| If you have done some serious reading about your website optimization, you probably would have come across the reference to the phrase “optimization of anchor text”. This article shall discuss the definition and importance of anchor text and how you can use this powerful website optimization feature to get high ranking in search engines. What is Anchor Text? 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. Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site. 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: ‘allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. For example: This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby, making it evident, that Google considers it an important pointer to page relevance. Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text. It has also been studied that anchor text, whether from external, or internal pages, is important. It should therefore be ensured that significant attention is given to the inclusion of important keywords in your anchor text. 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: Read all about Anchor Text Optimization. Instead of Read all about Anchor Text Optimization here. The above example shows us that you can leverage the hyperlinking of important keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever possible. It is always a great idea to restructure sentences if keywords don’t fit in anchor text. |