Of the many uses of good content, generating quality links back to your website is one of the most powerful.  The more one way quality links back to your site the better.  But if you want to take it a powerful step further, start using anchor text.

Links work, particularly one way links, because the more sites that reference your site the more authority you will have in the search engine’s eyes.  It’s like having your friends tell you how good a particular product is.  Let’s say you are looking for a good network marketing system
and all of your friends tell you how good this one system is.  You’ll be much more interested in that system, right?

Now imagine that one of your friends is a network marketing genius.  She is really successful and makes a lot of money.  One day you mention to her how you are looking for a good network marketing system and you heard about this certain one from all of your friends.  Suddenly she tells you how she uses that exact system and how it taught her to market the right way.  And now, because of that system people hang onto her every word and can’t wait to try whatever she suggests.  If you were interested before, now you are really interested.

Search engines work the same way.  The more sites (people) that mention something the more they are interested.  What really gets them interested though are sites (people) that already have a high ranking.  It
just makes your site that much more appealing and worthy of their top spots.

But mentioning a site just isn’t good enough.  Oh, it’s good, and search engines are really good at figuring out what a site is about.  But anchor text lets them know right away what it’s about.  It also lets you tell them where to place your site and who you want to find your site.

Let’s stick to the theme of a network marketing system.  If you want to rank high in that phrase, make sure that your text links say “network marketing system”.  As long as it is relevant to your site, the search engines know that anyone looking for a network marketing system would be better served if they were shown your site.

Of course, there’s good anchor text and bad anchor text.  I’m sure you’ve seen sites use “click here” for their anchor text.  Is that where you want your site ranked?  Click here?  Have you ever searched for the phrase “click here” using a search engine?  I didn’t think so.  Neither have I.

To be fair, what they are doing is telling you exactly how to get to their site.  That’s great, we all hate to go somewhere and be confused as what we need to do next.  Confusing web sites are really no fun.  But do you really want to rank well for a search term nobody uses?

So, use anchor text for your links whenever you can.  It’s not always possible, and if it’s not that’s fine.  Don’t worry too much about it.  But if you can, go ahead and take advantage of it and let those search engines know what you are about and where you want to be ranked.

Two more quick tips about anchor text.  Search engines aren’t the only things looking at your links.  People are too.  So, make sure that your links make sense.  Also, make them relevant to your site.  If you have a site about bubble gum don’t use network marketing system as your text link.  Chances are the person looking for your site is chewing gum already.  Or like me, they just popped a bubble and now have a bubble gum emergency.  So, to keep from creating more of a mess I’ll leave you to it.