What Is Anchor Text & Why Is It Important?

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words you choose in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you’re linking to. It tells search engines what the page is about. For example if your car dealership webpage includes a link to an article about “financing your new Chevy Silverado with an APR that won’t balloon,” then your anchor text in the link should reflect those keywords: How to finance a Chevy Silverado without ballooning interest

What Not to Use

If, on the other hand, you use keywords like “click here” or “part 2”—you’re telling people the page is about the subject “click here”. If you use “Part 2″ as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing “part 2″. As you can see, Google and the “humans” reading your anchor text will find well-crafted anchor text much more authoritative than “click here for more info”. The point is to make your anchor text authoritative and digestible. If your anchor text incessantly rambles, it may be a good indication you need to revise: How to go about finding really, really awesome financing deals for your brand spanking new Chevy Silverado so you won’t have to put your kids up for adoption next month and your wife will still love you Know too, to keep your actual links relevant to the content on your page. If you have a car-dealership webpage then make sure your links are about car-related topics and not about World of Warcraft! Here’s some key place to be including anchor text:

• External links - links from other sites
• Internal links - links on your pages’ Navigation maps
• Links on your main page

The Benefits The benefit of wisely using authoritative anchor text is it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. If you’re wondering why Google would even care about something like this when considering page rank—they do! Here’s why: The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages because search engines give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. Google has a special operator: “allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate query-able data, thereby making it evident that Google considers anchor text to be a key indication of page relevance. Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text. Bottom Line

• Yes, Google cares!
• Use anchor text and links that match the content of your webpage
• Make sure your anchor text is both authoritative and digestible for humans and search engines
• Use the right type of links