SEO Anchor Text
Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is often blue and underlined, such as this link to the ciim homepage
Table of Contents
Code Sample
<a href="http://www.example.com">Example Anchor Text</a>Optimal Format
SEO-friendly anchor text is succinct and relevant to the target page.
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. In the phrase “CNN is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the BBC’s take on events,” two unique pieces of anchor text exist for two different links: “CNN” is the anchor text pointing to http://www.cnn.com/, while “the BBC’s take on events” points to http://news.bbc.co.uk.
Search engines use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for “CNN”, Moz.com thinks that http://www.cnn.com/ is a relevant site for the term “CNN” and that http://www.bbc.co.uk is relevant to “the BBC’s take on events.”
If many sites think that a particular page is relevant for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER appear in the text itself.
