Anchor text can be defined as the hyperlinked text on a web page that indicates the subject matter of the page it links to. It gives useful information about the content of the linked page and it also helps the search engines to know what the page is about. Anchor text is a tool to improve the rankings of your web page in search engines. Anchor text can be used in external links, internal links, navigation maps and links on your web page. The process of optimizing anchor texts with the help of keywords in order to get higher rankings in search engines is known as Anchor text optimization. But there are other roles that the anchor text plays:
(1) Internal anchor text helps in the optimization with in the website i.e. if your web page has a hyperlink connected to another web, then one can use specific or related keywords as the anchor text instead of generic words. When linking between pages on your website use descriptive anchor text and try to keep the anchor text consistent while linking to the same page.
(2) External anchor text helps in the optimization of anchor text in the inbound links that a site gets. This can be achieved by various methods such as Link Exchange, Directory submission, blogs etc. Ranking of your site can be increased by the links from external sites that help your site to get significance for the keywords used in the anchor text. The ranking will increases as the number of such inbound links increases.
(3) Anchor text also helps to show the importance of your page to search engines for rankings through important keywords, related to the theme of such pages and from other pages of your own site.
(4) Your website will get higher rankings in search engines by including keywords in anchor text. All search engines give importance to the anchor text on your web pages.
(5) Navigation maps can be used to put keywords in anchor text and these text links can be found at the bottom of each page in a site.
(6) Important keywords phrases can be inserted in your page’s natural text and link it to related target page of your site.
