Link Building Anchor Text is one of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines. Marcus Tandler has actually said when it comes to SEO, “Anchor Text is still the single most important factor.”

Simply put link anchor text is the text used by other people to link to your site and the text used by your site to link to other pages within your site or to other sites.

When you link to another site or another page within your site the words that you actually have linked make up this link anchor text. Search engines see this as a valuable tool for determining what your site is about and what other people think your site is about. If you have a dozen people linking to your site with the words “click here” it really doesn’t do much to help your site’s ranking. This doesn’t tell Google what your site is about or what is on your site that is relevant, although they do notice the words around the “click here” link.

Now if you have the same dozen links all pointing to your site using the link anchor text “drag racing” Google can see that these sites feel your site is about drag racing. When it indexes your site it will find your site optimized for the phrase “drag racing” and it will hopefully see links on your site itself that use the anchor text “drag racing.” All of this information now tells Google that your site is optimized for and is about drag racing. You are linking to drag racing related documents/sites and other people are linking to you using drag racing as the link anchor text so they must agree about your site being a drag racing site.

Without relevant link anchor text there is no way to know what sites linking to you actually think your site is about. Also, there is no way to tell what you think about documents or sites you are linking to. This leaves Google with only your site itself as the ranking factor which will rank you much lower than if you had good inbound and outgoing links that utilized keyword rich anchor text. Good link anchor text can be the difference between a very high ranking and a ranking that is very low and useless.

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