Anchor Text- The most important factor of SEO

Link building is without a doubt the most important factor of SEO. Now the most important part of link building is anchor text. What exactly is an anchor text ? The anchor text is the clickable text of the link. Most people think it’s just to give your link a better appearance but it actually is a very big factor to improve your rankings. In SEO, the anchor text is used to describe the link. So instead of leaving a very long URL that contains letters and numbers and looks unprofessional, you could replace it with an anchor text that will describe what the link is linking to.

Anchor Text & SEO



Links Are Like Votes For Your Website



The above information may look confusing as to why is anchor text important in an SEO campaign. As we know, having an efficient link building campaign is key to SEO. When we say link building we are talking about inbound links. Every inbound link that a website receives, it is like a vote in his favor. Inbound links tell the search engine that your page is important because ( if done properly) the search engine will keep on landing on your page when he crawls other websites because of those inbound links. That is when the anchor text comes in play.

The anchor text will tell the search engine that not only am I voting for that website, I am voting for him for this category, product, service, or what have you. If you don’t give an anchor text, the search engine won’t know what keyword the landing page is targeting.

That being said, it is very important to include anchor texts in all your links. If there is no anchor, yes you will be getting votes with those inbound links but search engines won’t associate your keywords with your website.

Creating Anchor Texts

Not all online services allow you to use anchor texts in your links. Twitter for example does not let you put an anchor text in your links. But do not worry, all standard websites whether its a blog, a forum, a directory, or anything like that, will allow you to use anchor texts for your links. This is the best way to use your anchor text :

<a href=”www.YourWebsiteURL.com”>Your Main Keywords or Key Phrases</a>

Using the above code will allow you to erase a very long URL and replace it with any keywords you need to target. This can increase significantly your website’s traffic.

Relevant Anchor Text

Having a lot of inbound links with proper anchor texts will help increase your overall rankings for specific keywords. It is important to note that there should be some relevancy between the anchor text and the page it is linking to. Let’s say you are targeting the keyword “shooting games” for a certain web page, you wouldn’t want to have an anchor text with “sports games”. Don’t try to spam your anchor texts because it can affect your rankings negatively. Anchor texts should only be used to point to URLs that are relevant to your landing page’s topic.