How to find anchor text links (the most powerful links your site can get)

Posted by Ken McGaffin on 26 November 2010

Using keywords in the linking text (or anchor text) that points to a specific page on your site is one of the most powerful ways to boost your search engine rankings. Ken McGaffin shows you how a new feature on Wordtracker Link Builder helps you find more of these most sought after links.

Indeed, if your competitors are beating you in the search engine results pages, then their use of keyword rich linking text could be one of the reasons why.

So it is vital that you know the linking text that your competitors are using.

A new feature in Link Builder will tell you the exact linking text your competitors are using and how often they’re using it. In this article I’m going to show you how it works.

Let’s start by looking at a link analysis of the office supplies firm, OfficeDepot.com.

Here are the domains that link to OfficeDepot.com

Now let’s click on 'See linking text’ to see the words that are used to link to OfficeDepot.com.

The tool has found 4,346 variations in the linking text pointing to OfficeDepot.com and that text is used in 19,375 links from 9,535 different linking domains.

Now look at the linking text and of course, you see office depot appear often in it – these are own-brand keywords such as office depot, www.officedepot.com and officedepot.com.

But what I’m really interested in are the non-brand keywords that are used to link to the site.

Non-brand keywords are the words people use when they’re looking for what you sell, but don’t use your name to search. Non-brand searches mostly bring new customers to your site and so they can really grow your sales and boost your profits.

We can find the non-brand keywords by excluding the own-brand terms. So, in this case, I’ll exclude any text that contains the word depot.

Here’s what we get:

So for OfficeDepot.com, non-brand keywords would be office supplies, office furniture or photo paper.

Click here for a free 7-day trial of Link Builder

Oh No! – Not ‘click here’ please ...

Now you can see right at the top that click here is popular linking text – yet this confers no keyword benefit. So the website has linked to OfficeDepot.com but has not used keyword rich linking text.

If we were optimizing for OfficeDepot.com could we get them to change the linking text? It’s certainly possible and worth the effort. Just click on the linking text click here to show the links that use that text:

And the pages that link are revealed:

We’ve found 34 domains that just use click here. Send them a quick email and ask them to change the linking text.

Tactic revealed: the small business handbook

Now let’s go back to the linking text results and see what else we can find:

I can see small business handbook is one of the pieces of linking text. That’s probably worth a closer look.

Click to see the pages that link using small business handbook as the linking text:

Let’s click on the entrepreneur.com link to see the original link:

So we can see the linking text in place on Entrepreneur.com

Expand that small business niche

It would also be interesting to see how many times small business appears in the linking text.

If I now clear the exclude box and ‘include’ small business, then this is what I find:

That’s 52 domains that link to OfficeDepot.com with small business in the linking text.

Summary

This is all useful information. What have we seen in this short look at the linking text analysis feature?

• We’ve seen how many non-brand pieces of linking text point to OfficeDepot.com

• We’ve found 52 domains that link to OfficeDepot.com using just click here

• We’ve seen that OfficeDepot.com publish and get links from a small business handbook

• We’ve found the actual sites that link to OfficeDepot.com using small business in the linking text.

This new feature in Link Builder gives you a unique perspective on one of the most important search ranking factors – linking text? Now, what can you find out about your competitors?

Live link building webinar

If you'd like to attend a one hour link building seminar and have the chance to get your questions about linking answered live and direct by link building expert Ken McGaffin on the date shown above.

Link building webinar details here

Click here for a free 7-day trial of Link Builder