Anchor Text on Your Site

Anchor text links have been known to have a lot of ‘search engine ranking’ juice.  It is one of the search engine optimization tools that has been around for the past ten years or so and continues to have ranking leverage.

An anchor can be spotted easily in content because it is usually underlined in blue (like in the image below) although some sites and blogs have custom colored links but it will still be underlined and still will be distinct.  When looking at the source code of an anchor text link you will notice an ‘a’ in the code which represents ‘anchor’, for example, ‘Search Engine Optimization’ link on our homepage is the anchor text and the code is <a href=”search-engine-marketing/search-engine-optimization.htm”>SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION</a.

Something to keep in mind about  anchor texts is that Google will only index one of the same anchor texts if there are multiple occurrences. A great example of this is shown in the image below from Moz.

It is always a best practice to have the link open a new window or a new tab, especially for social media platform links. We want to keep users on the site and not distract them by directing them to another platform. Recently, Bing changed their algorithm to include crawling external links on sites for added credibility. For example, if you own an auto shop and carry various brands of oil, it may be helpful to include links to the types of oil carried to add as useful information for the user. After all, it’s always about the user!