Okay, so what exactly is "Anchor Text" ?

First of all, in simplest terms, anchor text is a hyperlink.

A hyperlink as you know is often abbreviated to "link". It's the HTML coding that when clicked on will bring you to a webpage. It can be another webpage your site or a webpage external to your site (someone else's website).

So, an "Internal link" is a hyperlink to another page on your website.

An "External Link" is a hyperlink to someone else's webpage, definitely not your website.

The WordPress Menu navigation that is usually automatically created within a theme is a typical example of internal links. Also, the various plugins that create "sitemaps" are another example of automatically created internal links.

Okay, Peej, I understand that, but what the heck does that have to do with Anchors?

Within the HTML of a hyperlink are the words or phrase that we see displayed on the page. The hyperlink is the "hidden" URL that we would type into a browser to get to the page. In the following example, the Anchor text is "Example Anchor Text". This "anchors" the link with the phrase that we will see when this code is published.

<a href="http://www.example.com">Example Anchor Text</a>

In our WordPress Editors where we type content for our blog posts and pages.

1. We typically type the words in the Visual Editor:

2. Then, highlight the words and select the Insert Link tool:

3. Then, we can either type in an external link OR select an already existing page or post within our own website:

And Voila, you have a hyperlink WITH anchor text:

Wordpress automagically highlights the anchor text and underlines it.

This is the most basic example of anchor text.

Now, let's get into why this is important.......