Questions - Anchor Text & Keyword Changes

Questions about anchor text and monitoring keyword changes

[marcusmiller]

Hi all

A couple of quick questions.

1) I have been reading through a lot of posts and guides etc on this site and there is a lot of mention of anchor text, ie "they have the keyword in the anchor text".

Can someone clarify what this means? Is this in sites that link to you, or internal link text or actual html page anchors linking.

2) I have recently made some major changes to the front of our site and optimised for a specific word. The keyword is no in the Title, the H1 tag, bold and in the general text.

I do not seem to have noticed any difference in my positioning for this word, what is the easiest way for me to check.

Thanks gang
Marcus

[Mohamed_E]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, marcus!

If some one links to you like this:

<a href="your.domain.com">blue widgets</a>

the phrase "blue widgets" is the anchor text.

It seems that Google gives more weight to anchor text from external sites than to the anchor text on your own site. This makes sense, since the former is an "off page" factor that you do not directly control, while the latter is an "on page" factor that you do control.

[tribal]

Some additional info:
Say you want your site found on the search term 'blue widgets', having some external links with the anchor text 'blue widgets' would make your site more valuable to Google, thus showing up higher in the SERPs.