What Is Anchor Text and How to Use Anchor Text to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Have you ever read text on the internet and along the way came across clickable words which when you clicked on them led you to another webpage, blog etc? These words are converted into anchor text by the author and usually show up as being hyperlinked. The procedure is to highlight a word or group of words and then insert a link or by means of inserting simple HTML code to convert specific words into hyperlinked text.
The reason for creating hyperlinked text is to give readers an idea regarding the content matter that they expect to find if they decide to click on the anchor text. In this manner, anchor text is a neat way of allowing the reader to go to another site without displaying the site's URL (which might also be long and unsightly and might give no indication of its content). Another reason is that you might feel that the information on a particular site will be beneficial to your readers as it complements, reinforces or could be used as a reference for your own content. Finally, linking to other content by means of anchor text could help readers understand a certain topic or sub topic better instead of providing an explanation yourself.
The words chosen to be your anchor text should be targeted keywords common to your content and the external content you wish to link to. Avoid the use of generic words such as "click here." For example, if your main content is about dogs and you have a paragraph related to dog training, then you would use "dog training" as keywords and other keyword phrases containing "dog training" within your paragraph to link to another source describing dog training.
Anchor text can boost your search engine rankings as follows:
1. When linking your internal pages within your site, refer to your pages by using keywords that are descriptive of the page you are linking to.
2. Designated text containing external links to link to other websites or blogs or forums etc should be indicative of the content on the pages you are linking to.
3. When linking to your home page or internal pages from external sources such as articles and other sites, refer to them by using meaningful keywords. Moreover, be creative in your choice of keywords. Do not just repeat the same keywords over and over again.
4. If you are asking webmasters to give you links to your site, provide them with the HTML code to control the anchor text they display on their respective sites.
5. In all cases, make sure the anchor text makes human reading sense and not just insert phrases that are not sensible or unreadable.
Boosting your search engine rankings is very important for your website, if it is not to remain buried in search engine results. Anchor text is a simple yet very effective way of doing so and will really help your site achieve increased search engine visibility.