Anchor text can affect your search engine placement. It serves as the ‘face’ of the page – the one that users find in search engine results. The anchor text gives the user a glimpse of what he should expect to find in the actual page itself when he gets there.

This being the case, working on your anchor text should always be a part of your search engine optimization strategy. You want to optimize it so that it contributes to your site’s online visibility through decent SERPs.

Anchor text optimization

Anchor text is the visible text that represents a link. It’s the word or group of words that direct you to the page that it is supposed to stand for. When you make your mouse hover over the anchor text, your browser will show you the hidden URL that it links you to.

Optimizing your anchor text essentially entails incorporating keywords into the text so you get higher search engine rankings. You need to place words that you want your page to rank for. Ideally, the anchor text works to tell the user what a particular page is about. For instance, if you use, ‘real estate trends’ for your anchor text, it’s assumed that you’re directing the reader to a web page that contains trend reports or news on real estate.

Relevance

Search engine optimization techniques pay careful attention to the anchor text because it can actually affect how a page would rank for particular keywords. It can enhance the page’s relevance relative to the keywords used in it. Everyone knows that search engines are particular about relevance so when the anchor text itself contains the keywords you want a page to rank for, you’re sending a signal to the search engine that says this page is highly relevant to the user’s search.

Algorithms

Optimizing your anchor texts can greatly influence the final ranking of the web pages you’re working on. This is an essential part of search engine optimization precisely because search engines are known to put a lot of weight on a page’s anchor text. Google, itself uses allinanchor:keyword, an operator that works to read text only from the anchor text in indexed pages. According to WebProNews, “this further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby, making it evident that Google considers it an important pointer to page relevance.”

This being the case, the importance of anchor text optimization in search engine optimization cannot be denied. If you want to get a decent ranking in search engine results, you want to take careful notice of how you craft your anchor text.