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Anyone who works in Search Engine Optimization will tell you that anchor text from inbound links is one of the most important factors in boosting a site’s search engine rankings. Anchor text is the text you click on to follow a link to another webpage. Why is this important in SEO? In short, anchor text tells search engines what the linked webpage is about. If 100 links point to a page with the anchor text “Discount Italian shoes,” Google, Yahoo and the other major engines will say, “Hey, this site is a good place to find information about discount Italian shoes! Let’s place them higher in the search results for that term.”

The importance of inbound anchor text is SEO 101, but what many people want to know is how internal anchor text (links on a website that point to its own pages) will affect page traffic. The response to this topic is not as clear-cut as it is with inbound links; however, some of the world’s top SEOs have done extensive testing with internal links and come to some interesting conclusions.

SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin acknowledges that using internal links to point to less visited pages on your site can give them a “positive nudge” in the search engines. For example, if your homepage is a PageRank (PR) of 8, while an inner page is a meager PR1, it is possible to pass some of the stronger page’s “link juice” along.

To keep a consistent, hypothetical example, let’s say the inner page is an article about buying Italian shoes. You want the page to rank well for keywords related to this topic, so rather than placing a link to the article on the main page that reads “click here,” the anchor text should say “Discount Italian shoes buyer’s guide.” Note that the most important keywords are at the beginning of the text to grab people’s attention and because search engines weigh the beginning words of anchor text more heavily than those at the end.

Fishkin continues to say that this strategy doesn’t seem to work when the anchor text points towards the index page. You can spend a lot of time and effort crafting links to the index that incorporate great keywords, but results seem to show that the anchor text “Home” is just as effective.

How to Craft Effective Internal Anchor Text

So how do you go about writing the best internal anchor text for your inner pages? There are a few strategies that SEO experts strongly recommend:

• Tailor internal anchor text to suit your strongest keywords – “Click here” or “Find out more” won’t cut it when it comes to writing anchor text. Use a keyword tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool or SEOmoz’s Term Extractor to find out what search terms to target. Internal anchor text is great for targeting “long tail” keywords (3 words or more) so use this to your advantage!
• Keep internal links at a productive level – You may get the urge to link to every page on your site from your PR9 index; however, this usually sacrifices any hope the site has of being considered “user-friendly” and makes it look just plain ugly. What’s more, stuffing keyword-rich anchor text on any page puts you at risk for a dreaded Google penalty.
• Keep older content in mind as you build out your site – Let’s say you’ve just written an article about upscale fashion for business men and women. Within the article you mention several styles of Italian shoes. Keep the link juice flowing to your discount Italian shoes buyer’s guide by pointing appropriate anchor text towards this previous post.

There’s little that can help your website’s search engine rankings more than links from a well-established domain. But if you really want to go the extra mile you must optimize your internal link anchor text. Use your most important pages with strong visitor activity to funnel traffic to articles, blog posts and content pages that are newer or have been forgotten by time.