What is Anchor Text and How To Optimize It
This is just a hyperlinked text within HTML and can be clicked to refer to another/different document on the same site or a different site on the World Wide Web. It is usually blue and underlined to distinguish it from other regular text on the site. The purpose of anchor text is to give the reader a clue about what the linked page is all about to have an idea of what to expect, although this is not always the case.
Anchor text is the basis of a backlink and forms a crucial part of SEO. It helps search engines to comprehend the context and content of the linked website. It is often difficult to influence your backlinks’ anchor text but you can easily influence it through internal backlinking.
Anchor Text Optimization
Avoid over-optimization because search engines might penalize you if you have too many backlinks. Ensure your internal links contains natural and optimized anchor text. Anchor text optimization best practices include avoiding generic, clickbait anchors, for instance, “click here”. Also, don’t use too many keywords to avoid over-optimizing. Keyword stuffing can hurt your SEO and it recommended that you keep the anchor text as relevant to the content as possible. The anchor text should make it easy to determine what the linked website is all about. If you’re going to link a website, ensure it goes into the topic of interest rather than the homepage. It is also advisable to use anchor texts that are different from other texts on your site.
Types of anchor texts
According to an seo company located at 200 S. Hanley Rd in Clayton MO which is a suburb in St Louis County, MO there are many different variations of anchor text
Branded: The anchor text represents the brand, such as “Apple” or “Forbes” and links back to the company or business website.
Naked URLs: The URL is also the anchor text, such as “yourwebsite.com” or “http://yourwebsite(.)com/” and this type of anchor text is not as user-friendly unless it matches the context.
Exact match: The anchor text is the exact keyword and points back to the exact topic. For instance, “dog breeds” to refer to a site about different breeds of dogs.
Partial match: The keyword used in the anchor text partly resembles the target link, for instance, “affordable wedge trainers” and “http://www.shoessite.com/cheap-wedge-trainers”.
Generic: These anchors don’t tell users what the linked site is all about. For instance, “read more”, “see more”, “this page”, or “click here”.
Images: This involves including an image to link back to a site through the image alt property. The image should relate to the content on the site it is linked back to.
To get the best result, avoid over-optimizing your anchor texts and always keep them relevant to your content. The more relevant the target keyword is to the article, the more favorable your rank will be. Your distribution of different types of anchors should be done strategically. SEO experts also warn against linking to toxic sites, as it is more beneficial to have authority sites linking back to your site, which is good for SEO.
These anchor text optimization techniques can help you improve your SEO ranking by avoiding search engine penalization. Building your links naturally using high-quality content and several different anchor texts can help to optimize your link profile whilst ensuring you’re not penalized by Google and other major search engines.