On site optimization - anchor text in body text

[danlae]

Hi

I am learning SEO from scratch and am only a couple of weeks in. My wife has just started a website selling children clothes. In the left bar there are links to the different producers. Clicking it takes you to the products from that producer. In the body text om the main page ( epleskrinet.no) the same producers are mentioned. By time i need to opitmize for all of these. Is there any point in making them anchor text - taking them to the same URL as is given in the side bar ? Or will it get discounted ?

Dan Laerum

[derderko]

Hi Dan,

it's generally a good idea if you identify a (unique) primary keyword for each of your pages. Am I understanding you right, that you have a bunch of producer pages, which you want to have ranking for the name of the producer?

Then I'd say the primary keyword is the name of the producer and I would try to link to those pages with the primary keyword. This helps Google in understanding what the page is about. Slight variations of the keyword are appreciated. Also you could have some "click here" anchor texts (which is totally natural in your anchor text distribution).

Just avoid the following thing: assume you'd be selling cars and you link to /Porsche sometimes with the anchor "Porsche", but other times with "Ferrari". This throws Google overboard and it can't tell if it should rank this page for Porsche or Ferrari. If you'd link with "see more cars" Google will figure this is off-topic.

HTH,
schuon

[DROIDSTERS]

Hi Dan

I do not believe you will be penalised for using the same anchor text and linking to the page twice from the home page. I would suggest you use a slightly different anchor text (still with your primary keyword (the brand), but using different adjectives around that word) to increase the relevance, of the brand page you are linking too, for a combination of searches for that brand.

[MarcLevy]

Hi Dan,

I would definitely recommend doing this. Forget SEO for second, it is great for users! If you are talking about a certain producer on the homepage and you have a full page deeper in your site about that producer then providing your users with a direct link to that makes perfect sense.

For sure, you should listen to some of the advise given above. Vary up your anchor text when linking to that page from different pages or sections of the site, but most importantly keep it natural and provide your users with the best experience possible.

I believe you can find a number of articles here on SEOmoz explaining tests run on how Google only counts the first anchor text it crawls to each specific URL. So if you homepage navigation is crawled first and features anchor text A, then the anchor you use further down you page does not really matter. Make it good for users. Here is an article by Rand from 2008 although I am sure there are newer ones: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts