What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is nothing but the clickable text when you click it, it will take you to a different location or different document. Anchor text is the visible text that is when linked to the hyperlinks will take you to another location or another document.
If the anchor text is relevant to the content then there are more chances of getting higher rank to your website.
Example:
Types of Anchor Text:
Following are the different types of anchor text:
Generic Anchors:
As the name says, generic anchors are normal anchor texts like “click here” or “Hover me”.
The generic anchors are easy to detect and sound common and familiar.
The generic anchors are easy to detect and sound common and familiar.
For example, in the sentence “Click here to submit the form” click here is a generic anchor.
Branded Anchors:
A branded anchor is an anchor that uses the brand name as anchor text. It is the safest to use unless your website is an exact match domain.
For example:
http://www.w3codingschools.com/anchor-text-optimization/
A brand name is attached with the above example i.e W3Coding Schools.
Exact Match Anchors:
In the exact match anchors, the attached links to the text match exactly with the searched and displayed results. The page title also matches the anchor text. It is the king of all anchor text and it has the power to increase your SEO rankings.
For example,
http://www.w3codingschools.com/anchor-text-optimization/
In the above example anchor text optimization is the anchor text, now, if the displayed text on the web page matches with the anchor text, then it will be an exact match anchor text.
Naked Anchors:
The naked anchors are the backlinks that take you to the website by using a URL. The naked anchors are not linked to any other links.
For example,
http://www.w3codingschools.com/
Partial match Anchors:
Partial match anchors are the same as that of keyword variations. The only difference is that you’re adding generic words around the primary keyword phrase.
For example: In this example, anchor text is an SEO Tutorial but when you click on the page heading shows SEO Introduction, where SEO is the primary keyword.
Image Anchors:
Google does not understand texts and therefore these anchor texts are used as the anchor text for a linked image that is used to make Google understand the context of the image.
Long–tail Anchors:
Then long-tail anchors are long-tail keywords that when typed in the search engine will take you to the website that contains that exact keyword. Long-tail anchors are similar to partial match anchors except that their length is longer.
Why Anchor Texts are Important?
You must stay updated with the search engines because they change their algorithms every year. There are different factors that matter ranking of your website and link relevancy is one of them. It means how article X is related to article Y, which will talk about their hyperlinks that are anchored with each other. There is a high possibility that if both the links are exactly relevant to each other then it can improve the ranking of your website.
Anchor Text Keyword Density:
The penguin algorithm has updated the search engine’s algorithms regarding the keyword used in the anchor text. With this update, Google strictly watches your internal web pages. If multiple pages within the website have the same anchor texts then it is liable to get the penalty from Google. You should use the relevant anchor for keyword and topic according to the relevancy.
Anchor Text Optimization Best Practices:
- Use anchor texts that are related to your website’s content.
- Don’t link anchor texts with any spam website.
- Avoid using internal links within the same content.
- While linking you need to make sure that the linked page does exist, otherwise, it is called a broken link, which gives a bad impression to search engines as well as to site visitors.