When using a search engine for searching terms of interest, you are physically typing in a word or group of words such as "credit" or "low interest credit cards". When the search engine returns the result of your search you will more then likely click on the best descriptive term as you outlined in your search.

If the search engine just returned a url such as www.creditcards.info then you probably would not click on that link if there was ten or more of them presented for you.

Online searchers have become used to clicking on descriptive terms that match their search engine question.

Therefore, anchor text is a descriptive term for the url of your website, blog, article or page.

By placing anchor text in the body of content, a reader's interest will be sparked by what the anchor text is describing, such as, "great information" or "buy now at a discounted price".

So basically, anchor text is a way of describing your url page with a descriptive term.

The best anchor text is text that carries the most search engine optimisation benefit. That is, anchor text is the keyword of your page.

An example of this is, if your blog is about fish, then rather then write "come see my site for more about fish", your correct anchor text would be keyword specific, such as, "how to raise goldfish" or "this is the correct method to feed tropical fish".

By using keyword rich anchor text, you are telling the search engines that the page your link is referring to is about that keyword.

The basic rule of thumb is anchor text will be the keyword you are targeting with the page you are referring that link to. Always ensure that the anchor text is relevant for your page and the keyword appears in the url, title or throughout the content.

Beside being of seo benefit, the anchor text is also a trigger to spark the readers attention and desire to click on the link so they will visit your chosen url and perform some sort of action, whether that is reading your content, clicking on an advertisement or buying a product from you.

Firstly, lets describe what a html link is.

A html link is exactly what you see in the address bar of your browser. If you look to the top centre of this page on your computer screen, you will see the html link for this hubpage.

Html links are the address book of the internet. Those links can get quite long and near to impossible for a reader to type in each letter of the html link to arrive at your site.

To make life easier, anchor text is used.

A html link looks like this :- <a href=” http://www.domainname.com.au ”> and will return the value of http://www.domainname.com.au

Now a html link with anchor text is :- <a href=” http://www.domainname.com.au ”> Your Anchor Text </a> and will return a link of Your Anchor Text.

So the two versions above will return a highlighted link of either the website address or the website anchor text.

The answer to is anchor text important is a resounding YES. The anchor text tells the search engine what the content on your page is about. The search engine will look through your content looking for the keywords you used in your anchor text.

When a search engine finds that a html link with keyword rich anchor text is relevant to the page it is referring to, then the search engine will give the most importance to that link, counting it as a strong back link to your site.

Using the correct anchor text to the pages of your site will result in your page being listed quite high in a search engine index and possibly, if you get a lot of links, you will find your page closer to the top, closer to position one of the search engine.

Position one means lots of traffic and lots of traffic means lots of sales or clicks.

As you can imagine if you have ten anchor text links all stating the same text to your page then the search engine might think your trying to trick it, or worst still, spam the search engine.

You see, a search engine will look upon anchor text from the site it is listed on as a vote of confidence and a vote of confidence usually carries a benefit of passing on page rank to your site.

To avoid this, the trick is to change your anchor text around.

An example of this is to use anchor text for "Online Credit Cards" to "Credit Cards Online" or "Credit Online Cards".

It is by altering the anchor text of your links, that you will get the most benefit from search engine optimisation and also sparking the readers interest to click the link and to visit your site.