Anchor text and SEO

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is simply the text that you use when making a link to another website, it is the word/words you click on when you click a link. Links are created with a Hypertext (Anchor text) using the following HTML code:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/new-page.html”>your Anchor text</a>

Here’s an example: Targeted traffic , in which “Targeted traffic” is the anchor text. or www.marketingtoolreview.com , in which ” www.marketingtoolreview.com” is the anchor text.

Why Anchor text is so important?

Anchor text is important for Both, website Readers and Search engine optimization.

1) For Readers:

It is always better to use relevant anchor texts that are related to the subject you are linking to, when visitors come to your website and see a link within your content that says “How to write unique content“, it makes sense that they will click that link Only if they are interested to learn about writing unique content. If you use “click here” as the words people are going to click on, then you are telling people that page is about the subject “click here”, using clear and targeted words as your Anchor texts will make it easier for your readers reach the right pages and eliminate confusion.

2) For Search engine optimization (SEO):

Anchor text is very important for SEO as the search engines are constantly checking the anchor text of your website links, Each time you get a link from another website, the search engines will examine the anchor text of that link and use it to identify the content of that page and decide what it’s talking about. If you use “video 1″ or “click here” as the anchor text, you are telling the search engines that the page is discussing “video 1″ and of course You wouldn’t want to rank for a word like “video 1″ or “click here”.

The word/phrase that shows up in your anchor text will increase your chance to improve your rankings for that keyword or phrase. if you use a phrase or a long tail keyword as your anchor text, you can easily rank higher in the search engines using few number of back links. But If you use a highly competitive keywords, you will need to build hundreds or thousands of back links before you are able to see any ranking progress.

Note that: While building back links to your website, Over optimizing or Using the same Anchor text for every link coming to your site will look unnatural for the search engines, so you need to use different anchor texts for your links but 80% of your links should use your optimized Anchor text.

Watch the following video for more explanation of Anchor texts and link creation: