What is anchor text in SEO? Basically clickable text in a hyperlink is termed anchor text.
According to the SEO best practices, the anchor text should be relevant to the page you are linking as compared to the generic text.
You can also change the color of anchor text or underline it through HTML code.
The keywords used in anchor text are used by the Google search engine as signals to understand the topic of a webpage.
What is Anchor Text in SEO?
Anchor text is also known as a link title or link label.
The words contained by an anchor text also help to determine the ranking of the page that this page will receive in different search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
There are also some links on the web that don’t have anchor text and are known as naked URLs.
Anchor text is displayed differently by different browsers.
Using anchor text properly can help a page to rank in search engines opposite to the keyword used in anchor text. Now we will discuss in more detail, what is rich anchor text.
Types of anchor text in SEO:
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Exact Match Anchor Text
The exact match anchor text is which has the same keyword highlighted as the targeted keyword of the web page.
- Variation of Anchor Text
A spam filter of Google is triggered when exact anchor text links are built by the websites aggressively.
Because it is unnatural thing that all the web pages that link to your website have exact match anchor text.
Some anchor text variations are natural such as a great number of internal links are naked URLs.
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Manipulation of Anchor Text
It is possible to over-optimize the anchor text of your links as a result of being a relevancy signal for the Google search engine.
What is Rich Anchor Text?
When anchor text contains your primary keyword place your website link on it, that is called Rich Anchor Text.
What is Targeted Anchor Text?
Mostly the anchor text is used from the links which are built from the other websites by the link building and SEO experts. These anchor texts are also termed targeted anchor texts.
The anchor text will contain the exact targeted keyword which an SEO expert is trying to rank in the Google search engine.
What is Backlink Anchor Text?
The link from another website is a backlink.
The anchor text of a backlink is the anchor text used by the other sites linking to your website.
These backlinks anchor texts make it easy for the search engines to determine the most relevant keywords of a web page that they want to rank.
What are One-Way Anchor Text Backlinks?
If an anchor text backlink to website X links to another website Y but website Y does not link back to site X then your website has a one-way anchor text backlink. T
The one-way anchor text backlinks are searched by SEO experts as PageRank juice flows from one to another domain.
It has been observed that a web page with more one-way anchor text backlinks ranks better in search engines.
What is Anchor Text Excessiveness?
You can also have a good number of anchor text on a web page like keyword stuffing.
When there are a lot of keywords on a single web-page linking to a lot of other web pages of a site or to the same web page with different anchor texts then it is an excessive anchor text case.
This activity is considered spam by the Google search engine which means that it can also lead your website to penalties.
What is the Distribution of Anchor Text?
As link builders are building links to their websites with targeted anchor text actively only specific keywords will have a higher share than the overall anchor text distribution of a page.
What is a Spammy Anchor Text?
A link with an anchor text that has no kind of relationship with the page it is linking to or exists on it is known as spammy anchor text.
Spammy anchor texts are one of the black hat SEO practices used to rank a page temporarily for high-competition keywords.
But spammy anchor text can also be used to harm other websites or websites of a specific person through Black hat SEO.
Unnatural Anchor Text vs Natural Anchor Text:
It is invisible that you will get a bad anchor text when web surfers link to your site and it will not help to know about the topic of your web page.
These are natural occurrences like naked URLs and are not covered by search engines.
On the other side, the excessive use of anchor text, lack of naked URLs, and a lot of targeted one-way anchor text backlinks are the signatures of unnatural anchor text.
The websites that focus on manipulating anchor text are penalized by the Google search engine as user experience is compromised.
You should create quality content to get natural anchor text links to your site. All the anchor texts should come naturally to your website.
Anchor Text vs. Anchored Links:
Here we will discuss the difference between anchor text and anchored links.
Any SEO expert can explain to you about anchor text.
The actual words used to hyperlink to the internal page of your website or another website are considered anchor text.
The anchor text has been known to impact SEO for a long time by matching backlinks to keywords.
The anchored links are quite different from the anchor text.
If you ever clicked on a hyperlink and this page load to jump to the most relevant place on the page immediately. Then you have clicked an anchored link.
Working of Anchored Links:
If you see a URL with a pound sign (#) with a word after it then you can say that you are looking for an anchored link.
