Anchor text

If you have any degree of control then try to make sure that the anchor text for a link has some commercial value for you in terms of links to your site. What do I mean by that? Anchor text is the phrase which someone clicks in order to follow a link back to your site - so, if you do a search on Google for the keyword phrase 'click here' you will find that Adobe ranks number 1, despite not appearing to use that phrase anywhere on its site. What Adobe does have, are plenty of links from sites around the world which say something similar to: 'if you need to download Adobe Acrobat, click here' where the words 'click here' provide the link to Adobe's site.

I'm pretty confident that Adobe didn't want to be linked for the keyword phrase 'click here' but these links developed outside their control. This is prompted this evening because we have an opportunity to nominate some linking text for one of our sites and it makes sense to use a keyword phrase where we would like to strengthen our ranking. It's easily done, because we know which keyword search is commercially important and it doesn't take a lot of effort to make sure that the links use that 2-word phrase.