What is Anchor Text and Its Importance in SEO

Backlink plays a very important role in SEO specially these days as Google Panda and Penguin has come into picture. The most important aspect of backlink is Anchor Text. Anchor text plays a vital role in SEO. I have no idea how many of you are aware of anchor text, but if you are not aware of achor texts then here is a simple explanation of anchor text for you. The text which is enclosed between the start and end tag of html anchor tag is called the anchor text. For example: “<a href=”http://www.jafaloo.com”>Tech Blog</a>”, here “Tech Blog” is the anchor text which defines the link in the anchor tag. This anchor text gives a valid meaning to the link and gives a clue to the search engines that what the target page is all about.

In simple words “anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlink display when linking to another document or location on the web”. Search engines use this anchor text to determine the subject matter of the linked-to document.

In the above example “The Fastest Growing Technology Blog” is the anchor text for the link. 

Why Anchor Text Is Important in SEO

Unlike earlier days, Search engines have matured now, they have started identifying more metrics for determining rankings and link relevancy is one of the most important factor in the SEO matrices. Link relevancy is determined by both the content of the source page, anchor text and the content of the target page. So a link pointing to a page which contains about iPhone from a page which also details about iPhone is a more relevant link than any other links. So here it is more important that the anchor text should also contains keywords related to iPhone.

Important Point:

“If many relevant pages have links pointing to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking well. So quality inbound links with right keywords in anchor text will lead you to achieve a good ranking in search results.“

First Anchor Text Importance:

First anchor text is the anchor text which comes first in a page if pointing to the same target URL or page. So if in a page there two anchor texts that points to the same target URL then search engines consider the first anchor text and ignores the second anchor text. So it is very important that how the links are build in a page. For example if a page has two links pointing to “http://www.jafaloo.com” and the first anchor text is “Tech Blog” and the second anchor text is “Fastest Growing Tech Blog” then search engines give importance to the first occurence of the anchor text than the second anchore text.

It Creates a Corelation between similar content:

Anchor text helps in establishing a good relationship between your related content. Suppose you are writing an article about gmail and already you have an article about gmail then it helps a lot in SEO if you link to the article with right anchor text. This helps search engines to determine relevant links and it also engages your visitors in your website contents as they find related articles.So while linking to your article make sure that you give a proper anchor text in the link.

What You Should Not Do: As I explained anchor texts are very important in SEO so you should never use anchor tags without proper anchor texts. Very often people give the URL as the anchor text (e.g “http://example.com”) which is less likely to get a SEO juice as the anchor text is not a relevant one. So always use correct anchor texts whenever you are linking to a page.

What to Do if you are using an Image as a clickable link?

Sometimes people use images as a clickable link, in this case you can not provide any anchor texts. So here you can use the title attribute of the anchor tag and alt attribute of the img tag (alt=”Your Keyword”) to define the target page. This procedure helps search engines to find the relevancy of the link. But as much as possile try to avoid images and use only anchor texts.

So finally I do strongly believe that by using proper anchor texts not only we are helping the search engines but also the visitors in finding relevant contents.