by Idea Lab

What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. For example:

“Truthmedia has developed successful sites like Women Today and TheLife.”

Here the words “Women Today” and “TheLife” are hyperlinked to the hidden URLs http://www.womentodaymagazine.com and http://www.thelife.com respectively. The words within the hyperlink, “Women Today” and “TheLife” are called the anchor text.

Why use Anchor text?

Anchor text is beneficial to use within a site for the following reasons:

• Search engine spiders look for anchor text when indexing a site.
• Reinforces relevance of keywords for the articles the anchor text is linking to.
• Improves a site’s readability. Highlighted text is more scanable.
• Engages readers to go deeper and increases interactivity as they see phrases to click on.
• Focuses the readers to a specific topic or directs them to perform an action by seeing the highlighted text “women’s life stories” rather than “Click here for women’s stories.”

Best Practices for Using Anchor Text

• External links: Links coming from other URLs should use effective anchor text. With larger campaigns mix and match the keyword phrases targeted through anchor links in order to associate keyword phrases with specific internal pages.
• Use links judiciously: Links should be found throughout the entire page rather than all at the bottom.
• Navigation maps: The navigation map is where text links are often found at the bottom of each page of the site. This is a great place to put keyword-enriched anchor text. These links WILL be used by site visitors and MUST be created and phrased with live visitors and search engine spiders in mind.
• Precise anchor text phrasing: Use precise wording to create anchor text that best supports the content. Do not use anchor text like “online web ministry” when specifically linking to a page on “web design” as this will mislead the readers and search engines may discover that the anchor text lacks relevancy. In most instances, using the words “click here” is unnecessary and inefficient because it is vague and nondescript. The anchor text will be more useful if it is a short descriptive phrase that explains specifically what the reader is clicking on, such as “women’s life stories.”
• Broad anchor text phrasing: Use a broad topic for an anchor text link when the page being linked to covers a broad topic. If the website is about “online ministries” use that as a broad phrase that links to a page with information about various ministries.

Source: Anchor Text Tips That Rocket Your Rankings

Additional Resource: How do SE Spiders Work? The Hungry Little Spider

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