Are you interested in learning more about anchor text and SEO? If yes, then this guide will be great for you! We’ve gathered precious pieces of information on using anchor text strategy for SEO in order to achieve the best SEO results. Keep reading and you’ll learn them all.

What is an Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is a visible and clickable part of an article. Most often this part of the text is underlined or is shown in a different color so it’s easy to recognize it. If you get your anchor text right, you’ll increase the chance of someone clicking on a link you’ve put. Thus, the linked page will get more audience. If you’re wondering whether your website has a good performance or not, we recommend you to get an SEO audit. After you do this, you’ll know whether you have to change the strategy for your anchor text or not.

In every article you write or read, you’ll stumble upon anchor text.

The importance of Anchor text

Most people don’t realize they use anchor text on a daily basis. Whether you’re reading an article or you’re searching for the destination for your next vacation, anchor text will be presented to you. For example, you’re reading an article about the City of Miami. While reading, you stumble upon a clickable link that says “top ten restaurants in Miami”. You will click on it because you want to inform yourself about Miami as much as you can before you go there on a vacation. Well, that clickable text is anchor text.

We can easily say that the purpose of anchor text is to connect you with other parts of websites and to provide you with many pieces of information. If anchor text strategy is done properly, then you will get the most out of your links. And to do so, you will need to know a few things about optimization and relevancy. With the help of anchor text, Google can easily understand the relevancy of every website and recognize spam. So, if you execute your anchor text strategy for SEO poorly, Google will give you a penalty for over-optimization and spam. Because of this, learning SEO is a must if you want for your website to have a good performance. However, you can also find experts that know how to increase your website’s performance. Sometimes it’s better to leave it to the pros.

If you’re using anchor text strategy for SEO properly, your website will get more audience.

Which types of anchor text exist?

In order to make your website better, you’ll have to understand the types of anchor texts. Each of these types can affect your website’s performance, but you’ll have to know which one will do the best job. There are many types of anchor texts. However, we’ve decided to explain to you only the most common ones.

• Exact-match – this kind of anchor text uses the exact-match of target keyword for a target page.
• Partial-match – anchor text is a variation of a keyword for a page that is linked.
• Generic – using a generic word as anchor text such as “Click here” or “Read more”.
• Branded – a brand name is anchor text.
• Naked link – using a URL as an anchor which isn’t the best anchor text strategy for SEO.
• Image – an anchor is contained in the image’s alt attribute. When you click on this image, Google will redirect you to a page that’s linked.

So, what is the best Anchor text strategy for SEO?

After learning the basics of anchor text, it’s time to give you more information about the best anchor strategies. These strategies will make a great impact on your website. Therefore, having an SEO friendly anchor text is a must! So, on what should you pay attention?

Conciseness

There are no rules when it comes to the length of anchor text you’ll use. However, if you want to follow the best anchor text strategies for SEO, staying concise and succinct is of great importance. When you’re thinking about your anchor text, you should ask yourself these two things:

• What is the most accurate way for describing a page that you will link to?
• Which phrases and words would attract the audience the most?

Always think about readers and try to stay straight to the point. Your anchor text needs to be noticeable and carefully placed in a sentence.

Relevance

As time goes by, Google is becoming progressively better at understanding the meaning of the website’s content. Because of this, when building anchor text you’ll have to always think about its relevance. If you want to ensure the relevance of your anchor text, try to describe the targeted page as much as you can. But remember, stay concise when you’re doing it.

Google can easily figure out whether your anchor text is relevant to the website or not.

Keeping it natural

Even though SEO strategies will help your website, avoid over-optimization! It will bring you more harm than good. Use natural anchor text phrases and varieties of keywords. If there are too many same anchors, or you’re using too many internal linking, there’s a chance that Google will recognize that article as spam. However, SEO experts can work with you in order to place your anchors properly.

Using “Deep” links

Best SEO strategies recommend linking to deep-level pages. Therefore, linking to homepage or product pages won’t provide the desired results. The way Google sees it, linking to these pages doesn’t look as natural as linking to blog posts. So, with “deep” links you will create a more natural and versatile text.

Steering away from links of low quality

Pay attention to outbound links you use in your anchor text. If these links are of low quality, Google will recognize and mark them as spam. Even though you will get paid for linking to these suspicious pages, try to stay away from it. With high-quality links and by following anchor text strategies for SEO, you’ll make the desired impact on your website. And that’s exactly what you need.