24 Jul 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: Anchor Text Primer

After a brief pause of one week, SEO Simplified series is back, and this time we will talk about off-site SEO optimization. I hope, by now, you must have sorted out most of the issues related to on-site SEO optimization, and applied the principles learnt to make your website search engines’ darling. If you feel you need further clarification on any topic we have covered so far in the series, please feel free to use the comment box. .

I will begin with describing anchor text. I have chosen this beginning because, I believe, links back to our websites from the websites in same or related niche are what we want from our off-site optimization effort.

What is Anchor Text?

Before talking about what anchor text is, let us understand the anatomy of an HTML link. A link has two parts: one is the text on which the URL is attached, and another is the URL to which the user will be taken once he clicks the visible text. The URL is not visible to the users.

For example, we want to create a link that will take the visitors to the beginning of the SEO Simplified Series; hence, we create an SEO Simplified: An Overview link. In this case, the HTML Code for the link will be:

<a href = “http://blog.gossimer.com/seo-simplified-an-overview”> SEO Simplified: An Overview </a>

As we can see the text “SEO Simplified: An Overview” is visible to us, but the URL to which this text is pointing is not visible. In this case the URL is, “http://blog.gossimer.com/seo-simplified-an-overview”. The visible part (text) of the link is called anchor text. In the above example, “SEO Simplified: An Overview” is an anchor text for the link “http://blog.gossimer.com/seo-simplified-an-overview”.

Why is it important?

An anchor text works as a billboard for the attached URL. Anchor Text is used to tell the visitors what the URL within the anchor text is all about. To draw an analogy we can say, anchor text is like the subject line of an e-mail. A good anchor text is as important as is a good subject line of an e-mail.

Not only that, search engines especially Google attach a great value to the link attached to a proper anchor text. Suppose, in the above example if we replace the anchor text “SEO Simplified: An Overview” with “Click Here to Read” then the value of link and anchor text will be diminished in the eyes of search engines, especially Google.

Now let us think that this series has become very famous among SEO aspirants on the internet, and many websites has started stared pointing to “http://blog.gossimer.com/seo-simplified-an-overview” link using “SEO Simplified: An Overview” as an anchor text then eventually, “SEO Simplified: An Overview” page will rank higher in the search engine for the keywords “SEO Simplified: An Overview” and for the keyword “SEO Simplified”.