I recently came upon SEOMOZ' "
Whiteboard Fridays" and this great lesson by Rand Fishkin offering wisdom on the finer points of anchor text and inbound links. This is definitely worth watching for anyone involved with SEO. I thought it was so good I took notes, which you'll find pasted below.
Rand Fishkin's Main Points
1) Multiple anchors from the same page do not provide more value
2) Diversity of anchor text source (websites) provides the most benefit
3) Fluctuating anchor text (ie different variations of anchor text, but links are same) – Do this to avoid trigger pattern matching problems in the engines (if every inbound link is same anchor text, it's suspicious)
4) The link associated with the first anchor text in the HTML is the one the engines recognize - ie if you have the same link, but the anchor text is "website" first and "portuguese cooks" second, the engines will only recognize "website" as the anchor text on that page
5) Internal anchor text only helps a little bit. Don't focus on it. External is where it really helps.
6) For images, alt attribute becomes the anchor text, though sometimes they use the surrounding text. If using images, use good Alt attributes
7) Text surrounding anchor text can matter as well
