These days, everyone knows that, to get top rankings in any of the engines, your site needs links. Not just any links, but links from quality sites and lots of them. One thing I have noticed is that for many webmasters that are newer to SEO, they often over look the importance of "anchor text" or "link text" as it is often called.



If you are unfamiliar with these terms, let me give you an example below.

This is Anchor Text

In the above example, the text "This is Anchor Text" is the anchor text. Anchor text is simply the text used as the clickable portion of a link. A while back (a few years now), the engines decided that, quite often, the text used as the anchor text of a link was a description of the target page. So, knowing this, they decided to start looking at the anchor text of links to a page an incorporating what those links "said" about the page into the algorithms used to rank pages.

To this day, Google still seems to give the most weight to anchor text, but all the engines use it to some extent.

It's also important to understand that the anchor text of an inbound link (at least today) still applies to that specific PAGE, not to the entire site.

What does this mean? Well, it means that, to get the absolute most bang for your buck out of each and every link pointed to your site, you should do your best to make sure that the anchor text used for each inbound link is relevant to the page that link is pointing to. This applies not only to external links (those from a different site pointing to a page within your site), but to internal links as well (those links pointing from one page of your site to another page on your site).

Internal anchor text is an area that a VERY large percentage of webmasters don't fully take advantage of. These are the links that you have full control over, so you should do everything you can to make sure that the anchor text for each and every internal link in your site best reflects the target keywords for the page it's pointing to.

The same goes for "homepage" links. What is your homepage about? I would bet that for 99% of the people reading this article, the topic of your homepage is NOT about "homes". So why is it that the vast majority of webmasters still utilize the anchor text "home" or "homepage" etc. when linking to their homepage? Don't you think it would make more sense for the anchor text of that link to be relevant to the page it's pointing to? After all, the homepage of most sites tends to target the most competitive phrases of that market don't they? So why wouldn't you want to get the most possible use of all those internal links pointing to your homepage by using some more appropriate and relevant link text?

Quite often I have seen the proper and improper use of anchor text be the difference between which page(s) make it to the top of the results and which ones end up on pages 2 and on. Where do you want to be?

See you at the top!