how doe sthe anchor text on hardlinks affect my pagerank?
 

just curious in what way the anchor text used to link my site on other pages affects my pageranking. does using specific words and phrases help raise my position on those keywords?

Yes and no.

a lot of people think that the wider the variety of keywords they use is beneficial and in all reality it is not. You want to focus on 3-5 keywords and repeat those over and over again, if you have to many different keywords, the crawler is not going to recognize your site for any particular one, and links are in the game too. The crawler sees thoise hardlinks as text and relates the words to the relevancy of the site.

So the anchor text can help a lot or it can kill you!!!

Best thing to do is try and make your anchors the same keyowrds as the rest of your page, or if you have anchor that cannot be changed, simply create a seperate links page for all trades and such to minimize the damage it could do to your PR.

Yeh, make sure you are using the most important keywords as your anchor text. SE's also take into account the text just before and after you link. This is where good article writing will benefit you.

Very true..:thumbsup

Search google for the keywords you want to rank for. Look at the competition. Check out their backlinks. This is a good way to learn the how and why of a search engine rank.

You can do the same for all search engines.

Also while your looking at competing pages try to figure out what over terms they might be ranking well for. This can be done by checking the anchor text used to link to their pages.

This information is only useful if you can match or exceed what others are doing. In that case pick different keywords and phrases that are less competitive.




ROBO

anchor text is huge. obtaining "real" and "natural" links means that links are embedded within the content of sites, and that your anchor text varies as people refer to your site differently.

Google (and to a lesser degree other search engines) heavily weight it's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high ranking can only be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors. Googlebombs (ie. search miserable failure) are probably the easiest examples to find and understand how anchor text effects SERPs.

I would suggest having NO MORE than 5 keywords as focus on any given page. Then, try to get the anchor text in backlinks to be as close to or exactly those 5 keywords. And get as many of them as possible.

This will help to improve your ORGANIC listings in the SERP's for those keywords.

all good to know, thnx guys