Importance of Anchor Text in Top Search Engine Rankings

I read in a lot of places that writing a good keyword rich anchor text link is very good for search engine optimization (SEO) and higher ranking of your webpages. I did not believe much of it till I did a Google search for “Click here” by mistake (thanks to a bookmarklet!)

Anchor text is simply the text you use to direct to a any link. Here the anchor text is “Click me” which can link to any url. See the result when you search for “click me”. The usual results are links to download pages of Adobe Acrobat reader, Apple quicktime, Microsoft internet explorer, java etc…

Why? If you have noticed that thousands of websites (including mine) post anchor text named “click here” and links to download sites of Adobe reader, IE, Quicktime etc. These sites provide links to download pdf files and provide an additional link alongside “click here” pointing you the need to download Adobe acrobat reader to open the pdf file. Similarly many sites advise you to “click here” to download Quicktime to play that video, or “click here” to download Internet Explorer to view a site optimized for IE only.

If you see these sites, they are not keyword rich for the words “Click here” or do not have this text at all on those pages, not do they have them in META keywords tags. I am not a SEO expert, but I believe they are ranking high in search engine rankings results mainly because of anchor texts.

I know many webmasters use this to get high results in SERPS (search engine results pages). And now I have started believing in search engine optimization tactics with clever use of anchor text. What are your thoughts on this?