Many moons ago Google PageRank (PR) was the most important aspect of SEO, not any more, in fact it now counts for very little and is seen as somewhat of a gimmick to the experienced webmaster. By far the most important aspect of modern-day SEO is anchor text found in the backlinks to your website (a backlink is an incoming link). Anchor text is the clickable text that is displayed for a particular link. For example this link:
links to www.google.com and has the anchor text “Google Search Engine”. When you get links to your website you should always try to get your targeted keyword or keyphrase in the anchor text. This is an incredibly important factor used by search engines when generating the result pages.
One thing you must remember, is that the search engines are aware that people purposefully target keywords via their anchor text, so it is a good idea to vary the anchor text that is used so that you don’t get penalized or banned for attempting to spam the search engines!
Anchor text is not only important for backlinks to your website, but it’s also important for internal linking of you web pages too. You should never have a link that has “click here” as the anchor text – it’s a wasted opportunity where you could use the anchor text to optimize your website. Instead, put the keyword of the page you are linking to in the anchor text for the link.
I hope this guide has helped you understand the importance of link anchor text, and how it is possible to analyze the anchor text of the leading website in order to attain the number 1 position in the search engines. In the next lesson we’ll look at how you can optimize your internal linking structure of your websites.
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In earlier days, I never thought about the anchor text as important. Now I can understand the necessity of that. Thank you for sharing.