Anchor text

The anchor text, link label, link text, or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Since 1998, some web browsers have added the ability to show a tooltip for a hyperlink before it is selected. Not all links have anchor texts because it may be obvious where the link will lead due to the context in which it is used. Anchor texts normally remain below 60 characters. Different browsers will display anchor texts differently. Usually, web search engines analyze anchor text from hyperlinks on web pages. Other services apply the basic principles of anchor text analysis as well. For instance, academic search engines may use citation context to classify academic articles, and anchor text from documents linked in mind maps may be used too.

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link's destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the 's homepage might take this form:

This proper method of linking is beneficial to users and webmasters as anchor text holds significant weight in search engine rankings. The limit of the concept is building sentences only composed with linked words.

Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency was, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page. Anchor text can also serve the purpose of directing the user to internal pages on the site, which can also help to rank the website higher in the search rankings.

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Wikipedia