Understanding Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable link that appears in text on a web page indicating that you can click through to another page of the same site, or to another website. It usually looks like this. (although on this occasion, it’s not clickable!)

Anchor text is important to how search engines view web pages and what’s written in the anchor text can influence how a page ranks. It’s therefore worth giving some consideration to how you display anchor text on your web pages.

When displaying lists of products on a web page for example, rather than put ‘click here’ for more information, why not make the product name the clickable link? You could also have ‘click for further information’ or something like that at the end too. So if you’re displaying several items on one page, make the clickable link the product name, even the image of the product can be clickable and if you have a description of the item below the image, put some text at the end that the visitor can click through for further information.

What the search engines read in the anchor text can help the page the link clicks through to, towards ranking for the keyword within the link. You can do this to link to any page of your site, not just ecommerce sites either. So if you sell services, make sure that links to your individual service pages contain the keywords that relate to that page. It’s not just your internal pages either, but your external links.

External anchor text is more difficult to control as websites will link to other sites how they want and often the company name is the anchor text. However, if there’s a short description of the company (containing keywords) next to the company name, then the anchor text of the description can help the website rank for those keywords.

This is a very basic explanation of anchor text, but bear in mind next time you’re linking to a web page within your site or even to a web page outside of your site, that what you put into your anchor text can influence it’s rankings for those keywords. The search engines use many factors in their ranking algorithm (how they rank web pages), but anything you can do to help with this is one step closer to gaining higher rankings for your all important keywords!