Link text or anchor text is the text that’s hyperlinked with the URL of your site. They are usually descriptive in nature of the site being linked to.

For example:
If you want to achieve higher online sales, Search Engine Optimization is a great way to accomplish this goal. In this case, Search Engine Optimization is the anchor text. You will see the link by hovering over the words “Search Engine Optimization”.

Search engines index and sort the web pages by the text on websites contained in their data centers. Text provides the only real effective way to describe a site’s contents. While pictures may be worth a thousand words to a human visitor, they are almost useless to search engines because very little descriptive text can be used to label a picture.

If websites contained the same content, search engines wouldn’t be able to tell which page it should show first in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, the purpose of a search engine is to deliver RELEVANT site results for the searcher.

Not all websites, however, are treated equal. A major defining factor is the Title Tag which fits a maximum of 100 characters. We addressed what Title Tags are earlier so we’ll not repeat it again here.

The other major factor is the number of links pointing to a particular site. Inbound links to a site counts as a “vote” for your site. Just like an election for government officials, the more votes one gets, the more popular that person is. The same holds true for websites – the more links pointing to a site, the higher the “link popularity” of that site.

Naturally, higher link popularity leads to higher search engine rankings for the relevant keywords being targeted.