Anchor text is important for SEO

Ah, anchor text…so essential yet so misunderstood. Anchor text is merely another phrase for the label text for your link. Unknown to many bloggers, these words actually have an effect on how search engines perceive the link’s value. In fact, it’s well-known in SEO expert circles that anchor text is the top one or two factors that determine how you rank.

Often times, bloggers make anchor text mistakes without even knowing it. This comes into play the most when they are creating their own backlinks or pingbacks/trackbacks. Here’s an example:

Creating their own backlinks

I’m about to share a way to build your own backlinks. Unlike many of the tools available, some free and some way too expensive, this method allows you to be completely independent.

• 1. Go to blogger.com and create an account if you don’t already have one. Although there are many places to start your own blog site, the blogger is one of the best free offerings available.
• 2. From your blogger dashboard, click Create a Blog. You will be asked for a blog title and a blog address. To create a backlink blog site, it doesn’t really matter what you choose here.
• 3. Choose a template. You can always edit it later but again, for our purpose, this is really irrelevant.
• 4. Click New Post and just type the following two things: (1) name of your post/article and (2) link to your post/article. It should look something like 7 Reason Why having a blog is like having a girlfriend
• (this will be the anchor text that will be a live link that points to https://www.stepstobecome.com/2018/09/7-reason-why-having-blog-is-like-having.html)
• 5. Moving forward, every time you create a new post or article, add to this post.

Simple, right? It literally takes less than a second to do. Again, there are other methods of creating backlinks but, especially for people starting out, there’s little reason not to create their own page that they have total control of.
Bad anchor text:

To learn more about what to do for your SEO,

Good anchor text: The former is vague and would have no value to search engines while the latter is relevant and should improve search engine rankings.

In a nutshell, here’s how it works. If there were 1000 sites that all had anchor text about improving traffic which all lead to my Top 5 things post, then the article would move up in ranking. Of course, there are other variables, but this part is an easy thing to do. You’re creating a link anyway so you might as well make it meaningful to improve the relevance of the destination, whether it’s your own backlink or someone else’s site.

Makes you want to go back and fix all those lousy anchor texts used in your old posts, doesn’t it