Anchor Text and Keyword relevancy

[Sergio Simarro]

Hi all!

I have read many many posts about anchor text that benefits the page it links to. But, is it taken into account for search engines?

Imagine, I have a page with the following code:

Beaches from Benidorm

Would the "Beaches from Benidorm" text used for search engines to evaluate the current page?

And going a bit further, now let's use:

[img]beach.jpg[/img]Beaches from Benidorm

Would the text "The best beach in Benidorm" from the ALT attribute considered too?

Thanks and enjoy the summer!

[wrmineo]

Yes, I believe it is taken into account for SEs because as their bots crawl a site and follow links, they're following the linked anchor text. Personally, I think if you can find an anchor text that is symbiotic to both sites, all the better!

The alt-tag is important because bots cannot read an image obviously, but they can read the corresponding text in the tag. To what extent that gives "value" to the link I honestly don't know but I certainly try to embed with content, keyword relevant text no different than I would an anchor text - however, I would caution not to simply pack in spam, but rather a well considered phrase or sentence.

[Sergio Simarro]

Hi W.R.

Thanks! I thought the same, but I am not completely sure.

And about spamming, I always try not to break the SEO rules. I posted this question due to a problem of usability. Imagine a newspaper website where you have a photo and a brief description of a news, so when you click on the photo or over the summary, you are taken to read the full story.

That's more or less what I am trying to do for a new web site that I am developing but, if I insert the whole text into a link, I don´t want to miss content for search engines.

Anyway, I have made some changes into the car hire site, so I think for monday or tuesday I will be able to post a response to this issue.

Thanks and good luck with your sites.

[supernatural_247]

another tip - the text link anchor text should be the same as the page title to which it is linked.

ex: if your page's title is Beaches from Benidorm, then your link's anchor text should be that as well.