Using Anchor Text When Linking to Other Blogs

We all know that giving links to other websites is good, and that receiving them is even better!

But how much effort do you put into linking back to other people's sites? If you spend a few moments thinking about it, you can do so much more good for the people you're linking to. Let me explain:

I'm going to take a post written by my friend Chris Hinton. The post is about a goal tracking software called 43Things - it looks fascinating, and you'll be able to read about it by using the links in the examples.

Not Good

"...and I enjoyed Chris Hinton's post about the 43Things goal tracking software, which you can read here."

In this example, I've given Chris a link, but the anchor text is "here." It's good to have a link, but that one will not really benefit his post as far as the search engines are concerned.

Better

"..and I enjoyed Chris Hinton's post Track you 2010 goals online with 43Things."

In this example, I've used his own title, so it's much better. But let's pause and think about it. It mentions the product name, which narrows any likely searches to someone who already knows about the product, and it limits it to goals for this year, 2010.

Best

"..and I enjoyed Chris Hinton's post about 43Things, an online goal tracking software."

This time I've tried to second guess what anyone searching for a post is likely to key into Google, and by using "online goal tracking software" as the anchor text, Chris should get the benefit of a broad range of search on that topic to his site.

It may add a few minutes to your writing when you do this, but the benefit for the recipient is huge.

Is this something you already do?