What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text that can make search engines and users understand about the extra relevant contextual information they are going to view on the destination page.
Example:
Types of anchor text
There are 7 major different types of Anchor text Variations that are used to link to your content both internally and externally. They are:
Branded Anchor texts
A link to your content with your Business brand name included in Anchor text.
Example: Web Marketer’s Guide is one of the Best SEO Blogs in India.
Exact-Match Anchor text
This Anchor text specifies the exact content that the user is going to view on the landing page when they click on it.
Example:
Know the Major differences Between SEO Vs PPC
Naked link Anchor text
link without text i.e a URL itself is used as Anchor.
Visit: https://www.webmarketersguide.com/ to know more.
Partial-Match Anchor text
Anchor text that contains a keyword variation to Focus or Target Keyword along with other words. It contains all the words of a query but not exactly.
Example: For example: ‘URL Optimization’ linking to a page about URL.
Generic Anchor texts
Link to your content with a generic word used in the Anchor Text.
Examples of Generic Anchor texts:
Click here, Know more, Read more,
Note: Avoid usage of generic words for Anchor texts.
Image Anchor text
Alt text used for images is considered as Anchor text for images with a link.
Random Anchor text
This Anchor text doesn’t contain either generic keywords or any focus keyword related to the landing page.
Example: Know more about on page seo and their importance.
Why are Anchor texts important for SEO?
The text you choose for anchors is important for a few reasons:
- Anchor text is also one of the ranking factors.
- Anchor text specifies the users and search engines about the valuable additional content they are going to view when they click on it.
- Help User-navigation easier through relevant anchor texts.
- Google Penguin and Panda Update Penalize the sites with over-optimized Anchor texts. It also monitors backlinks and its anchor texts to see if a site is over-optimized.
- Important to increase user interaction with the site.
- linking to other content through relevant Anchor text makes google consider the link text as an indicator of the topic of the linked page.
How do anchor text influences search engine rankings?
- Anchor text of a link has a significant impact on the SEO rankings of a site. If the Anchor text contains the target keyword of the webpage that it links to, then this can enhance the ranking of the linked page for that keyword. This method can be applied to both internal linking and link building for your site.
- So, creating many instances of relevant anchors to your website makes it easy for you to register to google what are you are trying to rank for.
Best practices for SEO-Friendly anchor texts:
- Avoid using the URL of a page, Generic terms as the anchor text.
- Try to Match the link text with the content of the page you’re linking to.
- Add Internal links naturally according to the flow of the content
- Make link text visible and clickable. You can do it by using a different color for the link, underlining it, Making it Bold, or Making it italic.
- Avoid using too many links to a page and all using the same anchor text, for both internal links and link building as Google might sense it as spammy behavior.
- Try to Review your internal and external link profile once a month to keep control over anchor text optimization.
- stop building links to low-quality sites.
- Use a variety of anchor text types: use of partial match, related match, page title, brand name anchor text can still give Google the right signals.
How to avoid anchor text over-optimization?
Things to do to avoid over-optimization of anchor text.
- Use Short and relevant keywords as Anchor text instead of using exact match keywords because google takes text around anchor text.
Example: off page seo Strategy
You can do this
Follow this off page seo strategy
2. Give Anchor links to only trusted sites if given to untrusted sites add “nofollow” attribute to stop search engines from passing link juice and ignore the anchor text.
3. If you want to link to an article of a website without using keywords. Simply follow the safe practice of adding a website brand name in the anchor text for the link.
Example: “According to WebMarketer’sGuide…..”
