The Power of Anchor Text

First of all what is Anchor Text? Anchor text is a visible hyperlinked text on the page.

For example:

OutsourcingTo.uS is an Australian outsourcing company with a full time onshore/offshore staff of 150 ready to maximize your online investment. Our own network of sites receives over 10,000,000 visitors yearly so we know how to maximize your online activities.

The word within the hyperlink “staff” is called the anchor text.

In a normally built site, anchor text is used to indicate the page that it links to. For example, the text "affordable web design" indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about the site pertaining to affordable web design if they visit the link. This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to improve the relevance of the "target" or the "landing page" URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

The Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page

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 site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on site's pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: allinanchor:keyword, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This really implies that Google's algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby, making it evident, that Google considers it as one important pointer to page relevance. 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 anchor text.