The importance of anchor text to Google

One thing that we have come to agree upon is that one of the ways of increasing a Site’s ranking or search engine results is by building links from similar sites.  There are even some great   link building services for your aid. But does that give us the best return? The SEO professionals note that it is not just about building links. The anchor text in those links is what really makes the difference. So that brings us to the topic today, what, exactly, is this thing called anchor text?

Anchor text is an indicator of the subject matter of the pages that have been linked. The exact choice of words of your anchor text should be the exact phrase you are trying to rank well for. The hyperlinked text on the link that you can see is called Anchor text.

As a quick example, take a look at this sentence: I am looking for cheap links .  The clickable text is the anchor text.

Links are the lifeline for all the search engines since they travel or crawl around the web via these links. They are the key indicators that tell the search engines the topic of a particular page. Most of any new site owners focus should be on building links to your page, but don’t forget about your anchor text.

When Google, Bing or the other engines have multiple sites about the same topictwo competing sites, the anchor text is usually the decision making factor on which one ranks better. A site may have optimized itself nicely, if anchor text was not used properly it in all probability will not have as good of placement in the search results as it could.

You can also keep this in mind when building a linking campaign for the internal pages of your site as well.  Good planning when choosing keywords can also help boost your main page, while boosting the rank for your internal pages.  This, together with the proper internal structure of your web site, will help with the promotion of both your home page and your internal pages.

Along with good onsite optimization, inserting those primary keywords in the heading, proper use of anchor text has been shown to be extremely important in all the leading search engine sites.  Read more with our SEO guide.  It is a great read on how one can dominate the SEO game.  The process is a science, not a mystery as many may have you believe.  If you follow solid principals, and go in with a gameplan, you too can rank high for your particular keywords .