What is anchor text?
Anchor text is the word (or words) that you use to link to another webpage. Typically, it’s underlined and highlighted in a different color than the rest of the text within your content.
For example, here’s a link to my post about how to write better title tags.
Anchor text is a universal way to indicate to a user that by clicking on specific words they’ll be redirected to a new webpage.
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Is anchor text important for SEO?
It might not be immediately apparent, but yes, anchor text is a small yet mighty aspect of SEO.
Anchor text can actually be used for nefarious purposes, like linking to malware, spyware, and viruses. Unclear, suspicious, and questionable links can negatively impact your SEO strategy and performance since search engines do their best to filter out content that may be harmful to the public.
That’s what makes it so important to ensure that your links follow best practices.
Even if your links aren’t malicious or harmful to others, if you don’t optimize them, they may not be working in your favor. Follow these anchor link best practices to make your links shine.
Anchor link best practices (and examples)
1. Create links using the right words
When you create a link within your content, it’s important that the text is relevant to the web page you’re linking to. Ideally, your anchor text should be a title or proper name so that users have a solid idea of what the link is for.
Here’s an example of good anchor text:
It’s important to avoid keyword stuffing in your SEO content.
In this example, it’s relatively obvious that, if you click on the link, you’ll be taken to a page that focuses on keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is a proper name, and the linked post contains that word both in the title and multiple times within the content, creating an obvious connection between the anchor text and the content it links to.
And now for an unoptimized version:
It’s important to avoid keyword stuffing in your SEO content.
This link gives us virtually no context about the webpage it will take us to. The anchor text has no relation to the page it will go to, either, making it harder for crawlers to understand the connection between the text and the link.
2. Keep anchor text short and sweet
In the days of yore, everyone played fast and loose with anchor text. It wasn’t uncommon for people to use an entire sentence as anchor text. Now, that’s a great way to make your content look like it was written by a medieval knight.
Here’s an example of some nice, short anchor text:
Cold emails aren’t for everyone. Here are some creative ways to get backlinks that will help you to optimize your link building strategy without winding up in a spam folder.
In this example, we have a pretty good idea of where the link will take us and it’s easy for crawlers to identify the connection between our link and the page it’s going to. Even though the link is within a longer sentence, it’s placed using descriptive, short text that gives context without taking up too much space.
Here’s an example of some long, awkward anchor text:
Cold emails aren’t for everyone. Here are some creative ways to get backlinks that will help you to optimize your link building strategy without winding up in a spam folder.
While that link is descriptive, there’s no reason for it to be that long. It makes the purpose of the link difficult to determine and includes a lot of unnecessary words. This can make it hard for people and Google bots to understand the relationship between the anchor text and the destination page.
Aside from the lack of optimization, long links aren’t visually pleasing, especially on mobile where they can take up half your screen.
3. Be specific in your anchor text
Anchor text should be descriptive, clear, and specific. The destination of the link should be obvious to readers so that they can easily determine whether the additional page will be of use to them or whether they should continue on.
Here’s an example of some nice, specific anchor text:
You know the text that’s displayed in each browser tab? It’s called a title tag.
Here, the anchor text is descriptive while still being concise. Users know that if they click the link, they’ll be taken to a page about title tags.
Here’s an example of anchor text that’s too general:
You know the text that’s displayed in each browser tab? It’s called a title tag.
In this example, users don’t know what that text is referring to yet since we haven’t told them. It also feels awkward and unnatural since a reader will have to backtrack in order to click it.
Links should be intuitive, not just in the anchor text that you use, but their placement for a reader. Try to link in places where a user would naturally want to click.
4. Make anchor text obvious
Search engines and crawlers don’t like suspicious links, and they try to identify them by looking for links that are hard to recognize. For example, links that:
- Aren’t formatted differently from the rest of the content
- Seem unnaturally placed
- Aren’t a match for the page they link to
- Don’t make sense in the context of the page they’re on
- Go to a spammy or low-quality page
Your anchor text should be the obvious choice, and what it’s linking to should be clear to both humans and search engines. Use common link indicators, such as different colored and underlined text to make your links apparent.
Choose the natural URL as a link, and remove any unnecessary tracking codes, subfolders, or other additions. Link to main pages as opposed to redirected URLs.
5. Don’t use outdated external link practices
The current trend for anchor text is to make it fit seamlessly within your content. It shouldn’t have to have a line of its own or always be featured in a call-to-action box. For example, avoid:
- Generic links, like “Click Here” or “This Guide/Post/Article”
- Exact link matches, like the exact title of the page you’re linking to
- Stuffing too many keywords into your anchor text
While generic links are necessarily harmful, exact matches and keyword stuffing within your links can lead to penalties from search engines, so it’s best to steer clear of them.
If you do need to use “Click Here” or “This Post”, use them sparingly.
READ MORE: What is black hat SEO?
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