Search engines and real visitors are almost alike now. Search engines like Google.com and Live.com continuously update their algorithms to make their systems “think” and “make decisions” like humans do. Some form of artificial intelligence.

Search engines and real visitors are almost alike now. Search engines like
Google.com
and
Live.com
continuously update their algorithms to make their systems “think” and “make decisions” like humans do. Some form of artificial intelligence.

Search Engines Need to Be Told What a Page is About

Machines however are not that smart enough as humans. Humans can decide what something about by looking at different factors. Search engines identify what a website or a website is about by reading what is written in the page or what is written about the page in some other pages.

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Search engines can’t also understand what is said about a page in another page. But can understand what an index finger, a pointer or a sign board tells about the page. The index finger can also be called anchor text or the text used in the link to describe a page.

Anchor Text Can Tells What the Landing Page Is

The anchor text of a link is just like someone pointing to something and telling what it is. For example a person points to a bus and tells “bus to south beach”. In addition to the sign on the bus, someone else too is saying it is “bus to south beach”. If many persons tell a person who can’t read a board it is “bus to south beach”, the person will know it is “bus to south beach”.

Same thing works with Google search engine. Google works on somewhat crowd psychology. Sufficient number of people tells a page is about something, Google too takes the word and acknowledges the page on what is said.

Machines however can only read what is written and can’t take discriminatory decisions. The biggest example of this disability to discrimination is the famous SEO joke “CLICK HERE”. Search for that term and you will get Adobe PDF download page. This is because a lot of (I mean thousands of) websites that offer to download pdf files also give a link to Adobe’s PDF Reader download page.

You wonder what the websites use to describe the download page? It is “click here to download Adobe PDF reader”. Sure enough, Google thinks the page is about “CLICK HERE” and shows it as the result for the phrase “click here”.

Same thing works with human visitors too. Doesn’t it? Do you have any doubt? Don’t you click a link that says “e-commerce marketing secrets”, in search of some e commerce techniques? If you have any more doubts, go to
WikiPedia.org
and search for any topic that you can think about and see if you are attracted to the links appear within the text.

The concept is simple – whenever you link to a page (within or out of your website), use some anchor text, preferably an important keyword. This way, both search engines and your visitors quickly identify what the resultant page will be.