Anchor tag Text

[Farhan]

For a site selling shoes,
which of the below would be a better anchor tag text?

1) shoes
2) great shoes

Is "shoes" as a link is more influencial on rankings then " great shoes" ?

[Mel]

Hi Farhan:

The anchor text link should be coordinated with the keywords for the site, which of course you would get from Wordtracker, who would tell you which phrase has the most searches.

As far as the SE goes its just looking at the users search phrase and ranking the page for that phrase, so if the user is looking for shoes ( probably not a great search phrase, too general) that phrase in your anchor text will have the greatest effect, and the reverse is true if the user is looking for great shoes (another possibly useless phrase)

[Farhan]

thanx Mel,
But I think i should be more descriptive ..

okay assume that great shoes and shoes both are highly competitive words, will the anchor of * great shoes* influence a search for "shoes" only. That is will the SE account and give the word Shoes the same importance, or if it would have been only *shoes* in the anchor the results would have been different.

[Spider Man]

If the search is "shoes" only, "shoes" is quite a bit better than "great shoes". The further into your anchor the search word is, the less it's counts. Though, If the search is then "great shoes", "great shoes" is a lot better than "shoes". Confusing huh?!

[Farhan]

Originally posted by Spider Man
...... Confusing huh?! [/B]

NO :) I got it Now !

[Advisor]

So Chris, are you saying that having extranneous words in the anchor tag text could hurt your chances of ranking high for a smaller subset of words in the hyperlink? That is, if you link a whole sentence it might not be as smart as simply hot linking only the particular keywords you're targeting?

Jill

[Spider Man]

Wow. I'm impressed. That's another angle of what I said. Basically yes...you been hacking into my computer and reading my unreleased articles again? :)

[Advisor]

Originally posted by Spider Man
Wow. I'm impressed. That's another angle of what I said. Basically yes...you been hacking into my computer and reading my unreleased articles again? :) Hehehe...nope, I just live to make your geek talk understandable to the general public! (We make a pretty good team, in that respect...maybe we should write a book together?) Actually, I wasn't sure about all that, but if it really works in real world SEO, it's very interesting and means I have some work to do changing some sites!

<emailing my sis to fix some things on the Nobscot site...>

Thanks, Chris!

Jill