Why Anchor Text Is So Important

Bad Anchor Text Can Make All Your Links Useless!

If you do not know what Anchor Text is then you need to listen up.

Anchor text is the keyword, keyword phrase or any other text you enter as the link text when creating a link in a web page or post and it is what you see highlighted so you know where to click on your link.

In the following link, highlighted in blue, the anchor text being used is the phrase ‘Go To The Home Page‘:

Go To The Home Page

And if you click on the link the home page is where you will go.

The anchor text in this link is purely navigational and has no effect whatsoever on SEO, or at least that is what you might think. In reality this link gives some authority, although it is so small as to be almost insignificant, to the home page for the keyword phrase ‘Go To The Home Page‘. Strange, but true!

If there were several high ranked web site pages out there linking back to my home page with this anchor text then my home page would start to rank in Google for this phrase and if I got even more quality back links with this same anchor text my home page could probably rank at position 1 in Google for ‘Go To The Home Page‘. Even stranger, but still true!!

A much better keyword phrase to use as anchor text to my home page would be something to do with SEO, obvious really, such as ‘Search Engine Optimisation‘:

Search Engine Optimisation

This could be applied to any links within this site to the home page and as anchor text for external links to this site’s home page form other websites. Google would then begin to think (correctly) that this site is about search engine optimisation and this site will start to gain authority and some rank for that keyword phrase in the search engine.

This is why Anchor Text is so important as it determines what Google thinks your page or post is all about and how important it is for that particular keyword phrase.

This is how the Internet works! It really is this simple!

All you need to do to have success for your website in the search engines is to get good quality backlinks and more of them than your competition.

BUT YOUR LINKS MUST HAVE THE RIGHT ANCHOR TEXT!

Otherwise you are wasting your time…

So always use your targeted keyword or keyword phrase somewhere in your anchor text, but do not always use the exact same phrase in every link you create back to the same page or post.

Mix up the words in your keyword phrase and add other words and related keywords to the phrase so that it is not always the same as Google will consider this as spam and it will have the opposite effect to that which you are trying to achieve.

Remember that if the anchor text is slightly different in each back link then this will look more natural but it will still have the effect you desire.