Inbound Links

[adamnichols45]

How many words should the anchor text use?

Any top tips on how best to do this?

[rankfirst]

The best practise is to use the exact keyphrase for e.g. "custom made everything" as alt pointing to the homepage within bold tags. I suggest avoid long trailing keyphrases, which dilute the impact of search engine voting.

[goodroi]

anchor text is a bit complex and its hard to precisely give a number that can be used for all keywords in all engines. in general it is best to focus on the keyword you want to rank for but to not have too high a percentage of it. in the past i have had anchor text that was 80% identical, i would not do that now. currently i do a lot lower than that and try to diversify a bit (widgets, blue widgets, 2007 widgets, widget resource).

you have some control over the anchor text you get. if you have a dmoz listing, the title of your site will be your anchor text (dmoz has around 100 scraper sites that will copy that anchor text). when you send out link requests you can suggest anchor text in your message. when you post on blogs, forums and guestbooks often the name you use becomes your anchor text. if you have a "link to us" page on your site you can also suggest anchor text. when you buy links you can control the anchor text.