Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
Anchor text is the visible text users see that contains a hyperlink to another page. Google believes that anchor text very often is a more accurate description of a web page than the page itself and ranks pages higher that contain these keywords.
What does this mean
Anchor text is text that contains a hyperlink. It is usually blue. An example is get to number 1 in google free. Here is the code for this link.
<a href=http://www.hotelconsultant.com/number-1-ranking-in-google/>get to number 1 in google free</a>
http://www.hotelconsultant.com/number-1-ranking-in-google/ is the page that the link goes to and “get to number 1 in google free” is the anchor text.
Why do Google use this to rank results: Anchor text indicates relevancy, indeed words close by are also thought to be a ranking signal. Your hotel should use the exact keywords in your keyword strategy if possible. Google wants the links to be naturally gained thus they expect some variation in the keywords and do not want to see exceedingly long anchor text as this looks like keyword stuffing. Use synonyms i.e. different words that have the same or nearly the same meaning to achieve this.
What do I do
How do I insert anchor text into my page: Change the text below to whatever you want and copy and paste it into your code. Copy and paste the page you want to link to into the green section and insert the text you want the link to come from into the purple section and then copy and paste the new line of code into wherever on the page you want the link from.
<a href=http://www.hotelconsultant.com/number-1-ranking-in-google/>get to number 1 in google free</a>
How do I find out the anchor text for all links to my site: Click on http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php and do the following.
You will then get the following page.
I have blanked out their name as I would be critical of their anchor text strategy. While this looks great and there are in fact thousands of links to this hotel which would have been painstakingly build up over the years, the only anchor text is the name of the hotel. You are probably wondering why this is bad. Unless something has went drastically wrong every hotel should be number one in Google for their own name and therefore their keyword strategy should be for different words. An excellent form of anchor text would be 5 star hotel Dublin if you were competing in this market and your anchor texts would be “5 star hotel Dublin” if you wanted to rank number one in Google for this term.
So what do I do: Do keyword research and figure out what keywords you want to rank for. Then tell the sites that are creating links to your site what anchor text you want and the exact page you want them to link to. After you have figured out your target keywords, send an email to the sites that link to you already and ask them to change the anchor text to your new target keywords. If you would like to create a link to my site here is the code I would ask you to use for example.
<a href=http://www.hotelconsultant.com/>digital hotel consultant</a>
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