You have certainly noticed on many websites that there are words in blue that when clicked will send you to another location.  These are referred to as anchor texts and they if used correctly will increase your websites page rank and popularity

Hyperlinked words on a webpage that are used to take a visitor to another page or site when clicked are known as anchor text.  Anchor text is often used to explain a word, show an image, or even just to redirect the visitor to another page on your site or anywhere on the World Wide Web.

The anchor text reports to the search engines what the pages topic is.  If you use it in the correct manner you can raise your page rank within the search engines such as Google.

You can use the text “click here” as the text readers will click but that would only tell the search engines that the page was about “click here”. It is best to use descriptive anchor text to allow the search engines to realize what your website is about and they can list it appropriately for searching.  Anchor text can zoom a site into the top ten searches in Google for a phrase that is not displayed anywhere on the page.

Google Bombing had became a popular prank for bloggers. They would use humorous or just random phrases that will get them noticed. If the phrase was rare it could land them a number one position in Googles search results.  If it was a competitive phrase the blogger may have to post hundreds of the links through anchor text to get noticed.

In 2007 Google created a new algorithm which decreased the impact of the pranks and bombs but it still recognizes anchor links as extremely important. If you are using Off Page SEO tactics to obtain link popularity by finding partners willing to link back to your website it is a good idea to create a HTML code for them to copy and paste, this way you are given the opportunity to create your own anchor text.

Make sure that you do not over optimize a single word even if your site only has one topic. If the only thing you sell is umbrellas you don’t need all your anchor text links to be umbrellas. You could create an unnatural pattern with the search engines.

Anchor text is used in many different ways.  It is often used in external links; any links from other sites would be best if optimized with appropriate anchor text to optimize results. Internal links are the most common anchor links where you can have hyperlinked text to travel the site.  Two of the more important places for anchor text is in your navigation maps and also the links to your main website page.

Your anchor text will be read by humans as well as the search engines. You want to ensure that it is optimized for the search engines but it should still make sense to those who are reading it. Remember to be descriptive and not vague, always make the anchor text self explanatory as to where the visitor will be travel when they click it.