Keywords Links and Use Of Keywords In Anchor Text

What is anchor text. Take a look at this simple demo web page created in Front Page. The underlined blue text above is called anchor text. You see such text links on nearly all web pages. below the image is how the HTML code looks to create the above page I have highlighted the anchor text in red. The link text is highlighted in blue.

<body>

Our Demo web page

<a href="http://www.practical-water-gardens.com/">Focus supply the world's

best water features</a>

</body>

</html>

Google differentiated itself from most search engines when it was first introduced by taking into account not only links text and anchor link text on the web page itself but also anchor text and links text on incoming links to that web page. This approach needed a great deal of computer processing power bearing in mind the vast number of links compared to web pages.

Just take another look at only 1 of the previous Touch Graphs and then know there are more than 3 billion sites on Googles database ... Absolutely staggering and amazing or at least I think so.

Google knows for every link the source web page and the destination web page and it records these data for use in SERPs information.

There was a distinct advantage however in taking specific notice of the backward link in so much that the link back to a web page was often not under the control of the web pages designer. On this basis alone it was more difficult for a designer to manipulate the SERPs results.

In addition if a site received a lot of links from external sources it was possibly more relevant to the search query than a web page with a small number of incoming links. This was no guarantee however since it could be manipulated fairly easily.

Google by virtue of its unique ability to collect and analyse anchor link text and proximity of text together with its other full text capabilities however was able to identify such unfriendly behaviour and penalize offending pages.

In recent times Google has shown its capability to not only recognize anchor text in a link but also the text immediately surrounding or in close proximity to a link. At December 2003 it was introducing this technology in its Google labs section. Almost certainly this will become a relevant search criterion sooner or later.

Using Your Important Keywords ... continued