Anchor text basics

There are a lot of web literate people who don't understand the basics of anchor text. Here's a primer taken from an email that I wrote to a forum moderator:

A post on autism was answered like this:

Welcome! Here is a link you might be interested in.
This answer is fine for people. But to help the search engines better “understand” the page that you are pointing to, you should write it like this:

Welcome! Time4Learning has a page on educating children with autism that you might be interested in.

The words that are hyper linked are called “anchor text”. Google takes anchor text very seriously. They use it to categorize pages. (Yahoo & MSN take the anchor text less seriously).

For a funny demonstration of this, google “here”. Number one on a google search for "here" is Adobe’s download page for acrobat because almost every website has the same line on it somewhere:

“click here to download adobe acrobat”

So if you are looking for "here", google thinks you want some adobe acrobat. And it is the world's best search engine! :->





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