For example
https://nowreturnon.org/Sample-page#Anchor
This particular URL tells the browser to load the page first and then move to the top, a pre-specified location or main spot of the viewing area, it depends on how far down is the page.
You need to define the anchor point on a web page before you assemble the above URL.
You can do this by using the tag “name”.
Anchored Links and SEO:
To enhance the user experience, anchored links are considered more useful.
Because you offer the reader quick access to the content they are looking for by loading the relevant content just after clicking on it.
Less confusion and fewer clicks will make it easy for users to go through your website easily.
Anchor links always have an impact from the SEO point of view. As suggested by the above question it does not impact the web crawler.
After “#” anything is considered browser-only command and is ignored by the spiders completely.
It is used by the browsers only to route the content for the reasons of UX.
But there are two useful advantages of anchored links:
The keyword used for the anchor link is noted by the web crawler the same as the anchor text.
It is just a little indicator of relevance but nonetheless, it is taken into account.
For complex or longer pages, direct links to anchored locations are created by the search engines.
They are positioned the same as site links in function.
Are anchor links good for SEO?
In short, anchor links are a best practice of SEO.
External anchor text is used by Google to understand the topic of a particular web page and also for which keyword that page should rank.
Google uses some techniques to improve the search quality which includes anchor text, proximity information, and page rank.
Like if we linked a page to the following article with the anchor text “dog biscuits” it means that the page that is linked to this article will definitely have something about the dog biscuits.
If you will repeat the same process then Google will be confident that this page should be ranked opposite to the keyword “dog biscuit”.
There are very slim chances to link the same web page with two or more two unrelated websites with the same anchor text even if the page does not have content related to the dog biscuits.
After that, you will definitely come to know why anchor text is considered a ranking factor.
How You can improve your anchor link Texts?
Here are some tips to improve your anchor text.
- Create a natural flow in Content
Generally, you should have a natural flow while writing.
This thing is the same for anchor text.
You should make sure while adding links they fit perfectly with other content on your web page.
Like if you want to put a link in a particular sentence, maybe the link does not belong there.
So, it will be better to put this link somewhere else and don’t make your content unnatural and difficult to read.
As links are important for SEO you need to make sure that they would never be a hurdle in the way of the message you want to convey.
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Match Link Text with the Content you Want to Link
Matching the link text with the content of the page you want to link is a good practice to write link texts.
It should be clear in the reader’s mind when he sees the linked text that he would be directed to a page that has the same topic as the linked text.
More precisely you should know what to expect if you click on an anchor text.
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Don’t trick your Site Users
The link texts should be used responsibly. It is very crucial.
Make sure your readers do not trick with links.
Such as if your link text identifies automobiles it would not be a good practice if that link leads the reader to a page related to food.
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Making Clear the Link Text is Clickable
It would be clear to the reader that the link text is clickable.
To do this you can use different kinds of colors to highlight the link or underline it and it will be better to use both of them.
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Put your Keyphrase in Quotes
For example, if you are writing an article and targeting a long-tail keyword such as “learning how to knit?”.
Now if you will use any of these words from your targeted keyword in link text you may get feedback from the Yoast SEO plugin to change it.
To avoid getting a red bullet in Yoast SEO you can put the full keyword in quotes. In this way, the analysis will only match the complete phrase instead of words.
Internal Links and Anchor Texts:
Internal links are very important and we all know about them.
There is a built-in internal linking tool if you are using Yoast SEO as your SEO plugin. You can use other SEO plugins like RankMath, and All-in-OPne SEO as well.
It makes it easy to find relevant content on your website.
You always need to think carefully about the anchor text whenever you have to add a link relevant to your article.
By carefully thinking about why and how you link other articles to improve internal linking structure you can make your website navigation easy for both your website users and search engines.
Adding links that add value to users is the best way to get the most out of internal links.
You should write impressive anchor text for internal links so that readers know that this link can help them to explore more things related to that article.
Avoid spamming and try to make it more useful and relevant.
Both website users and search engines get help from anchor text whether it is worth visiting a link or not.
Some people also try to play games with this system but they don’t succeed.
Because now Google has much better techniques and tools to spot unnatural and harmful links. In the end, you should keep it relevant and natural to get positive results.
We hope now you have in-depth knowledge about what is anchor text in SEO.
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