are separated by 2 letters as a stronger match than separated by a 4 letter stop word.

What should I do ?
Should I change my on page optimisation and all my internal links to use "at" instead of "from" though my target keywords include "from" ?

Thanks.

I find what you have described pretty odd. Usually an exact phrase (without quotations) with 3+ keywords; and where it is in the title and in the body at least 3 times, is in a h1 etc., rarely fails to make top 20. Especially with a reasonable pr (+4). You could be suffering from the same thing I did in that Google for some inexplicable reason failed to rank my homepage on certain terms. This is a known flaw that sometimes index pages disapear from the index. That could be what has happened. In my case I it came back. For the term "suchmaschinenoptimierung" (search engine optimization) i was extremely frustrated that I wasnt getting anywhere. I optimized the page well and got the incoming links yet for some reason it was rankin´g anywhere. Yet for the same page other terms such as "webpromotion service" I was top. Aftzer a couple of months of head scratching wondering if I'd lost the knack or whaever, up it popped top 10 for "suchmaschineoptimierung". I had made no changes at all yet all of a sudden it reached from nowhere to top 10 even though the site was cached and indexed for 2 months. Anyway, this is what might be happening to you. I'd need to know your full url to know for sure, but for a search without quote for a three word phrase you should be up there assuming the page gets spidered and has a pr of 2+.

Alan

Actually this is not true I'm afraid.

It is a common misconception - I think that the intent is there but the reality is very different eg

For the phrases

houses for sale france - we rank 7
houses sale france - we rank 19

jobs in france - we rank 6
jobs france - we rank 35


And we have a lot more like this with even greater discrepancies

Same here, FoxyWeb. Jobs India and Jobs in India return different results.

Mukthi, I am with Alan here (actually I always am but just thought I would voice it).

We had the same thing happen on a site a while back. Perfectly optimized index page with a not too competitive keyword combination. For months we weren't even top 30 and I could so no reason whatsoever....then, google got its act together and there we were; number one

Maneesh and Foxyweb, actually, this is probably a misconception the other way around. It is true that google doesn't include those words in their searches, however, what you are seeing is the PLACEMENT of the words. Because there is a stopword in there "in, on, from etc.", you actually have three words, not two, thus pushing the third word (which is really more important than word number two!) further down the title and slightly diluting the title words. The main reason is the fact that google is looking at where the words are in your title/header (if you had that phrase as words 4,5,6, it would also rank lower than when you have them as 1,2,3). On the other hand, depending on the phrase, it might actually be searched more with a stop word in there...and usually easier to get top spots...

At least, that's what I noticed

What you say is correct - what I am saying, and said, is that we should not just say that google ignores the in, at, to, for.... etc when it considers the phrase as although "the intent is there" the problem remains that the "reality is very different"

In other words when a person is optimizing for keyword phrases he has to weigh up the value between these two phrases for example

jobs france
jobs in france

and if he cannot separate the value of the two he needs to optimise for both otherwise he may find that the

jobs france

which he optimises on, believing that Google ignores the "in" and so do people searching, he is seeing 35 and missing custom

and the one that people use

jobs in france

is at 6

So to sum up I am saying that it is not correct to say that google ignores the "in" of this world as other factors - as you correctly point out - come into play

FoxyWeb and Manish,
Thanks for your inputs, actually I was aware that "widgets hell" give a different result than "widgets from hell" but the point is that the search then becomes "widgets somestopword hell" so what I have noticed is that "widgets from hell" , "widgets in hell" , "widgets at hell" etc all produce the same result.

So When I am optimising for "widgets from hell" and I see all the search results that appear for those keywords as "widgets at hell" - I think may be a 2 letter stopword is better than a 4 letter stop word, and I am thinking that I should change my incomming links as well as on page optimisation for "widgets at hell" instead of "widgets from hell" - sounds silly that to get on top for the from search I will have to optimise for the at search !

Sam-I-am, thank you very much for sharing your experience, I think my situation is similar, the page appears for other search terms even without the quotes, but for the main keywords that I am targeting the page does not appear even in top 1000, and as I said, the page is at number 1 for the same search terms with the quotes !
Its driving me nuts really, Any change I make is refelected in the cached version of the page within 2 days, so it is being indexed, I just wonder why it is not showing in the results !

I just had a thought I would like to bounce of you people,

To get on top of the results for "widgets from hell" without the quotes, which of the following is it best to optimise for ?

1> "widgets from hell"
2> "widgets at hell"
3> "widgets hell"

Though number 3 does not gramatically make sense, I would be willing to do it if it can get me on top of my results !

Hi mukthi

Go to something like Wordtracker and see which one gets

1. the most numbers
2. the least competitors

in other words see what people are using [look at your stats too for search phrases]

Then use that one.

Ciao

FoxyWeb