What Are Anchor Text Links, and Why Are They Important for SEO?

One of the most important factors in SEO is the creation of backlinks, and creating backlinks the right way can significantly improve your search engine rankings.  A backlink is a link to your website that’s placed on a different website.  Here’s an example of a backlink on our blog that goes to web design firm LegalWebExperts.com:

http://www.legalwebexperts.com

Google uses backlinks to help decide how high your site should rank.  The more backlinks leading to LegalWebExperts.com exist on outside webpages, the higher the site will rank in Google.  However, when we use live URL addresses as links (as above), Google still isn’t sure what that link is about.  What kind of content is on the page?  What search keywords would it make sense to connect this page to?

We can tell Google what’s on the page and exactly when to present it in search results by using anchor text links.  An anchor text link is a hyperlinked word or keyword phrase.  For example, in the sentence “Legal Web Experts provides legal website design and custom development solutions,” legal website design is an anchor text link.

Anchor text does more than give human visitors an idea of what’s on the page that you’re linking to.  It tells Google that this page is relevant to legal website design, and this pushes it ahead of other Google-ranked sites without anchor text links for the keyword “legal website design.”  When people search this keyword in the future, the Legal Web Experts site will come up higher in the rankings.  For this reason, it’s important not to place backlinks with anchor text like “Click Here” or “Next Page.”  These anchor text links may be useful to your human audience, but a high Google ranking on the keyword “click here” does little to help your SEO campaign.