Placing Long Tails in anchor points

[partymarty4870]

I just sort of stumbled upon this this morning, I wasn't trying to rank for this long-tail and was nowhere to be seen previously. My FAQ page was getting a bit big so I listed all the questions at the top, linking to anchor points further down the page. It was all done to make it easier for users - not with SEO in mind.

To my surprise I'm now number one, two or three for almost all of the FAQ's. As in the (heavily smudged) pic above, google lists the page and then has a "jump to" link to the anchor point. It won't change my bottom line by much but maybe someone out there can use it . This page has zero inbound links (from me anyway).

I don't know if you wordpressers out there can use this, as my site is html/asp and also, PR flows very very well through my site. I can't really use this much for myself, so haven't experimented or tested further. just sharing this discovery for anyone who may find a use for it.

 

[jrbobdobbs]

Can you just explain - you are saying you may have ranked on the strength of having on-page anchor links with those keywords?

I think there could be something in that - quality sites will tend to have their content well-organised with internal anchor links. Might be something Google looks at. I think there are a ton of on-page indicators of this kind out there that we need to be looking at these post-Panda days. Another one that seems to help rankings is a large-resolution, well-optimised picture on the page, possibly linked with a thumbnail. I have jumped a few places on the strength of that.

Gonna try this, put a little "index" at the top of a page of mine, see what happens!

 

[partymarty4870]

Can you just explain - you are saying you may have ranked on the strength of having on-page anchor links with those keywords?

That's pretty much what I'm saying - Anchor points containing Long Tail Keywords.

My site is 500+ pages, all PR 3,4 and 5. I have a total of 3 external links on the site. So my PR flows well through the site.

this was totally unexpected and not what I was really trying to do. They're not buying keywords for me, I was just trying to "improve the user experience".

Actual figures are

28 long tail questions linking to the exact same longtail questions anchored down the page. All questions are in bold and have H3 tags.

I don't even check these longtails, but they are part of my 6 monthly 800 or so keyword check. I was in the top 1000 for all of them, with only 4 in the top 10. Now I have 8 x #1's, 9 x #2, 6 x #3 and 4 others in the top 10.

Like I said I don't know if this will work for others, maybe I've been promoted to an authority site in the eyes of the big G. Maybe they've been there all along. Or MAYBE the longtail anchor points did it.

I have followed the same formula on a few pages that will earn me $$$, that I am trying to rank and will let you all know if it did anything.

(Although it's so rare to actually have ranking pages that you know exactly what offpage SEO has been done, any future experiments on pages I am trying to rank will always be an unknown)

 

[jrbobdobbs]

You got me thinking - I have just spent an hour improving the structure and content on a page of mine and adding internal anchor links, with a little table of contents at the top.

I think it's little cues like that which Google is looking for in a page, and suggests quality and possibly authority too - think Wikipedia! Remember what the whole Panda thing was about - it was sitting real people down to look at web pages and studying what factors they marked out as positive, and using those to inform the algorithm. (no, it was nothing to do with profile links, the Bogeyman or anything else) So you can bet good on-page optimisation is something looked-for.

Also, these anchor links, as you show, can be used by G to create those little sitelinks in the SERPS entry, same as well-structured authority sites get those sitewide sitelinks.

There's got to be a connection, and I think some of these factors are going to start being increasingly important - I am certainly seeing that blasting away with cheap backlinks is not getting the results these days, and this could be one reason (my on-page sucks! )...

Thanks for the tip - let's see...

 

[Whitegold]

What the OP points out is legitimate and I've been using it for some time .. I don't really use a table of content as such as I prefer to use little headings through my content with the anchor text linked to an earlier part of the content (hope that makes sense)

And for the newbies among you, then here's a little clue as to how it's done ... go to google and search for your keyword ... scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see the additional available search phrases .. pick ANY of these or a combination of them all and place them into your page as headings with the exact match description as your anchor text .. add in about 2 paragraphs of text specifically relevant to this anchortext and the jobs a good 'un .. adding in even longer tail keywords will definitely see you near the top of the serps.

and yes, you get the little 'jump to' addition in the google search description slightly later, usually within 48-72 hours sometimes even sooner ..

 

[Whitegold]

What the OP points out is legitimate and I've been using it for some time .. I don't really use a table of content as such as I prefer to use little headings through my content with the anchor text linked to an earlier part of the content (hope that makes sense)

And for the newbies among you, then here's a little clue as to how it's done ... go to google and search for your keyword ... scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see the additional available search phrases .. pick ANY of these or a combination of them all and place them into your page as headings (H3,H4,H5) with the exact match description as your anchor text .. add in about 2-3 sentences of text specifically relevant to this anchortext and the jobs a good 'un .. adding in even longer tail keywords will definitely see you near the top of the serps.

and yes, you get the little 'jump to' addition in the google search description slightly later, usually within 48-72 hours sometimes even sooner ..