Check the most popular anchor text to your site

Here’s a quick SEO tip to webmasters and bloggers.

Google gives you a way to check which anchor texts are most commonly used to link to your site. This is a great SEO tool because (1) you know what keywords you’re likely to be optimized for already, given the inbound links and (2) if you’re not yet optimized for these, then with a little work you can get first place (or maybe even just first page) on queries for these keywords.

Google webmaster tools let you do that (among other nifty features). Simply head over to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and click the manage link corresponding to your site. Make sure you have already verified ownership of this domain.

Then after you submit the address, click the Statistics tab, then select Page Analysis. From this page, you will see “how the Googlebot sees your site.” There are two columns, which pertain to the top anchor texts used to link to your site both from within your site (internal links) and from outside (inbound links).

Apart from keyword density, the anchor text used to link to your site is important, because this is used by Google to determine the context of that link. So sometimes even if these keywords or phrases are not actually contained on your site, you can still rank high for relevant queries.