Anchor text is a clickable hyperlink which acts as a critical tool for Search Engine Optimization. Let’s try to understand more about anchor text and its uses.
What is anchor text?
Anchor text, which also goes by the names link labels, link text, and link title, is basically a text that can be clicked in a hyperlink. Anchor text provides the user with contextual information and relevant description about the contents of the destination page.
Use of anchor text
Essentially, the use of anchor text is to hyperlink the current page or display another location on the internet. These anchor texts give both the search engine and also the users, the information about the contents of the destination page.
Significance of anchor text
As mentioned earlier, the anchor text holds a great significance when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. The relevance of the words contained in the anchor text determines the rankings of the page on the search engine results. Anytime you search anything on a search engine, the search engine tends to show results that are relevant to your search keywords.
From the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) front, Anchor Texts tend to play the main role as they hyperlink texts to the landing page of a website. This practice helps in getting the website a better ranking in search engine results.
One can also use these anchor texts to direct the user to internal pages or documents of the website. This also helps in bettering the page rank of the website in the search engine.
A page rank assigned by a search engine plays a great role in increasing the reach of the website. What determines this page rank is the relevance of the content on the web page and also in the anchor text.
According to a study conducted in 2016, which was mainly about the influence of anchor texts across 16000 keywords, the exact and partial match of anchor links still have a bigger correlation to the rankings of the web pages as assigned by the Google search engine.
Types of anchor text
- Exact Match – An exact match anchor text is when the text mirrors exactly the keyword present on the landing page.
- Partial Match – An anchor text with little variation that links the text to the landing page is called the anchor text with partial match.
- Branded – Branded anchor text is when a brand name is used as the anchor text.
- Generic – A generic anchor text is a text that is commonly used to provide a link to the landing page without using any keywords. For example, ‘Click Here’ remains the most commonly used generic anchor text.
How to create anchor text?
To gather more traffic to the website and to increase the outreach of the webpage, the anchor text needs to be SEO friendly. Let us look into the properties an SEO friendly anchor text should have. An SEO friendly anchor text should be:
- Concise – Brevity plays a great role when it comes to anchor texts. Keeping the anchor text succinct should be the priority.
- Highly relevant to the landing page – The relevance of the anchor text remains the most important factor in deciding the page rank of the said website. Links that direct to content on the websites have more link relevancy and are more SEO friendly.
- One which is not very generic – It is always suggested to not use too generic anchor texts because these are just contrary to link relevancy and serve little purpose for Search Engine Optimization.
- Does not have a high keyword density – Too much keyword density in the anchor text is also not a good sign. It is imperative to keep a healthy balance of keyword density and topic related content in the anchor text.
It becomes important to know how to create anchor text and also to have the knowledge of how a typical anchor text profile of a website should be, to get more traffic to the website. The link mentioned above also provides insights into how to optimize the anchor texts for best results.