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490 viewsAnyone who browses the internet uses anchor text daily.
All of us visit various web pages to satisfy our search queries. It is a common practice to click on the links provided in the web page content that takes us to another page providing more information.
Anchor texts are the text descriptions of those internal links.
If you consider the authoritative web page you are visiting as a highway, anchor texts are those exits that take you to other bylanes.
What Is Link Flow?
Link flow measures the amount of link juice, authority, and value transferred from one web page to another via HTML link anchors.
Links can pass on the following types of values from one web page to another,
- Traffic
- PageRank
- Crawling
- Anchor Text
- Visibility
- Trust
What Is Anchor Text?
Before we proceed with the application and optimization of anchor text SEO, let’s answer the most sought after question, “what is anchor text?”
Anchor text in SEO is the text that describes a visible and clickable hyperlink placed within a web page’s content.
Usually, anchored text appears in a different color than the surrounding content and is often underlined.
A well-written link anchor must tell the user what to expect by clicking the hyperlink. It also helps search engines understand the context of the link.
An anchor text html has two parts. The first part contains the URL, and the second describes the link anchor.
Importance Of Anchor Texts SEO
Anchor text SEO plays a vital role as it indicates search engines about the context of the link.
Search engines can understand the topic the link will be redirected to by the description of the link anchor text. If you just use one of your key phrases as anchor text, search engines get confused about which content to consider most relevant.
Hence anchor text becomes a Google ranking factor.
Anchor SEO also plays a vital role in offering a satisfying user experience.
Users decide whether to click the hyperlink by reading the link text description. If the anchor text wrongly describes the context of the content on that link, users get frustrated and leave the page.
That can significantly increase the bounce rate and cause a loss of potential organic traffic.
What Are The Different Types Of SEO Anchor Texts?
There are various types of SEO anchor texts that you can use.
However, mixing different types of SEO anchor texts in your web content is always a good practice.
Article or Page Title: Use the exact page title as an anchor text, like How to Fix 404 Errors?
Naked URL: Using your website URL as anchor text without using any link text, like
Website Name: Using rankwatch.com/ as an anchor text.
Partial Match: Using variations of your targeted keywords as anchor texts, like website SEO analysis tools.
Branded Links: Using your brand’s name as an HTML link anchor, like RankWatch.
Images: You can use any image of your content as the link, and the image’s alt text becomes the anchor text in that case. If the image does not load on any specific browser, the reader can still understand the relevance by reading the anchor text SEO.
Exact match: Using one of the exact targeted keywords as an anchor text, like Backlink Checker.
Generic Links: Using generic keywords as anchor texts, like ‘Know more,’ ‘Click here,’ etc.
Related Keywords: Using key phrases closely related to the main keywords as anchor texts. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) terms are often used as these types of anchor texts.
How To Use Anchor Texts?
You need to remember the following things while using anchor SEO texts for links in your content.
Use Anchor Texts Naturally
When inserting links within your content, remember that they should look natural and relevant to the topic.
The same applies to the anchor text SEO as well. They must fall in place within the content naturally and describe the relevancy of the link to the readers.
In the above example, the anchored text ‘structured data markup’ appears naturally and perfectly blends within the content.
If you are struggling to place a link within a specific portion of the content, the link may be irrelevant and can be placed somewhere else.
Match The Anchor Text SEO With The Targeted Page
You must write the anchor SEO text considering the targeted page’s content.
The link anchor text must clearly describe the context of the content to the readers. They should understand what to expect from the targeted page the moment they read the anchored text.
In the above example, the anchored Text ‘Google’s Knowledge Graph’ clearly indicates that the reader will get further information on Google’s knowledge graph by clicking on the link anchor SEO text.
Do Not Fool Your Readers
Your SEO anchor text should clearly describe to the users what they can expect clicking on the link.
Refrain from fooling your readers by using ambiguous SEO anchor texts.
For example, if the users see the anchored text ‘Google Pixel 7 pro’ and after clicking the same lands on the site “pexels” offering free stock photos, it will surely frustrate them and create doubt about the authenticity of your web page.
Make The Anchor SEO Text Visible
Your readers must quickly identify the SEO anchor texts in your content and clearly understand that they are clickable as well.
You can make the anchor SEO texts bold, underlined, or use a different color to make them prominent and easily visible.
In the above example, the anchored text ‘OWL ontology’ is in bold and clearly reflects that it is clickable.
However, you should check Google’s Guidelines on natural anchor SEO texts for further help.
How To Optimize Anchor Texts For SEO?
You should optimize your anchor texts to achieve anchor text SEO.
When it comes to optimizing or choosing the perfect anchor text, RankWatch serves as the perfect companion.
Since it is important to select relevant anchor texts that convey the gist of the linked website, you need to have a reliable keyword researcher that can perform the task for you.
RankWatch’s keyword researcher can easily find suitable keywords that perfectly sum up the linking site’s content, and have good search volume as well.
Moreover, you will also get the difficulty level of these keywords that further helps in understanding how to use them for getting desired rankings.
Apart from that, RankWatch also has another tool that can help you discover unique anchor texts within seconds.
RankWatch’s Backlink Audit is not only known for unraveling the link profile of a website but also present you the various anchor SEO texts that are used for linking to the said website.
The above information can prove to be extremely useful when you want to link to different websites to build your link profile.
If you are confused as to which SEO anchor texts to use, simply follow the below mentioned steps:
- Log in to your RankWatch account and go to the Backlink Audit dashboard
- Enter the website URL to whom you want to link
- Once the dashboard discloses the site’s link profile, simply click on the “Anchors” option from the overview tab
- A new dashboard disclosing all the anchor texts that are used for linking to the website, will appear in front of you.
- The advanced table states all important metrics related to individual anchor texts, like anchor text type, anchor text percentage, number of new and lost links associated with each SEO anchor text, whether the link is do-follow or no-follow, and so on.
Using these metrics, you can easily sort out the anchor SEO texts that are relevant to the website and use it for passing on the link juice.
Moreover, the backlink audit also has the feature to differentiate the anchor texts used particularly for linking to the site’s home page from the ones that are used for passing on the link flow to the inner pages of the site.
When it comes to anchor SEO text optimization, the best method would be to use them naturally in the content.
Since anchor SEO texts are quite different from search queries, you cannot use them throughout the content piece like keywords. You can only use the SEO anchor text once, for interlinking purposes.
Conclusion
When relevant anchor texts are used naturally within the content, they help search engines understand the context of your content and your website structure as well.
That, in turn, helps your content rank higher in search results.
Natural anchor texts also help readers decide whether to click on the link.
Please think from a reader’s point of view while writing your anchor text. That will help you to understand which phrase of words will best describe the content of the targeted web page to your target audience.
It will be of great help if you use a reliable tool that offers optimization ideas for your content and anchor texts.
However, over-optimizing your content with link anchor texts is not advised. That may indicate to search engines that your content is spammy.
The length of your anchor text should preferably be within five words or less, and try to mix different types of anchor texts within your content.
I hope this article and our suggested tool will help you create more natural anchor texts and achieve higher rankings.
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