Introduction
Online visibility of your site is vital in improving your business among competitors. Customers most likely visit the websites that appear on top of the search engine results. The trustworthiness and relevancy of your website affect its appearance on the search engine result page. Backlinks are an essential factor for gaining credibility and authority from google. They pass link juice to your site, which helps it to rank higher in the google SERP. Ensuring the quality and niche relevant backlinks is necessary for better results.
The incoming links should be obtained from highly authoritative sites of your business. Also, you must choose the perfect anchor text for effective link building to boost your site’s google ranking. In this article, let’s find what is meant by anchor text. What are the different kinds of anchor text? And how to choose the best anchor text for robust link building.
What Is Anchor Text?
Anchor text or link texts are clickable texts in a link, and it is used to link one webpage to another, within or outside the site. The texts are designed to have a different colour, mostly blue or underlined, so that visitors easily find it to click. It describes the content of the linked webpage, which helps the readers know where the link is taking them when they click it.
According to the Google algorithm, anchor texts are one of the main ranking factors as it helps the search engines to understand the context of the linked site. You can enhance your site’s search engine ranking with the help of relevant anchor text.
Significance Of Anchor Text
Using anchor text, you can link a website within its inner pages or with a web page of another site. The importance of these texts in search engine optimization are:
- Google needs to understand your site’s structure to assign the website’s domain authority. Search engines use anchor text as a primary component to determine the context of a website.
- Anchor texts give the users a peek at the linked site’s description, which helps them to decide their next step. They make the navigation process easier for the visitors to your site. Anchor texts enable the readers to choose which web pages they want to read or skip.
Types Of Anchor Text
Selecting the suitable type of anchor text has a significant impact on the link building of your site. Here let’s learn the different varieties of anchor texts.
Exact Match Anchor Text
As per google’s advice, you should write the description of a link with wordings related to data present on the site. And choose the anchor texts that tell the readers what they are getting when they click the link.
An exact match is an anchor text with keywords that precisely describe the linking page. Let’s see an example: If the keyword of a link text is “backlinks”, and its link is redirected to a webpage with details of backlinks, then it is said to be an exact match. These anchor texts are beneficial as they enable search engines to quickly scan your website for Google ranking. Also, it provides a rich user experience by directing the visitors to access all web pages on your site and gives brief information about the destination of the link.
Branded Anchor Text
The anchor texts, which include terms referring to your product or brand names, are called branded anchor texts. An example of this type is a backlink with the link text “JetRanks” pointing to the JetRanks site. Branded link texts are used to set up a powerful link building to achieve top google ranking on your website. Usage of these texts also helps in marketing your site and gains organic traffic by letting the users know about your brand.
Selecting backlinks with branded link texts are highly preferable to gain the trust of google as it contains your own business name. Some anchor texts may lead to penalties from google, but by choosing brand texts, you can avoid them. These texts make the link building process look natural by having your brand name as the keyword.
Brand + Keyword Anchor Text
This kind of link text consists of your brand or business name along with a keyword or phrase related to the content of the webpage linked to it.
Partial Match Anchor Text
Partial match anchors contain mostly Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords related to any specific topic on the web page. LSI keywords are essential to rank your website higher in the google SERP. But ensure you use these link texts sparingly on your site. For example, a link pointed to a page with a section about “How to perform link building” will have partial match text like “How to perform link building”. Also, this can be used to link the inner pages of your site and enhance its page authority.
Generic Anchor Text
Generic anchors are the most common type of words which direct the users to reach their desired destination. These texts do not include any brand name or keywords and do not describe the context of the linked page. Some examples of generic anchors are “click here”, “visit the page”, “more info”, etc.
You can use 5-10% of generic anchor texts on your site to avoid spamming. Use these link texts to navigate your users from one webpage to another or to perform actions like uploading or downloading a file.
Phrase Match Anchor Text
Phrase match anchors include phrases which are targeted to rank along with keywords of your site in google search results.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Anchor Text
You can rank many keywords on your site at a single time using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) anchors. This anchor text contains LSI keywords to rank your website among key phrases competition. You must use LSI keywords relevant to your niche to form the link text. By looking through the suggestions provided by Google, you can get an idea to form LSI phrases naturally on your web page.
Naked Link Anchor Text
This kind of link text contains naked URLs as the anchors. Naked link texts are used to land users on your site or particular web pages. You can find these anchors in places like reference links, resource pages, biographies or in listicles of sources. To boost your backlink profile with anchor texts, you can use naked anchors and branded texts.
Image Anchor Text
If you use images as a link, the alt attribute of it acts as an anchor text, and this is referred to as image anchor text. You must ensure the alt text describes the image correctly and the keywords are not overused. So that google will quickly understand the context of the image linked to your site.
Techniques To Choose the Best Anchor Text
1. Check The Relevancy Of Anchor Text
Ensuring the relevancy of backlinks is essential while link building to obtain better google ranking on your website. You must verify that the topic of the linked page and the context of anchor text on that web page is relevant to your niche. Using anchors that properly match with content will provide a good user experience. Make sure you use backlinks that provide valuable information related to the reader’s search engine query. Avoid irrelevant incoming links, which may confuse the users and make the process artificial.
By using perfect anchor texts, you gain the trust of both readers and Google. It increases the chances of improving your site’s google rank by gaining high authority. Always check that the keywords in your anchor text are related to the info provided on the linked page.
2. Mixing The Correct Type Of Anchor Texts
Using duplicate words in the anchor text can make it look spammy and leads to getting penalties from google. Irrelevant and duplicate anchor texts do not help in enhancing your site’s rank in SERP. To improve your site’s anchor text profile, you can mix different types of anchor text based on the linked page.
3. Choose Concise Anchor Texts
Select anchor texts with concise words to help your users clearly understand the description of the linked site. You should pick the link texts which attract the readers to click the backlink.
4. Note The Keyword Density
Keyword density is a metric that shows the percentage of keywords used on a web page compared to its total words. Google analyses the keywords of link texts to determine your website’s relevance. Ensure there are no similar anchor texts in your incoming link to intimate website crawlers that they are naturally obtained from relevant sources. Selecting anchors with unique keywords and phrases is highly preferred for search engine optimization.
Conclusion
Google considers the inbound links on your site to determine their relevance. Backlinks play a significant role in search engine optimization to grow your business. You need to know specific key strategies for achieving a successful campaign in both on page and off page SEO among your niche competitors. The quality of incoming links in your website affects its ranking in google. Anchor texts are the essential metric to identify high-quality backlinks for link building on your site. They represent the context of the site pointed out in the inbound link. You can use tools like Linkio’s URL anchor text categorizer for selecting influential anchor texts. To check the link texts of backlinks linked in your website, you can use the SEMrush tool. Picking correct anchor texts needs time as it has a direct effect on the optimization of your site. While choosing these texts, remember that it simplifies the user’s decision-making process. Proper acquisition of anchor texts helps you to gain the trust of both google and the readers. As a result, your website’s organic traffic and authority will improve.
