Last week we announced a new tool every day (except New Year’s), and we thought we’d kick off this week with one more tool announcement. We just finished the “Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer”, and are excited for you to start using it. This tool checks the backlinks for your site (or any site), and then displays the actual link text (anchor text) used for the links.
Why is knowing the link text helpful?
The link text, or anchor text, is an important aspect of the “link vote”. When someone links to you, the search engines see it as a vote of approval of sorts. In order for the search engines to understand your page better, they consider the text that a user would actually click on, and extract any semantic value. They also consider the text of the URL, at least to a small extent. This text is then used, along with the content found on the page being linked to, to help the search engine consider you for placement for that keyword.
Googlebombing uses this same principle. If a lot of links use the same or similar keywords as the anchor text, that is an indication to the search engines that the page is related to that topic or keyword.
It’s cool and all, but how can I use it to help my SEO?
When you are link building, you are trying to obtain links to your site from others. If you are requesting links, it is best to have a pre-formed link to help the webmaster giving you the link to install it properly with the right word and spelling. If you find links that have spelling problems or perhaps are off-topic or just too general in the link text, then there may be opportunities to request the site owner to change the link text.
This tool is just one of many tools of a complete suite of SEO tools to help make your SEO easier.
