Anchor text is nothing more than clickable text that refers users to a different page (on the same or a different site).
It is one of the indispensable tools for doing link building, one of the most important off-page SEO techniques.
Anchor text is very useful for the purpose of optimizing the internal pages of a site, because it provides search engines and users with relevant contextual information about the content of the link destination.
Good anchor text suggests to the reader what to expect if they click on the link.
On-page SEO optimization best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you are linking with, rather than generic text. In fact, seo friendly anchor text is:
- synthetic,
- Relevant to the page,
- never generic and with very low keyword density.
It must come across as natural, totally spontaneous, and never forced within the text.
Anchor text: why is it so important?
The words contained in the text still help determine the ranking the page will receive from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
In addition, a link must provide value to the user, and anchor text is the most relevant way to convey the value of that link.
Like any SEO-based activity, the ultimate goal remains to improve the ranking of our website or e-commerce content on the SERP (search engine results index).