Anchor Text For SEO

In order to get good rankings from the search engines it is important to understand several different factors, one of which is anchor text. As you will see merely getting links from other websites does not ensure good rankings in the search engines. The quality of the anchor text plays a significant role in ranking your pages for specific keywords. So what is anchor text? It is simply the visible text of a hyperlink that is, the words making up a link clicking on which takes you to a new web page.

Anchor texts are used in both internal and external links. Internal links are those that connect the different pages of your website while external links are those that come from sites outside your own website. You might be wondering why you can’t simply include the link to your website or so. This is because anchor texts indicate to the reader as well as to the search engines what kind of information is contained in the link. Thus your anchor text must be meaningful. Stuffing the anchor text with keywords might put off the visitors even though it may boost your rankings. Quality anchor texts which include the target keywords improves your rankings in major search engines as they help the search engines to know what your site is about. For example if you have a cosmetic surgery page, you will want a varity of terms like leg vein and various treatments going to all your internal pages, instead of all your links going to the homepage on one broad term. Anchor texts that link back to your site from other sites are also regarded highly by the search engines.

If you want a page rank for a keyword then it must be included in the anchor text. If not the complete keyword a part of it should certainly be included. However it must be noted that having all your anchor text exactly the same as the links is not a good idea. You could try mixing words or changing them from singular to plural, etc. Also while obtaining links with the desired anchor texts you must make sure that you are linking to the correct page and not just to the homepage.