What is Anchor Text

SEO is a complex technique that consists of many crucial details and anchor text is one of them. It is a text you click to move from one internet destination to the other. While anchor can generally link webpages, they can initiate downloads and link to documents or files. It usually appears as blue underlined text, but you can change your site’s link colors and styles via HTML or CSS.

Learn More About Anchor Text

Anchor text simply represents the text or phrase linking another website or page. Standard anchor text is blue-colored and underlined, but one can change it according to the purpose and design of the content.  

Keywords used in anchor text are required to be highly relevant to the linked website. This way, readers clearly understand the page they are being redirected to. It is one of the pieces of information that make a website page match the algorithm helping search engines to understand the topic, industrial niche, and purpose of the website or landing page. 

Anchor text is generally the clickable text of an HTML hyperlink in any content piece. Anchor text aims to explain the content of a linked page or resource in the shortest possible form to the search engine and website visitors.   

Previously in older versions of the HTML specification, the hyperlink (<a> tag) used to be called an anchor that gave the text name “anchor text”. When images are used for hyperlinks, that time alt attribute of that image is taken as anchor text by Google. 

For example, the blue word in the above sentence with the underline is called the anchor text as it is a clickable link redirecting you to a new page.   

SEO marketers classify the seven primary types of anchor text: 

• Exact match - The exact keyword or phrase targeted by the page to rank for. 
• Phrase match - A keyword containing the exact phrase for the target keyword of the page. 
• Partial match - All of the words of the target keyword appear, but not in exact order. 
• Branded - The name of the brand or company presenting the target page. 
• Generic - Any random or generic phrase, generally CTA, like, here, click, this article, etc. 
• Image alt text - If the image is used in a link then alt text is used as anchor text. 
• Naked URL - The actual target URL is the same as it appears in a browser’s address bar.

For more information and examples of anchor text, check out the detailed anchor text guide. 

Why is Anchor Text Important? 

Anchor text or hyperlinked text provides a concise and attractive context of the content present on a linked page or website. It has to be effective and when it is in between the para, always should be in the flow with the content; it should never be forcefully stuffed in there. 

 In advanced SEO practices, anchor text provides some additional context for search engines. This way the anchor text improves the search ranking by helping search engines to understand the linked page. 

 Note: The page can be indexed by Google but not yet crawled using only the anchor text or the URL! 

 Anchor text is essential for site ranking as it helps search engines to understand the page and lets crawlers know about its existence over the web. Anchor text is the front face of the earned rich backlinks by the websites from other high DA/PA websites in the industry. 

 For example, if you are writing a post to link an application, then you can use a direct CTA. Ultimately it will look relevant and natural. A hyperlink can be both internal and external; if it is relevant it will improve the site's presence over the search engine in SERP. 

 Many types of links and anchor texts can be added to the page, the most common of them are listed below: 

• Branded links. These types of links are directly embedded in the anchor text with the brand name of a business. 
• Sometimes people use direct URLs instead of embedding them into anchor text, but this method is likely to be less effective. 
• Article or Page title. The exact name of the page or title of the linked blog post can be used as anchor text. 

• We can use similar entities or phrases strongly related to the target keyword. 
• Texts or links are used in mixed form and jumbled with meaningful appearance targeting the linked page. 
• The most common CTAs are: click here, view more, read more, etc. These links are not useful to get the page crawled. 

Best practices for anchor texts 

1. Write anchor texts that make sense without the surrounding text

Think like a reader or a site visitor which is not easy to determine. But this way you will be able to mix the anchor text with the content in such a way that if you place that anchor text somewhere else, still it would make sense. Anchor text can be creative to let the visitor know whether the link is working or not.   

Create an anchor text that is itself enough to create an urge in the reader to click that text. Describe the destination of the link easily using creativity in anchor texts and making them independent of the surrounding content. 

 Check out this for the same: 

Useful: “A complete guide about Anchor text” 

Not Useful: “Click here to learn about anchor text” 

 The final takeaway, readers focus only on the linked text, not the word surrounding it. If the hyperlinked text is interesting then well and good otherwise there is no use for that interlinking. 

 2. Avoid keyword stuffing

Do not try to stuff keywords in the anchor text forcefully; it would make the anchor text uninteresting. Using exact is also one of the types of anchor text but it is not that impactful always. So, matching the same phrase for every link is not helpful. Google takes it as over optimize and may penalize your website for it. In this case, the search engine ignores the links and costs you no opportunity to rank that linked pages. 

3. Diversify your anchor texts

When you are interlinking your website pages and blog posts with each other, you have the freedom to diversify the use of anchor text. You are open to using synonyms and experimenting with new ways to attract an audience to that interlinked page.  

You can get a complete insight into anchor text from the search engine itself. 

Outgoing links never use the same anchor text on the same page. So be creative and use different synonyms for either external or internal linking. Put a specific focus on the website's reputation, so Google would not find it in spammy behavior.