What is Anchor Text?
Consider a highlighted small text in a website, and it’s also clickable. That’s exactly what an anchor text is. It's a clickable link that smoothly takes you to another webpage, or a new section inside the same website. Anchor texts are usually prominent text links that gives you more information about a webpage’s contents.
Importance of Anchor Text in SEO
Anchor text is a helping tool for both – people and search engines. How? A clear, clickable link helps people understand how they can surf the website better. They can easily find what they need. And for search engine, it tells us what contents will be inside the link, this helps them rank better. Google’s algorithm first used anchor texts to scoop out the most relevant pages to display.
Types of Anchor Text
- Exact Match: It’s the exact words used in an anchor text which takes us to a webpage exactly about that thing. Let’s say, using the anchor text "best SEO tools" links to a page about top SEO tools.
- Partial Match: Here, other words are used with the anchor text keywords. Let’s consider the link that says, “"Easy tips to get your website noticed online," links to a page about SEO tactics.
- Branded: This anchor texts adds brand names, simply. Like, "Relevic’s analytics platform."
- Generic: This uses general terms in links, like “ click here,” or “read more.”
- Naked URL: This type pastes the entire link as it is, like: "https://www.relevic.com."
- Image Alt Text: When images are in links, there is an alt text which tells the search engine, like hey! The image is about a cat.
Best Practices for Optimizing Anchor Text
- Relevance: Use that anchor text which relates with the content of your webpage. You cannot provide an anchor text about cats that leads to a page about dogs.
- Diversity: Use a mix of anchor types so you can create an optimized webpage. Using many exact match texts leads to search engine thinking it’s a scam.
- Avoid Over-Optimization: Balance is key. Don’t add too many keywords because then it’s likely to be considered spam.
- Descriptive and Concise: The shorter the better! Don’t use too many words in the anchor text, keep it short yet informative.
- Natural Integration: Add anchor texts which seem natural with the rest of the page. Avoid those awkward, out the place links.
- Limit Generic Anchors: Using general terms like, “click here” can be too confusing.Instead, clearly ‘describe’ the text for users ease.
- Internal Linking Strategy: Users can easily find their way around a webpage, if you set a smart internal-linking system of anchor texts.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Keyword Stuffing: Don’t overload your site with extra keywords. Search engine will place penalties on your website.
- Irrelevant Linking: Search engines and users won’t trust you if you put anchor texts which don’t match your webpage content.
- Overuse of Exact Match Anchors: Exact match anchor texts only makes search engine mark you as ‘suspicious.’ Use only 1% or 5% of exact match links.
Anchor Text and User Experience
If your anchor texts are clear and informative, of course it will make users easily search for what they want on your webpage. Imagine labelled shelves in a supermarket – easy to spot items!
Anchor Text in Link Building
When you use links from other sites, the secret weapon is the anchor text, which helps search engines know what your content is really about. If you use relevant and trustworthy anchor texts, it can help you rate at the top of your SEO game!
Monitoring and Adjusting Anchor Text Strategies
Lastly, you can track the success of your anchor texts by checking its performance daily. You can also use analytic tools to see how many clicks it generated, and how users are interacting on the website. Improve if needed. If you keep your anchor texts with the SEO trends and the user needs, you are bound to win!
