What is Anchor Text and How to Use It Effectively?

Anchor text optimization is very important, when talking about site optimization and ranking well in search engines. The words contained in anchor text can determine the ranking that page will receive by search engines, if it is used wisely. In this tutorial, you are going to learn the importance and how to optimize anchor text effectively to get high ranking in search engines.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible and clickable text within an article body, linking from one page to another location.
They are usually used to indicate the subject matter that the text links to when clicked. See the example below for more clarification.
Here are two words within this site Widgets and SEO, they are both linking to different locations. Widgets is anchor text pointing to http://realcombiz.blogspot.com/search/label/Blogger%20tips while SEO also point to http://www.realcombiz.com/search/label/SEO%20Tips in which both the two links were hidden.

Anchor Text Code
<a href="http://www.your-site-name.com">keyword</a>

<a is the opening tag href="http://www.your-site-name.com" is where it links to, keyword is the clickable text that appears, while </a> is the closing tag. Keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used, so it is very important that you use relevant keywords that is relevant to the landing page. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. Search engines that matter, especially google give significant weight to the anchor text on the algorithm. If you are really interested in enhancing your website ranking, it is important that you use the right keywords in anchor text.

In thorough research, we found out that if two links are targeting the same URL, only the anchor text used in the first link is counted by google, but there ways to count multiple anchor text phrases contained on the same page and pointing to the same target. This is done by creating anchors on the target page and linking to those anchors using hash tag "#" as shown in the example below:

 <a href="http://www.your-site-name.com/title#text">second-anchor-text</a>

How to Optimize Anchor Text

The strength of anchor text is determined by the keyword used. Some webmasters use keyword like "click here" when posting on a forum, commenting on other blog's, or even guest posting with an anchor text linking their site, in which the keyword does not describe the relevancy of the link to search engines. It is advisable that you use keyword that best describe where your link is pointing to (landing page), because if many links point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking well. See the example below for better understanding of how you can use anchor text effectively.

Learn how to spice up your blog using CSS.
and,
Learn how to spice up your blog using CSS here.

The keyword used in the first example is relevant to the landing page, which is really understandable by search engines than using click here or here.
Links from external sites help your site to gain relevance for keywords mentioned in the anchor text which boosts your site ranking, depending on the number of inbound links.

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