How anchor text boosts your site ranking on search engines
A survey was carried out on 37 search experts, the 2nd highest SEO factor was the anchor text of links from other sites. Unfortunately for many webmasters who want to rank better on the search engines is their lack of knowledge of what anchor text is. Well, fortunately, anchor text is an easy concept to understand. In this post, we’ll look at what anchor text is and how to use it well for your website or blog.
Simply put; Anchor text is the highlighted text word on a page that links to another web page - the link word you see and click on to another page.
Clicking on the text, called hypertext, loads the linked resource in the user's browser. Links are created using the Hypertext Mark-up Language's (HTML) anchor element:
<a href="http://www.somedomain.com/new-page.html">This is a hyperlink</a>
The hypertext is the text that occurs between the angle brackets. It would generally appear as: This is a hyperlink in a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla
Here's another good example, reciprocal links, in which "reciprocal links" is the anchor text.
Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page next that you're linking to.
Here's why anchor text is so important...
It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here". If you use "Part 2" as the anchor text, you're telling the search engines the page is discussing "part 2". You wouldn't want to rank highly for "click here" or "Part 2".
Anchor text is so important that it's possible for a particular page to appear in the top 10 in Google's search results for a relevant phrase which isn't mentioned anywhere on the page.
Some blog publishers make use of "Google bombing" to get pages ranked highly for humorous phrases. If the phrase is obscure, only a handful of links will win the phrase at No.1 ranking. If it's highly competitive, hundreds or thousands of links might be needed.
[NOTE: In January, 2007, Google created a new algorithm which reduced the impact of many prank Google bombs, but anchor text is still very important.]
When asking other sites to link to your site, it's a good idea to provide them with the HTML code ready to cut and paste into their page. That way, you choose the anchor text.
However, if your site is all about purple widgets, you don't want only "purple widgets" to be used as the phrase in every link to your site. Over-optimizing like that would create an unnatural pattern.
Pitfalls (http://www.abcseo.com/seo-book/anchor-text.htm)
There are some pitfalls. Firstly, many interesting and useful web pages don't have relevant inbound-links.
Secondly SEO experts can use this knowledge to subvert a search engine to favor their pages by creating inbound links for popular keyword from other sites under their control. This is a form of search engine spam.
You can use anchor text in:
- External links - links from other sites
- Internal links - links on your pages
- Navigation maps
- Links on your main page. A very important spot.
Remember that real live humans will read your links as well as search engines, so the words in your anchor text need to make sense!
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