What Is Anchor Text?

March 08, 2005

What is the definition of "anchor text"?

The visible, hyperlinked text on a Web page. It's often underlined and/or a different color than the rest of the copy.

As stated before, search engines see incoming links to your Web site as "votes of confidence." However, like in Florida, not every vote is counted equally. The following variables all affect how important a link is:

The importance or popularity of the site linking to you...CNN is worth more than Al's Bait Shoppe.
The relevance of the linking site to your own site...Al's Bait Shoppe is worth more than Bill's Bike World if you are selling fishing lures.
The number of links on the linking page...if you're one out of 10 links you'll get a bigger boost than if you're one out of 100 links.
The words in the link, a.k.a. the anchor text...the anchor text gives the search engines a better idea of the theme of your Web page or site. Your ranking will get the biggest boost for the search phrase used in the anchor text, such as "expert fishing lures."

In other words, if the anchor text is your company name that will help when someone Googles your company name; if the anchor text describes a benefit or feature of your products, you'll rank higher when someone searches on that phrase, such as, "high-quality lures" or "fooling striped bass". This is a benefit when you're trying to attract business from people who don't necessarily know your company by name, but would benefit from your services.

Since you can't always control the anchor text on someone else's Web site, you should take advantage of the power of anchor text on your own site. Choose your page titles carefully, and when linking to another page, always try and use your most effective keyphrases as your anchor text. For example, "Resources" is too generic to help. But "Fisherman's Guide to Fishing Lures" is much more effective.

Further Anchor Text Resources: