James is a user of CoraLite which tracks a large number of SEO factors. We may sometimes wonder if these factors actually make a difference. He decided to test if having a keyword in an < a > tag actually influences a page’s position in the serps and if it is worth applying to your site.
Note: Actual title is "[Test #567] Will Having Your Keyword In An <a> tag Influence Rank?" . Actual tag from the description also <a>
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Transcription below:
Will having a keyword in a tag influence rank. So James uses cora light, I use cora light. And I use cora. And this is one of the many correlating factors and that are in there, I think there's 1000 something in there now. And we actually see this a lot.
Essentially, what the software is telling you is that you should have links out to whatever you can link it to itself, you can link it to external pages, or their internal pages with keywords, or the variations inside of your alternate text, or your anchor text, I'm sorry, not alternate text, the anchor text portion of it. Or you can actually put it in the positions like the title, you can use name attribute in there, too, and put keywords in there at the same time. And it really increased the code, keyword density, versus the content keyword density, by doing stuff like that.
A lot of the times, if you're local, you're going to see this particular factor jump up in your reports. And the number one indicator that you're dealing with a directory is really you're just starting off in a local search, you know, even lawyer sites or a plumber or roofer whatever, they're gonna have a lot of directories in there that have a lot of links in there, those links will have business names, and those business names will have your primary keyword in it, and it fires this thing off.
Typically, as a kind of a standard practice, I totally ignore this factor. But James wanted to test it out and see, hey, is it really a thing is it does it really matter?
You can read the set up here, here's where he changed the the main variation is he just changed the way he did it. So two, four and six links. And this is where I placed it in there, you can see he didn't use any attributes, he just used the anchor, this was probably easier to see. He just used the anchor, he didn't use title. And he could have titled name, ID, etc. And really stuff that a tag if you wanted to. But he didn't. He's been responsible SEO. And those are three test pages he got on there.
Here's where they started, right in the center of the results. And then we started seeing things bounce around a little bit 264, 64, 2s gone, 246, 642, 64, 2s gone again, 64 and then 6 jumps up to the top. And 6 pretty much stays there. To the end of the test, which is pretty interesting. I think there's one, if you follow along the keyword density test, this result actually makes sense. The keyword density is higher progressively as the more mentions are of the keyword in the a tags. And so it actually just kind of ranked right in order. So I don't know the keyword density of his original content, but we'll assume it's 10% mean, you added two more.
In this one case, you added four more, and this one, we made it six more, so you've increased it. And I'm just gonna guess 12, 14 and 16% keyword density now. And it ranked progressively according to that, which makes a lot of sense, it's good to know that they're actually reading that a tag, in particular the anchor text. And because it's naturally part of your content, they're gonna read it anyway, right? But it's good to know that they're actually applying it and using that in the algorithm too.
I think another the natural test, to build upon this one would be to check those other zones, see if they're reading titles, see if they're reading name and stuff. We have all indications that they're actually it's they're using some of that stuff, CSS selectors, we know that they're not using those kinds of things, the CSS attributes, but maybe the title and those kind of ID labels inside of these href tags will help us increase density without making our content almost unreadable by having it over optimized for a term.
This is really a good test for you guys to repeat and implement on your websites kind of make it a part of your checklist. Again, some things that you can link out to would be other pages so your silo stuff is natural way to create these linking to the page itself is a natural way to create these, and then maybe even linking to some of your other landing pages too.
If they don't convert on the content that they landed on, at least you can send them to another landing page that they may have some interest in. And you'll be able to leverage that. I'll caution you though, that if you're analyzing with a tool, and you're competing against directories to ignore the number counts that you get suggested to because they can get insane and you don't want to be putting 100 links on your web page if you don't have to.