Anchor text, link- what is it?

Anchor text generally gives your visitors useful information about the meaning of the page you’re linking to.

It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.

Recognize that real live humans will read your links as well as search engines, so the words in your anchor text need to make understanding!

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”.

. Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. For example, let’s examine this code:

<a href=” http://coffecup4me.com/web-hosting-choice/”>Web Hosting choice </a>

The anchor text for this link is “Web Hosting choice”. This is important in search engine rankings because the search engines use anchor text to help determine the relevance of a page being linked to for those keywords.

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.

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.

However, if your site is all about purple widgets, you don’t want only “purple widgets” to be used as the phrase in every link to your site. Over-optimizing like that would create an unnatural pattern.

You can use anchor text in: