Anchor text

The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text. Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text. Example of anchor text: <a href="http://www.seobook.com/">Search Engine Optimization Blog</a> Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites. See also: Backlink Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text

Anchor text is the actual text part of a link (usually underlined). Used by search engines as an important ranking factor. Google pays particular attention to the text used in a hyperlink and associates the keywords contained in the anchor text to the page being linked to. Also see "Google bombing."

An Anchor text is the textual components of web hyperlinks (text links or ‘alt' text associated with image hyperlinks). Anchor texts may provide additional descriptive information about the referred page, and is therefore often indexed as metadata to the referred document.   Detecting links from other pages to a given page, and using the anchor texts associated with these links to compute an authority rank component. The referring anchor texts may also be included as searchable content for the referred documents.