What is Anchor Text
TweetIf you have been optimizing your site for the search engines, you probably already know what anchor text is, but for the complete beginner who sees this term all over SEO articles it can be kind of confusing. Basically anchor text is the clickable text of a link. For example, if I link to my article covering on-page optimization the HTML code looks like this:
<a href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/on-page-website-optimization/">on-page optimization</a>
and the anchor text is "on-page optimization."
Importance
Why is anchor text so important? Because the words used in the anchor text go a very long way towards getting the page being linked to ranked for the keywords used as the anchor text. The example link above will give a slight boost to my page in the rankings for "on-page optimization".
For competitive terms, a single link is not going to give you a big boost. Competitive terms can have hundreds, if not thousands, of links pointing to the top pages for the given keyword.
Internal & External
It's not only important to link to your own pages using the anchor text you want to rank for, but you also need links from other sites. In fact, links from external sites are going to be given more weight, because it is easy for you to create pages and send links to your own page using whatever anchor text you want. In theory, links from other people's sites are tougher to earn and thus deemed more trustworthy.
Use Variations
It is important to mix up the anchor text that you use to point to your pages. If 100% of your external links are pointing to a page with the same anchor text, it looks spammy. I'm not entirely sure if there are filters set up to catch this type of search engine gaming or not. It seems likely to me that there are, but either way it's not a good idea. You want to rank for every possible combination of the anchor text, plus any modifiers that could be used to describe the page so mixing up the anchor text to your page makes a lot of sense.
For example if you have a page that sells "men's hats" you might also want to rank for "hats for men." By driving anchor text to the page with a variety of terms, you can rank for different variations.
What the experts do is drive enough anchor text to rank on the first page for several related keywords, then take a long hard look at their analytics. They check to see what keywords are driving the most traffic and what converts the best. Those are the keywords that take top priority. The answers are not always as obvious as they seem and can lead to a more efficient use of resources going forward.