Anchor text is the visible text of a hyperlink, for example the link below links to our home page (http://TrafficBoosterPro.com/) with the anchor text SEO Expert services-
The HTML code for which is-
<a href="http://TrafficBoosterPro.com/">SEO Expert Services</a>
The red text SEO Expert Services is the Anchor Text for this hyperlink (or text link as it is sometimes called).
Google (and to a lesser degree other search engines) heavily weight it's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high ranking can only be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors. Googlebombs are probably the easiest examples to find and understand how anchor text effects SERPs.
The miserable failure Googlebomb of late 2003 aimed at the biography page of George W Bush (www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) clearly shows the power of anchor text. The US Presidents biography page which fell victim to the Miserable Failure Googlebomb (and a few other Googlebombs) does not include the words Miserable or Failure anywhere within the code, yet two years on is still at number 1 for the Miserable Failure SERP at Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Click here to see this in action...
Its consistent search engine placement at number one for this phrase can only be attributed to the anchor text of links to the page (lots of bloggers linking using the anchor text Miserable Failure).
A similar phenomenon is occurring with the Computer and Computers SERPs in Google. As of January 2005 a search in Google for the word Computer ranks www.dell.com as a top 10 result and a search for Computers ranks www.compaq.com as a top 10 result. Looking at the code of these two pages reveal neither use the word Computer or Computers respectively (at least not in a format Google understands).
Since 371 million pages are reported for the Computer SERP and 150 million pages for the Computers SERP and these SERPs are highly commercial and competitive (fierce competition) the reason these two site rank highly for those SERPs is due to the power of anchor text. With hundreds of thousands of pages linking to these two home pages with many using the anchor text Computer/Computers it's enough to rank highly with no on page optimization!! Imagine where they would be with a little on site optimization!
We have found through both experimentation and real sites that anchor text is almost always the deciding factor for very hard SERPs. A site can do OK with good on site optimization, but poor use of anchor text/few links. A site can do quite well with good use of anchor text/links, but poor on site optimization. When you have a highly optimized site (lots of keyword rich content) and good use of anchor text from reasonable PageRank (PR) pages there tends to be very good SERPs.
Anchor text usage should reflect the content (ideally the main SERP) the link is linking to and ideally help the page it is linked from as well (the latter isn't always possible). This means if you can link highly related pages (related SERPs) together they will tend to do much better in their respective SERPs. Most pages on the SEO Expert Services site would benefit from the addition of the word SEO and so adding a link from every page of the site using anchor text "SEO Other Keyword(s)" is a good idea.
Every Doorway page that the TrafficBoosterPro script creates in our site, links to the TrafficBoosterPro home page via the main menu on the left using anchor text TrafficBoosterPro home for example. This could be your home page.
The SEO Services page main SERP is clearly SEO Services. By adding the TrafficBoosterPro home link on the left menu we've given the TrafficBoosterPro home page a boost from the anchor text of the link to it AND as importantly added the word TrafficBoosterPro to the Home page as well. We've found anchor text gives the page it is on a larger boost than the same text as just body text. So if you can add a related link (like the TrafficBoosterPro home) from a related page (like the SEO Services page) you should.
There are a lot of SERPs related to the SEO Services SERP etc..., for example SEO Company, SEO Firm, SEO expert James Saunders, SEO Consultant ... so more often we can add links from pages of this site with the anchor text SEO Services etc... more likely we are to pick up these SERPs. The same is true for the anchor text of other links using the word SEO (i.e. SEO Services). You will notice the word Optimization is used a lot as anchor text as well for the same reason.
The anchor text can't always be perfect since there are other considerations including space available, making links descriptive etc... The left menu of the SEO Expert Services site have a Home Page link, the anchor text Home is very poor text to use for a link since it confers no benefit to the page (we don't want to rank high for any searches related to the word Home), but we want our visitors to easily navigate the site and a Home link is the easiest way to get back to the home page. A compromise is to use anchor text SEO Expert Services Home.
The alt text of image links is the equivalent to the anchor text of text links. This means when a link to a page is part of an image you should add relevant alt text to the alt attribute (looks like this alt="keywords here"). Occassionally you'll find a situation where you just can't use relevant keywords as anchor text, when this happens image links can solve the problem.
For example we could use a Home image link in place of the SEO Expert Services Home text link on the top menu below the logo with an alt attribute with keyword rich text. However, in this case we have at least two other links per page to the home page using keyword rich anchor text (the keyword rich copyright link at the bottom) and an alt attribute (the top banner image that says SEO Expert Services, Search engine Optimization Services is also a image link to the home page with a keyword rich alt attribute, hover over it to see). So two out of three links using highly keyword rich text should be more than enough.
If you have a menu like situation where it's not possible to use good keyword rich anchor text use an image link. Take a screen shot of a page showing the menu you'd like better anchor text for. In an image editing program like Paintshop Pro cut out each word associate with the menu, this will give you a bunch of small images that when viewed look like text, there's an example below that we used on a SEO clients site recently-
Hover over the word Home above and you'll see the keyword rich alt attribute. The above is just an example, don't keyword stuff your alt attributes with keywords, especially in a situation like this (a menu link).
The code for this image link is-
<a href=""><img src="alt-text.gif" width="80" height="18" border="0" alt="Alt Text, looks much better than using a keyword rich text link for a home link"></a>
As a side not until 2005 the alt text of non linked images (so a standard image on a web page that doesn't link to anything) was ignored by Google, didn't matter what you put in your non linked alt text for Google rankings. However, in 2005 Google unexpectedly started to use all alt text as part of the ranking algorithm. So you should take this into account when creating images, give them relevant alt text.
For someone to be able to practice anchor text links or Googlebomb methods will be needed the TrafficBoosterPro doorway generator script so that you can create automatically doorway pages on your servers (in different IP each time if possible) so for your Traffic after, only the sky will be the limit. ;-)
With TrafficBoosterPro you get traffic overnight when you target on specific keywords. The Technique is that all the doorway pages will load RSS Feeds when Search Engine robots arrives at your site will find in the doorway pages fresh content at each visit it will find anchor text links to index all the other doorway pages and when it serve this page to a search result page the visitor will be redirected by JavaScript stealth code to a URL of your desire.(which can be changed in seconds if you want to redirect your traffic elsewhere next day without needed to edit the Doorway Pages ever again). The RSS Feeds are Targeted and selected by you, they do not show any URL's (so you don't leak page rank) and they are selected randomly from files on your server by mix up 3 or 4 or more RSS Feeds each time so that the content will not be repeated to any other pages making the Robots penalizing your pages as spam pages.