First of all, what is an anchor text? The anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Do I need to explain what a hyperlink is? I hope not.

An example of an anchor text and a hyperlink is this: my favorite place in the whole world!

The anchor text there is “my favorite place in the whole world!” and it is hyperlinked to another blog.

Now for the keyword. A keyword is the word or sometimes a group of words (usually referred to as a key phrase) that you want your website to be known for. Keywords are very important in search engine optimization (SEO) as these help your website to rank well in the search engines.

Perhaps the best example of the power of the anchor text is the key phrase “click here”.

Do you know what is at the number one spot for that key phrase when searched on Google? And take note that the search yielded more than a billion results!

It’s the page for downloading Adobe Reader.

Amazing, isn’t it? Most especially since the keywords “click here” are nowhere to be found on that

Adobe page.

The only explanation for that is the power of the anchor text.

The Adobe Reader is one of the most popular free software and also one of the most used because of the popularity of the PDF format. Websites that offer downloads of PDF documents and ebooks would usually place a link to the Adobe Reader’s download page so that people who still don’t have the software can easily get it and read the PDF file the websites were offering.

And I think you can guess what anchor text they usually use.

CLICK HERE

So what is the importance of the anchor text to your site? If you want your site to be known for a specifc keyword or set of keywords, it is important that you place your keywords in the anchor text that will be pointing to your site.

So if your keyword is “Sagada”, it is best to write your anchor text like this: …learn more about Sagada.

An extra point with that technique is not only did you make good use of the “Sagada” keyword, but you also included the keyphrase “learn more about Sagada”. So there is a greater possibility that if someone makes a Google search to try to learn more about Sagada, he might find that site in one of the search results.

In parting, always make an extra effort in using your anchor text especially if you are exchanging links with other site owners. Always ask them to make use of your desired keywords for the anchor text when they link back to you.

She was actually very interested in the whole search engine ranking idea. So when I asked her what’s the keyword she would like to rank for, she said ‘Prudence Charlz’ which was the pseudonym she was using for her blog.

I asked her why and she said it’s her name so that’s what she wants to see in the search engines.

Big mistake, wouldn’t you agree? I told her the same thing and she would not accept my explanation that nobody would be searching for her name (a pen name that is not yet even well-established).

To give her an example, I made a search for ‘prudence charlz’ on Google and as I expected, it gave a very small amount of results. Only 160 results.

But she was adamant in wanting to see her pen name on the number one spot. I told her okay and that it would actually be quite easy given the small number of competition for that key phrase.

That’s when she decided to give me a helluva of a task. When I told her it would be quite easy to make her blog rank first for the keywords ‘prudence charlz’, she said she would also want to rank well for the keyword, ‘prudence.’

I didn’t need to make a Google search to know how many results would yield the keyword, ‘prudence’ but just the same I made a search for it.

8,430,000 results. Now that’s a lot of SEO work!

How about you? Do you think you can give the ‘prudence’ keyword a shot?

Is it 2% or more than that?

I say don’t worry about the percentage and just do the following and your copy will work just fine:

• Put your main keyword in your title. While it is not definite whether spiders start scanning a page from top to bottom or vice versa, it is the title that states what your article is all about. It is just natural to put your main keyword there.

• If you structure your article into three parts (introduction, body, conclusion), put your keyword once in the first paragraph, twice or thrice if possible in the body, and once in the last paragraph.

• Sometimes if you follow the keyword density percentage, your copy may look spammy or sound too unnatural. Although a good copywriter can effectively incorporate such a number of keywords into the copy, there will always be a limit to the amount of creativity that he can use.

• Know your keywords and build your article around it. Never forget to create a balance between the number of keywords and the general readability (by humans) of your article.