Why Optimizing Anchor Text Is Important For Your Website

Anchor Text: What Is It And How to Optimize It?

If you are a blogger or an internet marketer, you must have read many articles on SEO, link building, etc. and there is a commonly used term "anchor text." But how many of you know why it is important for your website and how to optimize it?

In this post, I'm going to cover everything about the anchor text and how you can use it to improve your SEO practices.

Contents:

What Is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is that clickable and visible text which is pointed to another URL within the same website or to a different site. In other words, it's a clickable text in a hyperlink.

The HTML format of anchor text looks like this:

Why Is Anchor Text Optimization Important?

The importance of anchor text in SEO is the same as that of backlinks. Before Google's Penguin update arrived in 2012, anchor text was one of the ways Google considered for the ranking of a website.

It was easy to rank with 100% exact match anchor text for all your SEO backlinks. But after changes in Google algorithms, anchor text is considered one of the reasons for Google to penalize your website if you do it in a wrong way, called anchor text over-optimization.

After the Penguin update, Google takes it more seriously to check keywords in your anchor text. Now, if Google finds any website that is of low-quality and doing abusive use of anchor text, it starts penalizing this website and drops its rankings in the search results as it's against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. After being penalized, you will lose a significant amount of traffic because of the rankings drop.

Googlebots can quickly detect which website is a spammer one and not following Google's rules based on their keywords, synonyms, and the title tag used as the anchor text.

As mentioned in post-Penguin anchor text case study by MOZ, you don't need to create hundreds of links with exact match anchor text to get a better ranking in search results. It would be sufficient if you build 5-10 links with a wide range of mixed anchor text with some of your main keywords.

Types of Anchor Texts

There are following types of anchor text:

#1: Exact-match

An exact match anchor text is the simplest and most powerful type of all anchor text. It includes the same keyword that we are trying to optimize our target page.

#2: Partial-match

Partial match stands for nearly similar. This type of anchor text contains some keywords similar to the exact-match anchor text.

#3: Branded

Branded anchors are those anchor text that includes the actual brand name of the business as the link's text.

#4: Naked Anchor Link

Naked links are the actual URL of a specific webpage. They contain the hyperlink as the anchor text itself. For example, https://serpstat.com/blog/ instead of Serpstat.

#5: Generic

Generic simple anchors are generally those text links that convince people to click, for example:

#6: LSI keywords

LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are variations of your target keywords.

How to Perform Anchor Text Optimization

Anchor text plays a major role in better search engine ranking of your website, but many website owners use over-optimized anchor texts in their link building strategy and get hit by a Google penalty.

Here are some tips you should use for anchor text optimization for better SEO practices.

  1. Keep anchor texts relevant to your content— for the best practice of SEO, you need to keep your anchor text relevant to your content.
  2. Use low keyword density — keyword density could be a significant issue of Google penalty.
  3. Avoid linking to spammy sites— having links from quality websites is much better than having links from a large number of low-quality sites.
  4. Avoid keyword-rich anchors in internal linking— although internal linking is highly encouraged, creating too many links with the same anchor text can harm your link profile.
  5. Right distribution of anchor text— having a lot of the same type of anchor text will get you in trouble quickly. Here are the anchor text percentages you can use:
    • Branded anchor text: 50%;
    • Naked links: 20%;
    • Generic anchors: 5%;
    • LSI, partial match anchors: 1-5%;
    • Exact match anchor text: 1-2%;
  6. Write relevant guest posts — writing a guest post for high authority blogs is the best way to build a strong link profile.

FAQ

How to use anchors?

You can use anchors for short description of the link content.

How to create anchor text?

Type your anchor text between tags and

What is an anchor link?

An anchor link is a web page element that links to another location on the same page.

Why are link texts important for SEO?

Links are important for SEO because there is a direct connection between quality and quantity of links to your website and how much search traffic your site receives.

Wrapping up

Anchor texts are an element that plays a major role in your rankings and getting it wrong increases the chance of your website being penalized.

Try to use them in a way that looks natural with the flow of content.