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<a href="http://www.widgets.com">here is the anchor text</a>
The important thing with anchor text is to make sure it includes keywords.
You will often see:
<a href="http://www.widgets.com">name</a> and maybe more keywords here
What you really want is:
<a href="http://www.widgets.com">all your keywords in here</a>
This is why hyphenated domain names are good in my opinion because inbound links, over which you have no control, instead of looking like this with no readable anchor text:
<a href="http://www.largebluewidgets.com">www.largebluewidgets.com</a> and maybe keywords here
They will look like this with readable anchor text:
<a href="http://www.large-blue-widgets.com">www.large-blue-widgets.com</a> and maybe more keywords here
[edited by: georgeek at 10:37 am (utc) on April 10, 2003]
The Anchor text is what conects the page its on to the site it links to. It "anchors" the site to the page.
Scott
Does concentration of keywords matter and does it help to have the url as anchor text ie
<a href="http://www.widgets.com">www.widgets.com</a>
In the above case can the SE's distinguish the keyword within the url or is it indecipherable due to the stop on either side of it.
Yes - sort of.
A better use would be the generic form (e.g. just the precise keyword) - not just for search engines but also more appealing to visitors.
The URL itself is unimportant since the object is "usually" to get someone to click, rather than getting someone to remember the URL for which they didn't click.
What's on the other side make the "mental note -- stick" not the URL itself.
If the backlink “anchor text” is an image, would the use of keywords in “alternate text” be equivalent to a link using key-word based anchor text?
Yes - most definitely - in fact anchored imagery is now the only optimization value for the "alt".
<Added> title="" in the link references helps as well and both "title" and "alt" are most effective if the text in each is identical</added>.
I believe if the image is a link then the alt text is used - see this long thread with some comments from googleguy [webmasterworld.com...]
