What's the best way to use anchor text to gain the best possible rankings from your link popularity campaign? Read on for tips and insight from the "SEO Guy" Morgan Carey into questions such as how Google views your vote for a site when you link to it and how they determine the value of your vote.
Anchor text and how to use it
The most important off page factor to securing high rankings in Google is appropriate anchor text pointing to the specific page of your website that has been optimized to target that term for that keyword phrase.
Anchor text defined
First off let's define anchor text. Anchor text is that portion of a hyperlink that is viewed by a user on a webpage (the clickable text). Here is an example: in html code, the link will be denoted with www.domain.com and the anchor text will be bolded as “ anchor text ”
Here is a typical html link:
<a href=” http://www.domain.com ”> Anchor Text </a>
Or a real life example -- my link is http://www.seo-guy.com and my anchor text is SEO, thus I would write my text links like this (and if you enjoy this article, please link using the same code in appreciation or to tell visitors about it):
<a href=” http://www.seo-guy.com ”>SEO</a>
Again as you can see my anchor text is contained between the > </a> after the domain and quotation mark portion of the link.
The logic of anchor text
Now that we are clear as to what anchor text is, let's look at the logic as to why anchor text would/should have such a dramatic effect in the Google rankings for your keyword phrases and what exactly “appropriate” anchor text is.
Google decided to base a large portion of their algorithm on inbound links (links from other web pages) because of its initial breakthrough technology “PageRank™”. Google (And most other search engines) counts each link as a vote for the linked “to” webpage by the linked “from” webpage. Analyzing all constituents of a link “from” a webpage to determine the specifics of the link allows for much more specific information to be gathered about the vote being cast. There are really only the two above mentioned common elements: the webpage address you're linking to (this does not have any alternatives), and the anchor text (which can be anything) based on the choice of the webmaster giving the link. It is because of this choice that the anchor text becomes important. If there were no such thing as link popularity in the algorithm, the anchor text people would choose to link to a website with would be truly representative of that website's content.
Basically Google uses anchor text (and assumes you aren't biased by link exchange) to answer the question “Okay, you're voting for a site (and that's great!), but what exactly are you voting for?” Anchor text is your explanation of what you're voting for. In essence you're saying “I am voting for this site because it is a great site that represents (Whatever you put in your Anchor Text)”. It's what I call the “Thumbs up and why answer”.
Search Optimization 
