Anchor Text and Search Engine Rankings
Written by: Tanya Gonzalez
SEO has now become an indispensible part of the internet industry. Unless you comprehend this methodology, you cannot possibly succeed in reaping the benefits out of your website. Whether you are into affiliate marketing, selling your own products, a website that earns through Ad sense, and other related programs by providing information on specific topics or looking forward to creating revenue through your blog, unless people spot your website there is absolutely no use, no matter how good your content or product is.
SEO
This is where SEO comes into play. SEO makes use of some technical as well as marketing techniques to make your website more visible in the cyber world. One of the important aspects of a good SEO is making use of Anchor Texts.
Anchor Texts
Incorporating ‘Anchor Text’ in your website forms one of the most important aspects of content creation. An anchor text is a hyperlinked set of words that looks like it is underlined in blue color. It directs the readers to another page within the same website or takes them to another website you might want to promote.
Anchor texts provide you with added advantage when it comes to your keywords. When search engines crawl into your website(s), the links embedded in the anchor texts are what they read and it provides them an idea of what your website is about.
The concept of SEO has a set of exceptions to every rule. As far as anchor texts are considered there is a possibility of over optimization. This is a major disadvantage as search engines might rank you low or they might even block your website from being crawled. Over optimization happens when you make anchored texts exactly with the same words as that of your keywords without any other related words or any variation. This way the entire SEO optimization of your website may go waste.
Cousins
In SEO, anchor text might look like it is totally irrelevant to keywords but it is not. In fact they are very closely related. There are better chances, pertaining to page ranking, of anchor text in a more appropriate manner and with the right combinations of keywords.

This makes absolute sense. It is esentially keyword stuffing.