PageRank™ FAQ's:
What is Anchor Text?
The Internet consists of billions of web pages, all linked together through so called hyper-links. You will not be able to navigate the pages of your site if they were not linked. The first point is this: not only are there links between the pages of your web site, other web sites link to you, and you to others.
The most basic form of a link looks like this:
(When you click this link, you are returned back to this page)
All the text that you see in the underlined link above is referred to as the Anchor Text. This text is seen as the "reputation" of the page it is linking to. If there are several links pointing to a page with these words in it, the reputation becomes stronger and Google will start paying attention to the fact that the page it is pointing to is indeed about "Anchor Text".
Both internal links (between pages) and external links to your pages contribute to reputation. Think about this - if you search for "home" on Google, THe New York Times web site shows up as number 1. Why? Because it has more than 350,000 pages in it's web site, all with the anchor text "home" on it. This should ring a bell! Never use the anchor text "home" to refer to your home page! If the topic of the content on your home page is "Cosmetic Dentist Chicago", then the link reputation should be the same.