Placing Anchor Text in Articles You Write for SEO and on Your Own Website

On some article submissions sites you need to use HTML code to create your anchor text. HTML anchor text links are coded using this general format:

Keyword description of your webpage

When you format your hypertext links this way, search engines crawling and indexing the page, and people reading the article, know what they will find on the page where the link takes them.

Let's say your website is "BestOfTheBestGardenSeeds.com" and it has a page on which you are selling snap pea seeds. When you submit an article about your snap pea seeds to an article publishing website like EZineArticles, you'll want to be sure to make the link to your site a keyword containing anchor text link like this:
"And you'll find the best snap pea seeds at www.BestOfTheBestGardenSeeds.com."

Notice that the URL for the website is simply spelled out; it is not linked from. Both the reader and the search engines are told that the page that is linked to has the "best snap pea seeds". This not only improves search ranking, but these types of anchor text links drive more visitors to your site because they get clicked more frequently.

You should use similar or identical formatting that you use for articles when linking between pages within your website. Though not as powerful as inbound links from other high quality websites, careful internal anchor text linking does help Google know which pages on your site are related to certain keywords and which pages you think are the most important on your website.

You cannot very easily control the anchor text other websites use when linking to your site, but, wherever you have the opportunity to add an anchor text link pointing to your site, do so. You can do this through social bookmarking on sites such as Digg, by submitting articles to other websites that have a high Page Rank, and by using keyword anchor text in your forum post signature and on your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Anchor text links and the quality or "link authority" of the page on which the anchor text link appears is part of what's called “off-page” search engine optimization. Off-page SEO, namely the type of linking from high quality websites described in this article, largely determines how your page ranks on Google. The likelihood of driving paying traffic to your site increases when your page ranks well for keyword searches that indicate the searcher is interested in buying something; searches such as "best snap pea seeds" for the example used in this post.

Keyword-rich backlinks to your site improve your ranking on Google for searches containing those keywords. Having a large number of anchor text links to your site, or to a particular page on your site, appearing on a wide variety of high quality websites improves the likelihood that your site will appear on the first page of search results on Google for that keyword search.