Anchor Text - A Noobs Perspective

Anchor Text - A Noobs Perspective

Anchor text are the words which if clicked on, will send the user to another website or document. Typically this text is underlined, bold or in a different colour. A good example of anchor text is shown when the anchor text describes the content of the document/website it is linking to.

eg. "I knew there would be snakes on the plane, but I didn't expect camels on the submarine!"

Anchor text is often an integral part of a sentence as shown in the bold text above. The above example is showing a good use of anchor text:

1) The text is descriptive of the page it is linking to.
2) The anchor text is differentiated from the rest of the sentence by appearing BOLD. (as long as the anchor text is differentiated or obviously symbolised as a link it shouldnt matter. This is upto the designers or writers aesthetic opinion.
3) The anchor text is an integral part of the sentence and does not interrupt the flow of reading.

A bad example of anchor text is shown below:

eg.

a) "I knew there would be snakes on the plane, but I didn't expect camels on the submarine! Click here for camels on a submarine."

b) "I knew there would be snakes on the plane, but I didn't expect camels on the submarine! Click here."

c) "I knew there would be snakes on the plane, but I didn't expect camels on the submarine!"Click here for camels on a submarine."

The problems with the above examples are quite obvious. With example a), The Anchor text is not
incorporated within the main body. This is annoying for the viewer as it interrupts the flow of reading. This does not add any valuable information/content to the previous sentence either.

With example b) and c) the words "Click here" is used as the anchor text. This is unproductive for the search engines to recognize what page the Anchor text is linking to. The search engine will think you are linking to a website with information on "Click here", where in fact, you are wanting to tell the search engine that you are linking to a page on "Camels on a Submarine".

As search engines try to provide the user with the most relevant websites for their search query; the relevancy of the page being linked to and the anchor text is also an important factor.

Good example: Camels on a Submarine linking to www.camelsonboats/submarines.com

This is good because keywords in the anchor text are also in the URL of the page being linked to.
The search engine will recognise the relevancy and account for it.

The relevancy of the content on the page is another important factor.
There are many other influencing factors that determine the worthiness of a link and anchor text but I may go over them in a later post. For now you should have enough understanding on anchor text to apply some practise.

Keep an eye out for my next post.