Friday, July 11, 2008

What to know about Anchor Text


The anchor text or link label is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the Anchor text can determine the ranking that page will receive by search engines. Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link's destination.

The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, using html tag called "href" a hyperlink to the main page of the site http://agentsofvalue.com might take this form:



The anchor text in this example is Make Your Business Grow Here. Instead of displaying the complex URL http://agentsofvalue.com on the web page, it is replaced with Make Your Business Grow Here as it's anchor text, contributing to a clean easy to read text or document. Sometimes the usage of anchor text tend to be misunderstand by some webmasters. Instead of turning appropriate words inside of a sentence into a clickable link, they frequently insert extra text such as this:

The two companies signed a joint venture treaty yesterday. To know more click here

The best and concise way of coding this would be:

The two companies signed a joint venture treaty yesterday.

This proper method of linking is very benificial because anchor text holds a significant weight in search engine rankings. Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page.

The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

2 comments:

  1. Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you're linking to.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, that's the point. Visitors will have an idea of the content of that link they are going to click to.

    ReplyDelete

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