Anchor text is the visible text of a hyperlink, for example the link below links to our home page (http://www.seo-gold.com/) with the anchor text SEO Gold-
The HTML code for which is-
<a href=”http://www.seo-gold.com/”>SEO Gold</a>
The red text SEO Gold is the anchor text for this hyperlink (or text link as it is sometimes called).
Anchor Text Importance in Search Engine Optimization
Google (and to a lesser degree other search engines) heavily weight it’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high ranking can only be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors. Googlebombs are probably the easiest examples to find and understand how anchor text effects SERPs.
The miserable failure Googlebomb of late 2003 aimed at the biography page of George W Bush (www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) clearly shows the power of anchor text. The US Presidents biography page which fell victim to the Miserable Failure Googlebomb (and a few other Googlebombs) does not include the words Miserable or Failure anywhere within the code, yet two years on is still at number 1 for the Miserable Failure SERP at Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Its consistent search engine placement at number one for this phrase can only be attributed to the anchor text of links to the page (lots of bloggers linking using the anchor text Miserable Failure).
Googlebombs take advantage of the combined effectiveness of anchor text from thousands of links.
A similar phenomenon is occurring with the Computer and Computers SERPs in Google. As of January 2005 a search in Google for the word Computer ranks www.dell.com as a top 10 result and a search for Computers ranks www.compaq.com as a top 10 result. Looking at the code of these two pages reveal neither use the word Computer or Computers respectively (at least not in a format Google understands).
How Effective is Anchor Text?
Since 371 million pages are reported for the Computer SERP and 150 million pages for the Computers SERP and these SERPs are highly commercial and competitive (fierce competition) the reason these two site rank highly for those SERPs is due to the power of anchor text. With hundreds of thousands of pages linking to these two home pages with many using the anchor text Computer/Computers it’s enough to rank highly with no on page optimization!! Imagine where they would be with a little on site optimization!
We have found through both experimentation and real sites that anchor text is almost always the deciding factor for very hard SERPs. A site can do OK with good on site optimization, but poor use of anchor text/few links. A site can do quite well with good use of anchor text/links, but poor on site optimization. When you have a highly optimized site (lots of keyword rich content) and good use of anchor text from reasonable PageRank (PR) pages there tends to be very good SERPs.
How to use Anchor Text Effectively?
Anchor text usage should reflect the content (ideally the main SERP) the link is linking to and ideally help the page it is linked from as well (the latter isn’t always possible). This means if you can link highly related pages (related SERPs) together they will tend to do much better in their respective SERPs. Most pages on the SEO Gold site would benefit from the addition of the word SEO and so adding a link from every page of the site using anchor text “SEO Other Keyword(s)” is a good idea.
Every page of the SEO Gold site links to the SEO Tutorial Index page via the main menu on the left using anchor text SEO Tutorial for example.
The SEO Services page main SERP is clearly SEO Services. By adding the SEO Tutorial page link on the left menu we’ve given the SEO tutorial page a boost from the anchor text of the link to it AND as importantly added the word SEO to the SEO Services page as well. We’ve found anchor text gives the page it is on a larger boost than the same text as just body text. So if you can add a related link (like the SEO Tutorial link) from a related page (like the SEO Services page) you should.
There are a lot of SERPs related to the SEO Tutorial SERP etc…, for example SEO Company, SEO Firm, SEO Consultant … so more often we can add links from pages of this site with the anchor text SEO Tutorial etc… more likely we are to pick up these SERPs. The same is true for the anchor text of other links using the word SEO (i.e. SEO Services). You will notice the word Optimization is used a lot as anchor text as well for the same reason.
Anchor Text and the Real World
The anchor text can’t always be perfect since there are other considerations including space available, making links descriptive etc… The left menu of the SEO Gold site has enough space for 24 characters before it wraps to the next line. Since it looks less professional having wrapped links on the main menu we limited our anchor text to no more than 24 characters on the menu.
Along the top menu we have a Home Page link, the anchor text Home is very poor text to use for a link since it confers no benefit to the page (we don’t want to rank high for any searches related to the word Home), but we want our visitors to easily navigate the site and a Home link is the easiest way to get back to the home page. A compromise is to use anchor text SEO Gold Home.
Alt Attribute Text of Image Links
The alt text of image links is the equivalent to the anchor text of text links. This means when a link to a page is part of an image you should add relevant alt text to the alt attribute (looks like this alt=”keywords here”). Occassionally you’ll find a situation where you just can’t use relevant keywords as anchor text, when this happens image links can solve the problem.
For example we could use a Home image link in place of the SEO Gold Home text link on the top menu below the logo with an alt attribute with keyword rich text. However, in this case we have at least two other links per page to the home page using keyword rich anchor text (the keyword rich copyright link at the bottom) and an alt attribute (the top banner image that says SEO Gold, Search engine Optimization Services is also a image link to the home page with a keyword rich alt attribute, hover over it to see). So two out of three links using highly keyword rich text should be more than enough.
If you have a menu like situation where it’s not possible to use good keyword rich anchor text use an image link. Take a screen shot of a page showing the menu you’d like better anchor text for. In an image editing program like Paintshop Pro cut out each word associate with the menu, this will give you a bunch of small images that when viewed look like text, there’s an example below that we used on a SEO clients site recently-
Hover over the word Home above and you’ll see the keyword rich alt attribute. The above is just an example, don’t keyword stuff your alt attributes with keywords, especially in a situation like this (a menu link).
The code for this image link is-
<a href=”"><img src=”alt-text.gif” width=”80″ height=”18″ border=”0″ alt=”Alt Text, looks much better than using a keyword rich text link for a home link”></a>
As a side not until 2005 the alt text of non linked images (so a standard image on a web page that doesn’t link to anything) was ignored by Google, didn’t matter what you put in your non linked alt text for Google rankings. However, in 2005 Google unexpectedly started to use all alt text as part of the ranking algorithm. So you should take this into account when creating images, give them relevant alt text.
Alt Attribute Text Test of Non-Linked Images
A quick test to determine if Google is still counting the alt text as part of the SERPs do this search in Google (the text below is NOT on this page as text, the text below is an image with alt text only)-
With the speach marks (this is an exact search). As long as Google uses alt text you should find this page listed since we’ve added the above piece of unique text to a non linked images alt attribute above.
Google Search for the above test
Title Attribute Text Test of Text Links
You can also test the title attribute as well, the title attribute is the code title=”keywords” sometimes used with text links. Currently Google ignores the contents of this attribute, so no SEO reason to use them with text links. If this ever changes a search for “Contact SEO Gold for a Detailed Search Engine Optimization Quote” with the speach marks will find multiple pages of this site, since the SEO Consultant link on the right menu (near the top) includes a title attribute using this text. If only this page (the one you are reading now) is listed when performing a search you can be confident Google still ignores the title attribute since we’ve used that exact text above within the normal content (so there should be just one listing for this site).
Google Search for the above test
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