How important is anchor text?

Anchor text is linked text in an article or web page. The value of this is crucial in Search Engine marketing. Search engines based their ratings on numerous thing and anchor text is one of the most overlooked.

You will see many examples of anchor text in the above paragraph and others on this hub. When using anchor text on your sites you have to look where you are sending people when they click on the links. if you are sending the visitor to authority sites that will help improve your search engine trust which will increase your ranking on a Search Engine Results Page.

Incoming links are important and bring alot of weight to your page rank, but outgoing links are important. If you create content and do not utilize anchor text you are missing a big part in your SEO strategy.

I have gone a little overboard in using anchor text on this hub, but it was to illustrate a point. Every where you see the word anchor text it links to wikipedia. Which is an authority site.

What I try to do is to include keywords in the URL and the anchor text. The Search Engines seem to love that.