The Anchor text is an always hyperlinked text used in the HTML. It is a clickable text with a reference to another document on a web. Usually, it is blue and underlined what differs it from other text on the website.
In the HTML code, it looks like this:
<a href=”https://shivamrajput.com/”>SEO Submission sites</a>
The point of the anchor text should be to informing the reader about what is the linked page about, so they know what to expect. See the content, that’s not always the case.
Anchor text and SEO
Because anchor text is an inevitable part of a backlink, it’s an important part of SEO. In the general, anchor text always helps search engines to understand the context and what the linked website is about.
So if it’s “Digital marketing”, search engines understand the referred page is about marketing things.
In most cases, you can’t influence the anchor text of your good backlinks. You can do so as part of the internal linking or when doing a targeted link building campaign.
Anchor text optimization
First of all, don’t over the optimizing! Search engines don’t like that and if too many of your good backlinks will have optimized your anchor texts such, i.e. too much good keyword optimization, your website may be penalized by Google.
As mentioned here earlier, you can’t always influence the anchor text because of earning backlinks without even knowing, but that doesn’t mean you will outreach 1000 webmasters to give you a backlink with the identical one.
Best practices for anchor text optimization
- Don’t over-optimize by using too many keywords.
- If possible try to avoid generic and clickbait anchors such as “click here”.
- Be natural; don’t try to stuff your brand or keywords on purpose.
- Keep the anchor text relevant to the content on the website where it’s placed.
- Make sure it’s easy to find out what is the linked website about.
- Link to websites that go deep into the topic instead of the homepage.
- Differ the anchor texts from other text on the website.
- If adding a new anchor text to an existing article, it’s a good idea to add at least a small piece of new content.
Types of anchor text:
Branded
When the brand is used as the anchor text, such as “shivamrajput” linking to the shivamrajput website.
Naked URLs
Anchor text is basically your website URL: “shivamrajput.com” or even “https:// shivamrajput.com/”. This type of anchor is not much user-friendly depending on your context.
Exact match
The exact keyword is used as your website keyword anchor text. For a good example, “Digital marketing tools or SEO Tools” points to a website about SEO tools.
Partial match
In this case, part of your website keyword or its variant is used: “cheap Digital marketing tools” or “easy to use SEO tools”.
Generic
Generic anchors don’t help users to find out what is the linked website about. The most usual ones are “Visit here.
Images
The search engines always using the image alt attribute text as your website anchor whenever the image is linked to a website. Alt text should be following the same trend as anchor texts.
I hope this guide to “What Is Anchor Text? It will help you. If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask me in the comments section below.
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