SEO Lesson: Anchor Text

In addition to the quanity and quality of incoming links, there is another factor that is very important for SEO:

The link text (or anchor text) used to link a particular page adds to the relevance or importance of that page for the keywords used in the anchor text.

In other words, the clickable text used in the link to a page is important. The 'clickable text' is known as link text or anchor text. The bottom line is that is very beneficial for SEO to have inbound links that use your target keyword in the anchor text for the links.

This lesson, combined with the previous one about the importance of inbound links, were a major revelation to me, that a sigificant portion of SEO was completely external to your site!. Often referred to as "off-page optimization", this aspect of SEO continues to be very important for rankings. It is also one of the most challenging aspects of SEO, since it almost always entails attracting links from other web sites, which are controlled by other people.

It is also important to note that anchor is also important for the internal links. When linking to other pages within your site, you should appropriate anchor text whenever reasonable.