Anchor Text: More Important Than You Think!

But what motivates users, urges them, compels them to click on links? The answer is simple: anchor text.

A trip to HTML theory corner would tell us that anchor text is the text that is displayed in a hyperlink – the very words that users click on if they want to visit the page the hyperlink points to. In a typical website, anchor textis usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. For example, the words Jeff Buckley are the anchor text that, when clicked on, would redirect a user to the site http://www.jeffbuckley.com. Such pattern of usage is being applied in search engine algorithms to increase the relevance of the webpage (for the keywords appearing in the anchor text), and most especially the "target" or the "landing page" URL. Wxeb browsers usually display anchor text in a different color, or with an underline, to indicate that the text is actually a hyperlink to another page or site.

As far as choosing the right words for the anchor text goes, web authors should be aware that anchor text is a good place to give important information to surfers. Given two example anchor texts, “go here” and “click for more details,” which of the two tell the user what it is exactly they are clicking on? Right. The one that says, “click for more details.” Needless to say, the right anchor text can make finding information online much easier, while the insufficient, inappropriate, or unclear anchor text can leave a link unnoticed.

SEO experts, on the other hand, are concerned with the contents of the anchor text for an altogether different reason, that of anchor text, or link optimization. The actual anchor text is useful to search engines too, as it establishes the importance of a page being linked to by a hyperlink. As search engines go about their daily business, crawling the web and indexing pages and links, they analyze links, the anchor text in those links, and the pages that those links go to. With that information, they assign weights and establish ranks. These ranks determine how high up, or how low down, the search results a website or page would appear.

To summarize, the benefit of proper link optimization is two-fold: first, it provides web users with a clear direction on where to go looking for information. Think of a well-written piece of anchor text as the big red “X” in your Internet treasure map (or at least the big yellow arrow pointing directly at the big red “X”). Second, well thought-of, meaningful anchor text is of immense value in search engine optimization. They enhance the importance of webpages they point to and is the most important consideration in a link building effort (more on link building later).

SEO Blog