Anchor text is crucial in the world of content marketing and SEO. But what is it and why is it so important? To put it simply, anchor text is clickable text that links to another page either on your own website or another website. Anchor texts allow search engines to better understand what your page is about. The more related links, the better the page will rank. This is because the search engine is able to easily comprehend what your page is about, and trusts it is providing the most relevant information. Optimizing anchor text can help to improve SEO ranking, which is why they are so important for all website owners to understand.
What are the different types of anchor texts?
There are various types of anchors that content creators are able to use to link to other pages. First, there are generic anchors. Generic anchors are links such as “click here” or “show more” that aren’t targeted, and use basic phrases to link to another page. Branded anchors use the brand name as the link to the page. For example, if there were a link to a page on Petco, “Petco” would be the anchor text. An exact match anchor, also known as a keyword anchor, is arguably the most important kind of anchor text. It is text that matches your target keyword exactly. For example, if Petco’s keyword was “dog toys”, the anchor text would be “dog toys”. Branded and keyword anchors are a combination of branded anchors and exact match anchors, therefore the anchor would be “dog toys at Petco”. The last important anchor is a naked link anchor, where the anchor is simply the URL to another page.
While these are some of the most important types of anchor text, here are others worth understanding also- https://www.semrush.com/blog/what-is-anchor-text-and-how-can-i-optimize-it/.
How can I optimize anchor text?
Because search engines pay attention to the number of links a website has when ranking pages, it’s important to work on SEO link building and inbounding links. Therefore, it is important to come up with an SEO anchor text strategy. There is not one best anchor text to use. Rather, in order to optimize anchor text, a combination of all of the types of anchors is necessary. While exact match anchors may seem like the best variation of anchors because it will directly tell Google what your page is about, over optimizing in terms of keyword anchors leads Google to believe that it is spam. Because of this, using a variety of anchors is vital to anchor text optimization. Avoiding high keyword density in anchor text, especially when creating internal links, will help build Google’s trust. Using less keyword rich anchor text and a distribution of the other types of anchors is the best for optimizing anchors. The best anchor text distribution depends on factors such as the competition and the industry, but poweredbysearch.com breaks the idea down nicely in a visual at https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/7-types-of-anchor-text-you-can-use-to-avoid-a-google-flag/.
It’s also very important when setting up anchor text to ensure you have link relevancy. Link relevancy means that the page you are linking to is related to your own page. This will help both your own page and the linked page’s rankings. Using a good distribution of types of anchors and ensuring you have link relevancy are both keys to optimizing anchor text on a website looking to improve SEO and rank higher on search engines.
Rebecca Kawamoto