What is Link Anchor Text?
Link anchor text is typically the readable text you see on a webpage. It’s normally highlighted in a different color and/or underlined. When you click the anchor text it takes you to a new web page.
For example: Sign up for the RichClose dot com Newsletter.
In this case “Newsletter” is the anchor text which takes you to the following web page:
http://richclose.com/2009/misc/rich-close-dot-com-newsletter-sign-up/
I could have used the webpage itself in the sentence but, it would have been much less readable by my web site visitors.
For example: Sign up for the RichClose dot com http://richclose.com/2009/misc/rich-close-dot-com-newsletter-sign-up/
In this case it’s much more difficult to read and not SEO friendly.
The link anchor text should include the keyword of the page it’s pointing to. In the example above “Newsletter” is the anchor text and it’s the keyword for my newsletter sign up page.
The following sentence again shows link anchor text, but in this example the link isn’t tied to the keyword for the page it’s point to. Do not use links like this:
Bad example: Sign up for the RichClose dot com Newsletter, click here.
While this strategy will take you to the same page and your users may find it OK, Google SEO best practice states that the anchor text, “click here” does not tell you anything about the page you’re linking to and it will not affectively transfer page rank for that keyword.
Make sure to always use the keyword for the page that the link is pointing to within the anchor text.
TBD Future Build Link Description Templates with Anchor Text
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