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Friday, November 4, 2011

Anchor Text Optimization


What is Anchor Text?

The anchor text, link label or link text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link's destination. A hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia's homepage might take this form:Anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link.

Anchor Text Importance in Search Engine Optimization

Google (and to a lesser degree other search engines) heavily weight it’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high ranking can ONLY be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors. Googlebombs are probably the easiest examples to find and understand how anchor text effects SERPs.

Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Let’s take this example:

“Please examine our SEO case studies for validation to evaluate our search engine optimization capabilities.”

Here the words “SEO case studies” and “search engine optimization” are hyper linked to the hidden URLs http://www.seorank.com/seo-casestudies.htm and www.seorank.com respectively. The words within the hyperlink, “SEO case studies” and “search engine optimization“, are called the anchor text.

In a normally built site, anchor text is usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. For example, the text “SEO case studies” indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about case studies pertaining to SEO if they visit the link. This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page

Please note that the keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL.

Search Engine Algorithms like Anchor Text.

The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: all in anchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages.

How to Optimize Anchor Text Within Your Site

Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content. You would be surprised, how easy it is, to find suitable instances of hyperlinking structures to make use of optimized anchor text.When linking to internal pages, it is better to use the format:

Using Keywords in Natural Text to Create Anchor Text


Search Engine Optimization is an important part of any search engine marketing initiative. Some people believe that submitting the site to search engines alone is sufficient in getting top-10 ranking. This is not true. Search engine submission only announces your site’s existence to search engines. To get a good search engine ranking,

Optimizing Anchor Text of External Links

Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your website. If you are pursuing or considering a link building campaign, put some serious thought in writing multiple options of the title and description of the link pointing to your website.

The “title” which is usually used as the hyper-linked text, should contain your important keywords. It is good to work with ten different options of title and description as it not only gives you more room to play with several keywords, but it also helps search engines give you a wider keyword coverage.

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