One of the things that you will need to learn if you want to earn online cash is how to construct a good anchored link. What is an anchored link, you ask? A link anchor is the text that you click on when you go to another page or site on the Internet. The content and context of this anchor is one of the most important factors Google and other search engines use to determine what the target site is about.

So, if you use something like “My Home Page” or “Click Here” as your link text on another site, like a forum or a blog comment, this doesn’t tell the Google-bot or the Yahoo-bot that much about your site. These are generic terms that don’t carry a lot of meaning. Yes, while a link is a link and can help some, it doesn’t convey any information about the target of the link. Therefore, it doesn’t count as much as a well anchored link.

What is a well anchored link? It’s a link that describes exactly what the site is about in a few words. For example, let’s say you had a site where you sold baseball cards. If you participated in a baseball card forum and wanted a link in your signature to your site you wouldn’t want to use “My Home Page”. Instead, if it were allowed, you would want to state specifically what your site was about in the text. For example, “Discount 1960’s Baseball Cards”. This would tell Google, as well as readers, exactly what your site was about.

Having good anchored links is probably one of the best ways to build authority for your site for your chosen keywords. In fact, your domain could be dirtygreenwidgets.com but if your primary anchor text was “clean yellow sprockets” you would rank well for that term. Amazingly, unless a particular keyword is highly competitive, it only takes a few links like this to rank well for a keyword phrase.

I should caution you that if you pull a bait-and-switch where your anchor text and your web site content don’t match up well that this may cause you to lose your position in Google. Google’s algorithms have gotten pretty good at detecting these attempts over the years. Therefore you should stick with terms related to your site’s content or generic terms or a personal name if you can’t use anchored text for some reason.

It is also a good idea to vary the keyword phrase you use or that you request others use for your site. For example, going back to our baseball card site, we may want to use “Discount Baseball Cards”, “Baseball Cards from the 1960’s” or “Best Sports Card Deals” occasionally so that it looks more natural and not like a spamming or Google Bombing attempt.

I hope this article has given you an overview of why anchored links are so important when you want to earn cash online.

Frank Carr November 20th, 2008 SEO

SEO
anchored links, keywords