Marketing content doesn’t magically market itself. Instead, specific strategies such as optimizing anchor text on your site are vital, helping control the user experience and journey through content, and optimizing SEO. Here’s what to know about anchor text as you execute your content strategy plan, and ensure you’re getting the most from your content.
What Is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the highlighted (sometimes underlined) word or phrase that includes the hyperlink that sends readers to another destination. It gives readers key information about where they’d be headed next if they click that hyperlink, and looks much better than including a long URL.
Why Is Anchor Text Important in SEO?
“Anchor text is important in SEO and digital marketing first and foremost because it provides a transparent understanding of where the user will land (i.e. what information will be delivered) if the item is clicked,” says Ilana Del Core, growth marketing SEO lead at Taboola. “Secondly, it helps search engines understand what web pages are about. Because of this, it’s critical to ensure relevance between the anchor text and the destination page.”
What Does Anchor Text Look Like?
Anchor text looks like a regular word or phrase seamlessly integrated into content. The only indicator to the reader that it is, in fact, a link, is that it’s a different color, often blue, e.g., Taboola Marketing Hub. However, behind the scenes, it looks a little different. As Del Core explains, anchor texts are made up of:
- A hyperlink.
- The visible text, which embeds the link.
- The HTML (HyperText Markup Language) anchor tag and attribute.
Example: <a href=”https://www.taboola.com/marketing-hub/“>Taboola Marketing Hub</a>
“Creating a clickable link on a webpage is done using the <a> (anchor) tag in HTML,” she says. “The visible text that becomes the hyperlink is placed between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag. The href attribute within the opening tag specifies the destination URL.”
Types of Anchor Text
Not all anchor text serves the same function. Here’s how to understand the differences, per Del Core:
Exact Match
Anchor text is ‘exact match’ if it includes the exact match of the keyword you’re targeting. For example, ‘performance marketing’ links to a guide on ‘performance marketing.’
Partial Match
Partial match is anchor text that includes a variation of the keyword on the linked-to page. For example, ‘how to optimize your marketing budget’ links to a guide on ‘marketing budget.’
Branded
Branded is the use of a brand name in the anchor text, for example, ‘Realize’ linking to its own product page.
Generic
Generic is the use of a generic keyword link, such as ‘click here,’ which should lead to the relevant page given the context of the sentence. Note that if you use an image, Google will use the text in the image ‘alt attribute’ as the anchor text.
Here’s an example: <img alt=”performance marketing metrics” class=”XXX” src=”https://www.taboola.com/XXX/“.
Naked
‘Naked’ means that the URL of the page the user will land on is used as the anchor itself. For example, ‘https://www.taboola.com/marketing-hub/’ is a naked link anchor.
LSI
This stands for latent semantic indexing, and is sometimes also referred to as ‘related.’ In this case, the keyword is closely related to your targeted keyword, for example, ‘performance marketing software’ or ‘performance marketing tools’ can be used as anchor text instead of the targeted keyword ‘performance marketing platforms.’
Long-tail
By contrast, long-tail anchor texts are specific, multi-word phrases. Instead of using broad, generic keywords, they incorporate longer, more conversational queries that your target audience is interested in — for example, instead of ‘best performance marketing platforms,’ the long-tail anchor text would be ‘best performance marketing platform for small businesses in the USA with CRM integration.’
Internal Links and Anchor Texts
Once users arrive at your website, you don’t want to send them to outside resources and materials. Instead, you want to keep them moving through your website. Internal links from anchor texts help guide users to other pages of your website. “Internal links are fundamental to website structure, user experience, and search engine optimization,” says Del Core.
Internal links contribute to your overall website architecture in a few ways. You can link your pages via anchor texts, based on logical and intuitive structure or hierarchy to help users find what they need on your site. You can also link pages to help search engines understand and properly index your website’s pages.
“Since Google uses web crawlers (also known as spiders or bots), which follow links from one page to another to detect, index, and rank the pages on the World-Wide Web, internal links help search engines find, index, and understand the pages of your website,” says Del Core. “Orphan pages, for example, are pages which are not linked from any other source — internal or external URLs or sitemap — and have close to no chance of being found and therefore indexed on search engine results pages (SERPs).”
Anchor Text Best Practices
Balance Internal and External Links
Finding the right mix of internal and external links is a delicate balance. “Closely tied with site architecture and user experience, internal linking through anchor texts helps optimize your website to rank for the terms that contribute to your bottom line,” says Del Core. “Since the anchor text gives the search engine an indication of what information the landing page delivers, strategic internal linking can help search engines understand the topical configuration of your website, i.e. what your business specializes in. Together with high-quality content, this supports rankings for keywords which translate into qualified leads.”
“Conversely, external links can affect the SEO rankings of your page, depending on the pagerank of the linking page and the anchor text it uses to link to your page,” Del Core adds. “Usually, this comes as an aggregated result of multiple pages linking to your page in this fashion. However, it’s possible that a high-quality, relevant external link will boost a page’s ranking, and vice-versa.”
Keep User Experience Top of Mind
Anchor text also helps create a better user experience for those searching. “By clicking on relevant, clear, and concise anchor text, users know where they are navigating to and can get to relevant pages with ease,” says Del Core.
To ensure good user experience, balance different types of anchor texts and don’t over-focus on certain types for the sake of SEO. Instead, make sure user-friendliness is the top priority of each decision.
