Why Anchor Text Could Be The Most Important Aspect Of SEO
Anchor text is perhaps one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization however it is also one of the least talked about. This one component of SEO is important to understand because it can help your page get ranked for a target keyword and also help you evaluate your competition all the more decisively. The latter is critical and, in fact, if you don’t take the text in backlinks into appropriate consideration when taking a gander at the competition for a keyword you could pass up a major opportunity for some concealed pearls that are easy to rank for.
What Is Anchor Text?
This is the hyperlinked text you see on a webpage. It is the obvious words that you can snap to take you to another page. Anchor text HTML code resembles this:
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>Your Anchor</a>
On most websites, you typically consider this to be blue text that is underlined and when you tap on it with your mouse, you are taken to the corresponding URL.
How Bloggers Use It
Bloggers and website proprietors utilize anchors naturally to indicate different pages on their website as well as pages on different destinations that they discover relevant to what they are blogging about. You’ve probably even done this yourself when writing a post where you referenced another post on your site, an affiliate item or even a post on another site. Usually a blogger will utilize a phrase that indicates what the page is about in the anchor, rather than a URL, so that the sentence reads effectively. The anchor text in these connections helps both the visitor and the search engine insects make sense of what the ‘connected to” page is about.
How Search Engines Use It
Search engines utilize this text to help them make sense of what the hyperlinked page is about. In this way, as you can see, getting anchor text backlinks with relevant phrases in the anchor is quite important if you want the search engines to rank you for a particular keyword phrase. In fact, anchor text is such an important factor in ranking a page that pages can rank for a keyword phrase notwithstanding when that phrase does not appear in the URL on the page!
There are several cases where this has happened, however perhaps the most famous is the place the Adobe Reader download page ranked #1 for the search term “click here” for a long time despite the fact that those words were no place on the page. So many individuals had connected to that page utilizing the text “click here” that it got to the #1 spot with no on page SEO for the term.
How This Is Important When Judging Competition For A Keyword
If you consider how important anchor text is to the search engines when deciding ranking for a keyword, then it’s easy to perceive any reason why it is a critical component of analyzing the competition for a particular keyword phrase.
