An anchor text refers to the visible and clickable words that link one page to another. It often appears blue and underlined. However, you can change its style through HTML or CSS. Although anchor texts usually link web pages together, they can also be used to launch downloads such as PDFs and other file formats.
The anchor text describes the article being linked. While the first half of the code contains the URL, the second half describes the link. It might look something like this:
Why Is An Anchor Text Important?
An anchor text is an essential part of search engine optimization and link building as it provides website visitors and search engines with relevant information about the hyperlink.
You can’t control the web pages that link back to your website. However, you can control all the anchor text within your platform. When you optimize your anchors, you’re making it easier for Google to understand your web pages.
Google uses multiple factors to improve search quality, one of which is the anchor text. It uses anchor texts to index your pages and identify spammy practices. It can also use the anchors to understand the kind of topics you’re linking in your content. In turn, this will help it determine the keywords that you’re trying to rank for.
On top of that, building backlinks using anchor text can improve your website’s rankings for non-branded keywords. This can help you widen your reach. At the same time, it can increase your business’s bottom line.
What Are The Different Types of Anchor Text?
Maintaining a diverse set of anchor text is crucial to modern SEO. This is to prevent search engines from viewing your content marketing efforts as spam. Some anchors are necessary for your website’s SEO. Meanwhile, others should be kept to a minimum to prevent search engines from becoming suspicious.
Because there are several types of anchor text, it’s essential to understand each format and determine which ones fit your needs best.
Here are the different types of anchor text:
- Partial match: A partial match anchor text uses a variation of a target keyword. It contains all the words in the keywords but not the exact phrase. Let’s say the keyword phrase is “link building strategies.” Your anchor could be “effective link building strategies.”
- Exact match: As its name suggests, an exact match contains the full keyword or phrase that you want to rank for. An exact match anchor is important for your search engine ranking. Just avoid being spammy to avoid any penalties from Google.
- Generic: Aside from keywords, you can use generic phrases as your anchor text. One such example is “click here.” A generic anchor doesn’t contain a target keyword. Since it doesn’t describe the content that it’s linking to, website visitors have to rely on the surrounding copy to figure out where the link leads to.
- Branded: A branded anchor contains a brand name. You might use it when you’re establishing personal branding. However, you have to be careful about using exact match domain names. If you use it too frequently, you could end up with penalties from Google.
- Latent semantic indexing: An anchor text may contain synonyms of your target keyword. If the keyword is “e-commerce,” an LSI anchor could include “online store” or “online shop.” To find the best LSI keyword, do a quick Google search for your query. Then, turn to the suggestion options in the search results to find relevant synonyms.
- Long-tail: A long-tail anchor text is similar to partial match anchors because it uses a variation of a keyword phrase. However, it’s longer than a partial match.
- Naked link: If you see an entire URL pasted into a blog post, which is clickable, then that’s a naked link anchor text. People often do this when they’re adding the links to their reference materials.
- Images: An anchor text can be the alt text of a photo. The alt text describes an image on your web page, which makes it more accessible to visitors who might be having trouble viewing photos due to internet problems. Adding an alt text also boosts your SEO efforts for Google images.
