Anchor text is very important for internet marketing / search engine optimization (SEO) and is known to have a significant weighting for Search Engine Optimisation. Anchor text is also known as link text. This is the visible (clickable) text between the HTML anchor and tags. Clicking on an anchor text activates a hyperlink to another web page on your site or a web page on an external site. This text provides additional relevance to the quality of a link because search engine algorithms consider the hyperlink keywords as relevant to the respective landing page.

Anchor text looks like this: <a href="http://www.yoursite.com" title="your anchor text">Your Anchor Text</a>

The anchor text tells the visitor and search engines what the linked page is all about. This is important for the ranking of the linked page and is also thought to be beneficial to the ranking of the linking page.

Google provides a search operator called 'allinanchor' that allows a user to search all the pages that are linked to through a particular key phrase.  The search is entered as allinanchor:Anchor text to search.  This search also provides links to the pages that are best optimised for the particular phrase.