Anchor Text

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the name of the hyperlink describing the web page associated with that link.It is the clickable text associated with the link. When we create a hyperlink, we usually supply two types of data in it as given below:-

<a href="http://www.exampleofanchortext.com ">Anchor</a>

Data 1:- The link url

Data 2:- The name of the link(describing the page) , a.k.a anchor text. The point to note here is that the name of the hyperlink can change and it can have many aliases.

How to create an Anchor Text

You can create an anchor text with the help of the <a>  tag. Example is given below:-

<a href="http://www.thisisanexampleofdoll.com">Doll</a>

Here:-

The href attribute specifies the link

The text “Doll” is the anchor text.

Hence, to create an anchor text you must supply text before the closing </a> tag.

Relevance of Anchor Text (Seo Purpose)

Anchor Text is extremely important from Seo point of view. Search Engines find out the anchor text associated with hyperlinks and gathers data about the relevance of that web page with respect to the anchor text.

Example

Suppose a web page displays information about “Milk”, the link to that page may have anchor text like – “milk”, “know more about milk”, “about milk”, “doodh”, “click for more info”, “click here”, “cows milk”, “why milk is good”, “advantages of milk” etc.

Now, as you can see from the example given above, anchor text for the web page milk can take many forms. People may create hyperlinks to your website and may supply anchor text describing your web page as per their needs.

In the above example, some people are linking to the webpage using the anchor text “Milk” as it supplies relevant information regarding milk, some may find “advantages of milk” useful as they are linking to it with that anchor text, some are finding it to be a good source of information for “cows milk” and in this way, that web page is getting different hyperlinks with varying anchor texts.

Ideal ratio

The search engines reads the human behavior and finds out the percentage of different anchor text associated with a web page. Then it ranks web pages accordingly. Considering the above example, the percentage of anchor text is given below:-

Milk- 40%

Cows Milk- 20%

About Milk- 20%

Advantages of Milk- 10%

Others- 10%

While evaluating the percentage of anchor text for the web page “Milk”, the search engines may find out that the words “milk”, “cows milk”, “advantages of milk” etc. describes that web page well and they may rank the web page with respect to these keywords. This is the power of anchor text.

Warning:- Do not use the same anchor text again and again. This may penalize your website. Always keep an ideal percentage of the main anchor text while creating hyperlinks.