Sunday, 28 October 2007 16:37
Written by Michael Myles

One of the most important elements to the SEO of a website is the anchor text. But what exactly is anchor text, and how is it optimally used? Just how important is anchor text?
Anchor Text is defined as the visible text of a hyperlink. For example,
http://www.allinanchor.com is a hyperlink. Rather than displaying the link address we can use anchor text that is relative to the site or page the link is pointing to. So, rather than this:
http://www.allinanchor.com we get this:
killer SEO blog. Both links point to the same place, but the link containing the anchor texts helps to establish relevancy of the content on the page to the content of the page the link is pointing to.
As we know the search engines work primarily off the relevancy and importance of the content in a website. There was a time long ago when the search engines placed most of its importance in keywords. People would stuff content full of keywords that had nothing to do with the subject of the website. Now, the websites that have been around the longest, and have the most relevant content are the ones that are on top.
Anchor text optimization is the process of optimizing anchor text using relevant keywords to get higher rankings in search engines. Using keywords as anchor text to link to pages on the same topic helps the search engines establish relevancy of all the text contained in a website. All major search engines place huge level of importance to anchor text in comparison to simple hyperlinks.
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