SEO CheckList

A lot of people use anchor texts without even knowing its true value for search engine optimization. I know, I speak from experience. Long before I even know such a thing as SEO exists, I was already using anchor texts for my earliest web sites. In the more recent years however, anchor texts have become much more important, thanks to Google’s PageRank technology.

What are Anchor Texts?

Anchor texts are the texts you use as hyperlinks. For example, in your html file, an anchor text would appear like this:

<a href=” http://www.domainname.com “> insert anchor text here < /a>

In the web page itself, only the anchor text would be visible to visitors while the link would remain encoded.

Why Are Anchor Texts Important for PageRank?

The simplest most direct answer I could give is — relevancy of links. Think of it like this; when you link to a specific web site, Google recognizes this as your vote of confidence. Now, imagine you’re voting in the national elections. Surely, you have a reason why you vote for a candidate. It’s the same as anchor texts. Anchor texts serve as the “reason” why you vote for a particular web site. Google then analyzes this and adds your link as a point to the site for that particular keyword you used.

That doesn’t stop there, of course. Google also analyzes YOUR web site’s relevancy to the linked web site. So if your web site is about real estate and you link to a web site about Paris Hilton, the link will score much lower for Google.

The anchor text for links is very powerful because it’s one of the driving forces behind Google’s PageRank. A study conducted by seomoz.org lists anchor text by