Anchor Text and Alt Tags « SEO and SEM Tips

If you’re new to SEO, you may begin to hear a lot about “anchor text” and “alt tags.” These terms refer to to elements in the html programming language. Html is the lingua franca of the worldwide web. They are important because they are both associated with links and links are very important to search engines.

Modern search engines pay a lot of attention to who is linking to whom, and the text that accompanies these links provides a vital contribution to the relevance of the linking page to the page receiving the link.

The following is an example of html code that will appear as the link below:

<a href=”http://www.resoluted.com”>Resolute Digital LLC</a>

The portion of the link that is displayed on the page — Resolute Digital LLC — is the anchor text. By far the most common kind is anchor link is to use the company name when linking to the home page. However, since search engines are very good at ranking company name searches to the company’s url, it’s somewhat of a waste of a perfectlyu good anchor to use is with a brand name. A better idea for Resolute Digital would be if it were fortunate enough to earn a link from a highly regarded SEO website to use an anchor like:

<a href=”http://www.resoluted.com”>Search engine optimization experts from Resolute Digital</a>

This would appear on the page as Search engine optimization experts from Resolute Digital. Now were using anchor text to suggest to the search engine what keywords they might want to rank us on.

Similarly, “alt text” refers to the html tag that is contained in image links. The code below describes and image which, if clicked, will link to the Resolute Digital site.

This code inserted into an html page would look like the following:

Once again, the alt text only displays if the image fails to load. However, because the text is contained in the html code, the search engines can read it. For that reason, we’d recommend the use of a phrase that we’re looking to improve ranking on.