Why the Anchor Text is Important

At first it may not seem that a link’s anchor text is relevant. If you’re a blogger, for instance, linking to another site using different texts (like “click here” or “this site”) might not have much of a difference. But to the eyes of Google (and other search engines, too), it’s a big deal what you put into the anchor text in between your <a> tags.

No matter how intelligent Google may seem to be, it’s still machine and not man. So even if Google will know how to rank pages according to relevance to a search, the analytical skills required to see the context of a page is still not as good. Humans, of course, will know, for instance what a link saying “click me” means, especially if that phrase is preceded by “to read this cool piece of information.” But Google will only know it’s a “click me” and not “some piece of info.”

This is not only relevant when linking to external sites. This is an especially useful search optimization technique when linking within your own site. For instance, if you have a page containing your contact information, it’s better to link to it as “contact us” instead of using the phrase “click here” to contact us (with “click here” hyperlinked). This way, when users do a search limited to your URL only, the keywords “contact us” would be conisdered relevant, instead of “click here”.

With enough internal links that use relevant anchor texts, Google will eventually index your site better, and the correct sub-pages will appear under your main page as indented search results whenever the right keywords are searched for.

Of course, the sites that you link to will also thank you for using relevant keywords instead of just “click here” or “here”. Using relevant anchor texts helps them get better in results pages for their desired keywords.

But it doesn’t end there. It also matters what exactly you place in your anchor text. For instance, have you ever noticed that sites that purchase text link ads rarely use their site’s title. Instead, they use the names of their services.

For example, if Google Tutor were to ask for a link, we would prefer using our tagline instead of our title for anchor text. We’re already #1 on searches for “google tutor” (with or without the quotes), but not as high for “google tutorials,” “google tips,” or even “google advice”. So we would go for either “Google Tips, Tutorials and Advice,” “Google Tips,” “Google Advice,” and the like.