When some people first hear of the college paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, written by Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, they often yawn or laugh it off as being outdated. Well let’s step back and think again, this famous paper starts off with these exact words, “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.” Note the words, heavy use of the structure present in hypertext, which translates to mean ‘the words used in text links that point to a web site’.
If you read this paper, pay close attention to section ‘2.2 Anchor Text’, which states: “The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves…”
With the above said, do a search for the keyword of ‘Cheeseburger’ on Google, and you will find the site icanhascheezburger.com among the top few search results. Note that nowhere on the site’s web page (or source code) is the term ‘Cheeseburger’. However, the ‘Cheeseburger’ term is use on tons of links pointing to the site, which increases the site’s relevance for the term in Google.
If the icanhascheezburger.com example isn’t enough, try a search on the mighty Google for the keyword phrase of ‘Click Here’, which will display adobe.com among the top 10 results. As with the icanhascheezburger.com example, the adobe.com home page doesn’t contain the keyword phrase searched for anywhere on the page or in the page’s source code.
Don’t read into this information and start believing this is the one and only secret to high search engine rankings – it’s not. For most successful web sites, on-site SEO is of the utmost importance. However, the point here is of the additional value of building highly targeted keyword text links pointing to your site. In other words, instead of requesting and submitting links using your proper business name such as ‘Bobs Widgets’, think of your important keywords and use them in your links, i.e., ‘Custom Widget Manufacturing’, ‘Custom Widgets Seattle’, etc. You get the idea…
Now get out there and build some nice keyworded text links to your site.
It is true that anchor text plays a huge role in how a website ranks in Google. There has even been a technique used before called Google Bombing where a community of people would all place links to somewhere with the same anchor text in order to get it to come up in Google for that text.
Pretty cool stuff.