Anchor text optimisation

[vtmoz]

Hi,

I would like to know the best anchor text practices. I think it's same for On-page and Off-page. As per the internet seo buzz, people suggests differently as below. Which actually work out?

1. Exact match with target page title or partial match

2. Will "Read more" and "learn more" are Okay?

3. How much it must be relevant with URL?

Thanks,

Satish

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

In the end they will all work. The most important thing to take into consideration is to make them as relevant and looking natural as possible. If your company name is: 'Example X' it would look most natural if your off page anchor texts do include these keywords followed by probably anchor texts like: click here, okay, read more, etc. As these are the anchor texts that are used all across the web.

Look at the patterns that other sites in your industry are using.

[ChrisAshton]

For internal links, just keep them relevant so people know what the link is before even clicking on it. If you have a guide on how to write page titles, make the internal anchor something like "guide to page titles".

As for external backlinks, if they're editorial links that someone else is posting, it's usually best to just leave this up to the site owner since they're going to make it relevant anyway. The best way to have a natural looking anchor text profile is to make it natural!

If you have to control the anchors (e..g directories or a guest post) then we typically lean toward this priority order:

1. Your brand name
2. Your URL
3. Your primary keyword(s)

That means that if you did web design and the name was "ProWeb", your anchor text profile would probably look something like this, in order of highest to lowest volume:

1. ProWeb
2. Pro Web
3. http://www.proweb.com
4. www.proweb.com
5. Web Design
6. Website Design
7. webdeign

You will get all kinds of variations like mis-spellings, "read more", "click here" etc as well but you get the picture.

I hope that helps! Just make sure you don't have your keywords as the most common anchors - it's pretty obvious spam!