The role of anchor text in the ranking of a web page

As the words describe it, anchor text is the visible text while helps to anchor the link of a webpage. Several people use several ways to link a web page. Having a relevant file name, a relevant title tag containing your primary and secondary keywords, relevant H1 tag etc. may all help to ideally link your web page. With the advancement of search technology and the rise of the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, people have started to rely and search on these engines. Search engines display results based on the user query. These engines rank web pages following an algorithm which remains a secret in the industry. One of the important metric of this search algorithm is anchor text.

Anchor text is the visible text of a hyperlink. When your site gets a lot of backlinks, the search engine’s make use of the anchor text to find out the relevant words or queries related to the website or the webpage. The power of anchor text is immense and it is one of the most important relevancy metric of a web page. Instead, of using words like “click here” while linking to your web page, you must use your main keywords. Having your primary and secondary keywords in your anchor text would give you a better hand to overcome your competitors. There are several online tools which helps in analyzing your competitor’s backlinks and find out the anchor text used while creating those backlinks. Some of the best tools are backlink watch, site explorer and link diagnostics.

Google recently had a lot of updates like the Panda and the Penguin updates. The Penguin update focuses on the backlink profile of a website, hence it is necessary to have a look at the anchor text used while creating links to your site. Having a lot of similar anchor text shall land your website in trouble and may penalize it. The best way to save your website from being penalized is to use varied anchor text while creating backlinks. This is the reason why you should use your main keywords, your secondary keywords, synonyms of main keywords, your page name, your site name plus your keywords as your anchor text. In this way, you can have an organic backlink profile for your website. This would give you the maximum benefit and you should be able to unleash the power of backlinks.