Google announced today that it has added an enhancement to the seach snippet that is displayed to users on search engine results pages.  Prior to today, search snippets were only comprised of the META description provided by webmasters, a snippet randomly taken off the page by Google, or a combination of both.

From today on, seach snippets on results pages can also include named anchors in a contextual text link format to help users jump directly to specific locations on the page rather than always being taken to the top of the page and being forced to scroll through all of the page content in order to locate the desired information.

Here are examples of 2 search snippets that include the new named anchors:

What Does This Mean For Search Marketers?

It appears that there is now a good reason to include named anchors in page content.  It would be a safe bet to assume that search snippets containing a relevant named anchor that is now clickable and blue instead of an entirely plain text snippet could lead to an increase in click throughs from organic search results.