First things first, I sincerely apologize for blogging after so long. I have been dead busy and have ignored my precious little blog for months now. Shame on me! I will really try hard to write once a week. I need discipline. Also, I have learned so much in the past few months which I want to share with all of you. Here is the first post in that series. 

Anchor Text Linking From Internal Pages of a Website

Before writing on this subject, I went through some articles on the same topic. I read a lot of blog posts (similar words put differently) on

1. What is anchor text?
2. How important it is anchor text linking for seo?
3. 2011 predictions for anchor text.. blah..blah..

What I saw or rather read was one side of the story. Where was the complete picture? And I speak this because of my experience in using anchor text for SEO. Some things about anchor text that I learned by reading experienced SE optimizer’s blogs, I discovered accidently or by seeing what competitor was doing.

What is Anchor Text?

• If you are not a SEO beginner – SHAME ON YOU!
• If you are a beginner; If I link from my website to yours using “my seo buddy”, then “my seo buddy’ is anchor text. That simple. Anchor text is the visible portion of the link.

Is There a Co-relation between Anchor text & SEO Ranking?

Yes. Very much. Now I haven’t conducted any hard core experiment to give you all a number, but it’s common knowledge and if you do some testing, the results will prove the same.

Let’s dig deeper.

1) Anchor Text Linking from External sites: I have read a lot of articles which tell me that it is possible to rank #1 for a particular term in the SERP’s by purely gaining anchor text links from external sites. It is true to some extent but I have never tried it out. My SEO is always a mix of on page optimization & link building from external sites. Also, it is a good thing to remember that If your site ranks #1 purely by external links, it can easily fall down to #3 or #10 If

• Few links break
• The quality of the external site goes down

2) Anchor text linking from Internal Pages: Now, this is something which I feel should be explored further.

Try this:  pick a keyword for which you don’t rank on 1. Find out the pages in your website which are indexed for this particular keyword by using keyword site:www.xyz.com

Now, the first webpage is the original page that is indexed for your keyword and will be found ranking in the SERPs. Do not touch this page. Move over to the next link in the search result.  We will optimize other internal links. Optimize this page very lightly for this particular keyword. Ensure that this page is relevant to the keyword. If not, pick another web page. Now, after doing some basic optimization and using the same keyword as anchor text, link from the newly optimized page to the page which originally ranks in the search engine for this keyword. Go live, get the edited pages indexed check the ranking of that keyword. Do You can do this for one keyword and 2 – 3 indexed (relevant) pages.

Why are we doing internal anchor text linking?

• It improves ranking (in some cases). For me, this works 99% of the time, even if the ranking moves up by 1 position.
• Google can pick up the other indexed pages and show them in the search results below the main search result.

Instead of depending highly on external links for anchor text links, leverage the relevant web pages of your own site. Also, technique might not work if your site is just a few days old or doesn’t contain good quality text.

If you do try out the above, please share the results. This method has given me positive results in terms of ranking 90% of the time. Remember, no spamming and no black hat techniques.