Keywords are the most important thing in SEO, but links should be concerned too. When you start optimizing both of them, then your site might get a better advantage or better chance than others in order to get a higher ranking. Lately, I've briefly talked about type of links——inbound links and outbound links. Now, I'm going to talk about anchor text and internal links.

Anchor text

What is anchor text? In a common definition, anchor means a heavy metal that is attached with a chain and dropped over the ship to keep a boat in place. Well, that sounds weird. Anyway, it's not related, I just defined it for fun. =) So, back to the topic. An Anchor text should be generally like a text that describes the links rather than displaying the links’ address. e.g. The World Avenue and 'The World Avenue' is the anchor text for http://world-avenue.blogspot.com/. Put it in a simple way, it's a text that you clicked on to open a certain hyperlink.

Compare with keywords in links.

Importance of anchor text

Certainly, inserting anchor text will be much better than displaying the entire address of the links. In my point of view, as an ordinary human that owns a pair of normal eyes, would rather prefer the links with anchor text to hyperlinks. Imagine that, how messy it will be if you put it in www.dog-care.com/2011/01/top-10-on-dog-cares.html. And, so are search engines. Anchor texts help search engines spider/crawler to understand well about the links.

And, there is something that you should know about anchor text. If you get a backlinks from a quality site, however, the anchor text is something like 'the worst site I ever seen', you will hardly accept it. That's why, anchor text are important.

Internal links

You should have know a little bit of what anchor texts are and how important are them. Now, you should have known too of what inbound links and outbound links are all about. And, you should able to get some hint from the phrase 'internal links'. Internal links are the links that are linking from a page to a page within your site. Well, as you are reading, there are some internal links in my articles which links within my site.

This will not only help readers to understand more about the topics which can be related with, but could also help you a lot in SEO. As what I've mentioned about, if your page are interconnected with pages within your site or even out from your sites (connected with others' sites), this will facilitate search engines spiders work, meaning that they can be easily crawl onto your page while indexing. And importantly, if you got linked from a lot of outer sources (quality sources/sites), then your site will be gaining in popularity and so are your rankings!

Alt-text

Well, I've discussed on alt-text before. If you missed out, then you may see this.