Diversify Types of Anchor Text
“Best practices include having natural, concise, diverse, and visible anchor text that links to a landing page. Anchor text distribution includes a mix of all types of anchor text types,” says Del Core. A quick audit of recent content might show you that you’re leaning too heavily on one type of anchor text over others.
How to Find Anchor Text Issues
Study the Competition
If your content isn’t performing as well as you want, study and mimic your competitors’ anchor distribution, at least for internal linking, Del Core recommends.
Use a Technology Tool
If you aren’t sure where to start, you can use a diagnostic or problem-solving tool to identify where your anchor text issues are impeding your SEO success. That said, a longer-term strategy for finding and fixing SEO problems, including anchor text, will be more successful.
“Third-party tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog can run a crawl and let you export in bulk all of your internal links, including anchor text and landing page,” says Del Core. “It’s important to see the extent to which your backlinks (external links) are healthy, as opposed to spammy, and ensure you have a healthy anchor text distribution.”
Hire Help
Using an SEO writer or editor to go through past copy and update anchor text can help improve your SEO. Ask them to find places where text is too generic, and locate broken and outdated links. Make sure you aren’t using too many generic anchor texts, like “click here.” You can also train writers and editors moving forward on the best practices of creating new anchor text.
How to Fix Anchor Text Issues
The same tools and experts that identify the issues can often fix them as well, though sometimes you need more expertise. “Third-party tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog will crawl your site/subfolder/subdomain and report back all internal link issues,” says Del Core, but adds that a webmaster or SEO expert will need to manually correct them.
“Sometimes, with the help of your web developer (using find-replace functions or scripts), certain common patterns can be fixed in bulk. However, from my experience, an SEO audit on a website that has been overlooked is a manual endeavor and requires careful and meticulous work to improve your performance on search engines.”
Don’t Use the Same Keyword on Multiple Links
Unnatural and spammy use of anchor texts and using the same keyword on multiple links will most likely devalue your links, says Del Core. If you continue to use bad practices, your site could even face a penalty. Manipulating backlinks and keyword-stuffing constitute anchor-text spam, and can hurt your SEO strategy in the long run.
Skip the Black Hat SEO
It can be tempting to try to play the system by using “black hat SEO,” in which you buy backlinks, keyword-stuff, use clickbait, or sometimes even present different versions of text to readers than to the algorithm. Recovering from a black hat SEO penalty isn’t easy, though. “These are important patterns to monitor and detect since they can cause penalties, devaluation of links, and poor user experience,” says Del Core, who recommends avoiding those strategies altogether.
Build Genuine Authority and Trust
In addition to the content itself, external links are still known to be the one of the most important ranking signals for pages. “You want your links to be valued for your rankings, and for the search engine and users to see you as a trusted expert and authority figure in your line of business, for optimal results,” says Del Core.
Del Core adds that backlinks are important since they represent “endorsements” or “votes” as to how valuable your page is. “From a search engine’s perspective, the more positive votes you have, the higher the ranking correlation,” she says. “From a user perspective, the more the traffic coming to your page sees content that’s relevant and high quality, the more likely these users can turn into qualified leads.”
No-follow External Links
Because no-follow external links instruct search engines not to crawl a web page, you may wonder what role they play, but they can be an effective way to link to another site without passing on any link authority. First, determine if you trust the destination: For example, bypass external links that are flagged because they’re a user comment or sponsored content. An SEO expert can make this decision one link at a time, or you can flag and change them in bulk with a tech tool.
As you identify the above problems, follow a logical linking architecture. “Through the right anchor text, users can easily navigate to information they are seeking and know what to expect when they click on your anchor text,” says Del Core. “In addition, site architecture will distribute authority around your website via Google’s link analysis algorithm PageRank, which flows to pages and helps improve rankings on search engines.”
Key Takeaways
Anchor text is an important SEO practice used to build more visibility and trust, and to rank better on Google searches. There are multiple different types to explore, and with a little time and the right tools, you can identify any current issues with your anchor text, and resolve them for better SEO results.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do you check your backlink profile?
To improve your own site’s SEO, it can help to check your backlink profile, which will tell you who else on the internet is linking to your site, what anchor text they are using to do so, and how high (or low) quality those links are. You can do this for free with Google Search Console using the “links” button, or you can use various checkers from the technology tools for SEO mentioned above, including Ahrefs, Semrush, and others.
What is rich anchor text?
Rich anchor text, as opposed to generic anchor text, is text that incorporates relevant, descriptive keywords that accurately reflect the destination page it links to. It’s important since it builds topical authority, indicating to the search engine who you are and what you are trusted for as a business; distributes PageRank in a more targeted way, promoting your link equity; provides context, which is crucial for users as it helps them navigate intuitively and ensures good user experience; and makes it easier for crawlers to navigate and understand the relationship between the different pages on your website, which helps indexing and, ultimately, rankings.
What is anchor text spam?
“Anchor text spam is the manipulative use of anchor text in backlinks and internal links to boost rankings for specific keywords,” says Del Core. “This happens through excessive or irrelevant use of what we used to call ‘money-making’ keywords — basically, exact match keywords which translate into money — keyword-stuffing, or high and repetitive amounts of the same generic keyword from external sites, usually spammy, low-quality sites.”
