How many times have you sat down in front of your mac/pc, went to Google Yahoo, or MSN, searched for something, found your results and went to a site? While you were on the site, how many times have you found yourself reading, click on the clickable link and start reading more information on another link, or another page of the same website? You just used anchor text to get to the other page. Anchor-text is no different than one of the nav buttons you use to get to a different page, it’s just used within the text content of the page itself as more navigation. But for whom, Search engines like more navigation and searchers aka you and I, do to, to an extent. We don’t want to get bounced around because we may feel a sense of mistrust and misdirection, thinking that for some reason we got scammed. The webmaster knows that’s not true and so do the search engines, but who are we kidding, without the searchers, there would be no search engines. Think of if there were no televisions in the world, would there be need for a commercial? Cause there would be no networks to broadcast there is no need to advertise.

Search engines wish to see coherent links within the site, supporting or promoting another site shows trust. Anchor text to link to other pages within your site will also allow spiders to crawl through your site more efficiently. Keeping that in mind, don’t obviously go put every word on the site a text link that’s just going to confuse the searchers and mislead the search engine spiders into thinking you are a link farm.

Also consider using all your keywords that you are targeting as anchor text as much as possible, but not exactly making 4 words out of a 7 word sentence your keywords. You really need to match the content, with the title, description and keywords to show signs of usefulness to be ranking where you should be.

Obviously there is the unwritten book of the algorithm of Google, so it’s judgment, statistics and gut with this part of the SEO process, but if done correctly can be extremely beneficial for you search engine rankings.