Most people outside Web design don’t necessarily know what “anchor text” is and why it’s important to search engines.
If you think of the definition of “anchor,” which means to “hold fast,” then anchor text simply means the text (or words) that hold your site together. A Web developer skilled in search engine optimization (and not all are), will anchor your site together with keywords in the anchor text (also known as internal links).
Internal links are the links you use to link your site’s pages together. You don’t always have control over the way other people link to you, but you have complete control over the way you structure your own internal links. When linking to your own pages, always use the link anchor text you want the destination page to be found for.
When you realize that search engines employ robots that read the HTML code of a Web page, then you’ll understand that robots follow links and read what’s in the code.
The words that anchor one Web page to another give the robot a clue as to what the destination page is about. It then factors that information into its ranking algorithm. When enough links point to a Web page with that all-important anchor text, then this signals that the page is about a specific, keyword topic. Over time, this influences your website’s search engine rankings.
Did you ever notice how everyone links to their home page with the word Home? Unless you really want your home page to rank for the search term “Home,” what possible advantage could this provide?
Instead, you should try adding your keywords to that link, not in the top navigation but in the footer. If a site included a link from every internal page to their Home page with ‘keyword keyword services’ or ‘keyword keyword company’, they’ll almost certainly see a jump in their search rank for that particular keyword phrase.
Photo credit: Scottchan
