What Anchor Text Is Best

Yesterday I looked at What Links Are Best - today, What Anchor Text Is Best?

The two go hand in hand. Pick a good link and good anchor text and you have a match made in heaven. A link that's sure to earn you grace and favour and move you up the search engine rankings. If it's a really good link, it will appear on Google when you check for back links, and looking at some really popular sites and some don't have that many links showing.

But others have huge numbers of back links showing, and don't necessarily perform well. It's not all about quantity - it's about quantity. So what should the anchor text include?

Traditionally it's been stuffed with the target keywords. But I think that if Google hasn't already started to ignore them, then it soon will do. I was with a customer yesterday and looking at his competitor's site, which recently dropped out of favour. The top site for a search term he's competing on has 19 links in, his site had 300+ links in. Yet it's the 19 links site that does best.

His competitor won't / can't divulge his link building strategy. He leaves it to an SEO company and they won't say what they are doing so that others can't copy. Sounds a get out to me. But why has the site with 19 links in listed so highly?

Simple, it has got better anchor text. I also happened to notice they have exchanged links with one of my (unrelated) sites. So I've started looking through their links to see how they link back - and I was very (pleasantly) surprised. More tomorrow when I've checked the rest of the links.