Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a web page - i.e. the words you click on when you click a link.
For example, in the this sentence, ‘innovative marketing tools have become the Holy Grail for modern day web builders, and creative agency, Edible has just launched……’ there are four anchors, namely: ‘innovative marketing tools‘, ‘web builders‘, ‘creative agency‘, and ‘ Edible’
Each ‘anchor’ is a link to the end site (in this case Edible) but the links are paired with a relevant key phrase which increases the rankings of the site being linked to. Please use your mouse to position the cursor over each phrase. By doing so you will see the content of the link/anchor.
By taking the phrase ‘innovative marketing tools’ from the content and inserting a hyperlink into that phrase, it is the phrase itself that becomes the keyword that is associated with the page it then leads to, commonly referred to as the ‘landing page’.
It is this ‘anchoring’ that can make better use of the otherwise, un-optimised copy/content of your web pages. Anchor text also gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you’re linking to.
Here’s why anchor text is so important…
It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it will boost 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”. You wouldn’t want to rank highly for “click here” as it isn’t specific to your business. Hence why it has over 1.2billion results on Google.
Anchor text is so important that it’s possible for a page to appear in the top 10 in Google’s search results for a phrase which isn’t mentioned anywhere on the page. Although, better results will be achieved, if the phrase is found on the ‘landing page’ too.
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.
You can use anchor text in:
External links - links from other sites
Internal links - links on your pages
Navigation maps
It is this principle of ‘anchoring’ that has led to the surge in ‘tags’ used in news and press release systems on websites as they follow the same principle but have been developed further in order to also link and index other pages on the same site, with those keywords/tags.
It is also important to remember that actual people (not just Google) will read the links on your pages too, so the words in your anchor text will need to make sense and be relevant! It is also good practice to blend the colours of the anchor text hyperlinks to a smililar colour as the content so that the page looks uniform, as in the above example phrase.