What is Anchor Text in SEO?

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is something that every single brand needs. It is how you improve your website’s design, its user-friendliness, and, most importantly, how you can get onto the first page of Google’s results page. To put this into perspective, the first result on any given search will, on average, gain a third of the traffic. The second result will get around a fifth of the traffic. This means that half of all traffic will go to the first and second results, and the remaining traffic will be dispersed to the other eight results on the first page.

In short, if you aren’t on the first page, you won’t be seeing organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. from Google.

To better your search ranking, you need to focus on your SEO. One of the ways you will need to do this is to decide and focus on what anchor texts you will use.

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What is Anchor TextAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to.?

Anchor texts are the words (or word) you have chosen to hyperlink within an article. The anchor text is important, as it is the keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. that Google will use to help understand your website, and it applies to both your on-site content and any backlinks. It is the coloured, underlined text you often see on web pages, and should be easy to spot.

How to Write Anchor Text Effectively

Creating an anchor text is as simple as choosing the keyword or tags you want, and hyperlinking them with the relevant webpage. You do have to be careful, however, as anchor texts are a key part of any linking strategy, which means that if you do not adhere to Google’s guidelines, they could be used to penalise your website. To ensure that your website is in the clear, and that any linking strategy is effective, always remember to:

Ensure the anchor text is relevant to your landing page.
Is naturally placed in the article, as Google will pick up on strange or out-of-place keywords that sound too promotional.

What are the Different Types of Anchor Text?

Deciding on the anchor text you use can be difficult, however, it should be decided on what key phrase resonates with your business, what it is you are linking to, and what fits naturally. While agencies may have their own definitions, many are the same and are derived from the following list.

Exact-match: If you’re linking to a page on email marketing and you selected keyword is ‘email marketing’, then ‘email marketing’ would exactly match what the link is about.

Partial-match: When the anchor text is a variation of the keyword given. For instance, for email marketing, it could be expanded to include ‘email marketing tactics’.

Branded: Your business’s brand name.

Generic: A generic phrase, such as ‘click here’.

Naked: The naked URL link, for example, www.clickintelligence.co.uk.

The Value of Linking Strategies

Anchor text is a key part of any linking strategy. Just as you would research for keywords when conducting any Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign, so too do you need to research which anchor text options you should use. Where these backlinks or hyperlinks appear is also important. You will want to have them on both your own website as internal linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., and on other websites as backlinks. The more backlinks you have from quality pages that have a high Domain Authority, the better. You can achieve this through merit and content marketing, or by using our link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. services.

Your anchor texts are imperative when it comes to improving your Google ranking. As you would be with keywords and when conducting your research on the best ones to use, be sure to do the same with your anchor texts. Hyperlinking the wrong phrase can not only harm your overall ranking in the SERPs, but it can also cause red flags, which Google could use to penalise you.