The Power of Anchor Text in SEO

Anchor text is a visible hyperlinked text that people usually see on a website or a web page.  Clicking this blue colored hyperlink will take the visitor to another page available on the website or another relevant page. These are also underlined texts that regularly appear on any website that is used to indicate the page that it links to.

Unfortunately, some SEO and webmaster often disregard the importance of anchor text in a rock-solid SEO link building strategy. In today’s search engine realms, anchor text could be the best element to help achieve high rankings in search engine result pages.  Despite the constant updates being done by major search engines in order to achieve a better way of ranking genuinely quality sites, anchor text remains to be an implementable SEO technique that can bring your site to the high ranking page of search engines.

If there’s one thing about SEO that remained unchanged, it is the power of anchor text. Putting a link on your site to another site is seen by Google as a ‘vote”. This is a proven SEO technique that Google has used since the beginning. By using anchor text, visitors are led to a page where they can expect to see information relevant to the text used as anchor text. This pattern of usage has been taken into consideration in search engine algorithms to improve the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text. To understand the power of anchor text, check the following:

• Enhancing the Relevance of the Target Page. It should be noted that the keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertinent to the keywords used. The relevance of the page containing the anchor text is enhanced to some degree while the real winner is actually the target page URL. Use optimized anchor text with relevant keywords to build the relevance of each page of your site.

• Anchor Text and Search Engine Algorithms. Including important and relevant keywords in the anchor text can spell out the big difference in the final ranking of site pages. All search engines give significant consideration to the anchor text on the site’s pages. Google, in fact has created a special operator: allinanchor:keyword, which detects and picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This is probably Google’s way of saying that its algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate searchable data, thereby, making it evident, that Google considers it as one important pointer to page relevance. Anchor text linking to external or internal pages should have important keywords.

• Anchor Text Position. This gives a significant impact in achieving good ranking. Positioning your anchor text is like positioning your targeted keyword; it should be very visible to the reader and the robots. Placing your anchor text at the beginning of your article makes it easier for robots to read what your page is all about. Placing your anchor text at the middle means you are showing relevant articles for your post. Placing your anchor text at the end of an article is sort of a reminder for the reader that they could also see other products or services you offer.

• Repetitive use of exact keyword as anchor text. Since Penguin has been around for some time now, it is highly advised that anchor text must vary. Repetitive use of exact anchor text in an article can be very detrimental to your campaign. Google can actually detect that you are manipulating the search engines if you overdo this. Careful keyword research and analysis will help you with the variety of anchor text you you can use.

Successful SEO techniques and strategies should, therefore always include the proper use of anchor text of inbound links. A significant amount of weight is given by Google and other search engines to this particular technique making it a decisive factor in targeting high or top ranking with search engines on extremely competitive search terms. Your online marketing outsourcing company knows the significance of this.