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
This 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>
<p>Our Demo web page</p>
<p><a href="http://www.practical-water-gardens.com/">Focus supply the world's
best water features</a></p>
<p> </p>
</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.
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. As time proceeded however it
became possible to spam this backward link system in many ways and the power
that PageRank held has to some extent at least been negated by the spam
techniques used.
Despite the spam the concept of back-linking to your website remains an
absolute key to high rankings. Getting lots of links is far more important than
on-page optimization. Just make sure that they are from valid sources.
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