The Importance of Anchor Text in Backlinks

Link building is an important part of SEO, the more links you have, the better. Each link comes with anchor text. Before we look at the importance of anchor text in backlinks, let look at what anchor text and backlinks are. 

Anchor text is the clickable text you see in a link. According to SEO best practices, your anchor text shouldn’t be generic; instead it should be relevant to the page you’re linking to. The keywords used in the anchor text help search engines determine the topic of the web page. The anchor text plays a role in the ranking you receive from search engines.

Backlinks are links from another website to yours. Lots of backlinks mean your site has good content and thus will be ranked higher. Anchor text in backlinks helps search engines determine relevant keywords webpages should rank for.

Now that that’s clear, we’ll move on to the importance Google and other search engines give to anchor text. Google wants to ensure that the backlinks to your website are natural, meaning they are linking because of the content and not because you paid them.

Exploring anchor text of site backlinks will help you get an idea of what people think of your website, get your competitor’s link building strategy, and help with keyword research.

However, not all anchor text in backlinks are created equally.

Types Of Anchor Text In Backlinks

Let’s take a look at the different types of anchor text you might find on the Internet.

Exact match

Exact match anchor text is when the it directly matches the word or phrase related to the link content.

The following is an example of anchor text in the article.

If the author wanted to target the keyword “chatbots”, this would be an exact match.

Partial match

When the target keyword is in the anchor text, there will be partial anchor text matches, but not complete matches.

Check this example.

Say that the target keyword of marketers is “guest posting”.

Using “guest series” is not an exact match, but it still includes keywords.

This means that it is still targeting the keywords you want to rank for, but it seems more natural.

Image

The image can also be anchor text.

This text appears when you click on the image and bring it to the link.

However, the actual anchor text associated with the image is the contained ALT text.

LSI keywords

LSI keywords, or latent semantic index keywords, are words or phrases that are closely related to the keywords you are looking for.

These names may be different names for the same principle or product, or they may be other closely related keywords.

Below is an example.

If you are talking about about phone, then LSI keyword might be mobile phone, telephone, smartphone.

Blog title/post title

When the name of the anchor text linked to is the full name of the blog title, page title or content title, this is the so-called POST title anchor text.

Naked URL

A naked URL has no anchor text at all.

Instead, it’s just a link to a page featured on your website.

The naked URL may contain “www” or just “domain.com”.

Below is an example.

The anchor text of this link is the link itself.

This can still attract keywords because subdomains usually include keywords.

They can also call for brand keywords, including the domain name of the company.

Anchor text can help search engine crawlers and readers to identify the content of the link.

As more and more websites use various forms of anchor text to link to specific pages, search engines can begin to better understand what the website provides.

In a way, anchor text is like keywords other people use to describe content.

However, just using anchor text directly related to the keywords you want to sort is not simple enough.

In the past, Google relied heavily on anchor text.

Unfortunately, this allows marketers, writers and webmasters to do something called “Google bombing.”

This has led to the emergence of page ranking keywords, rather than related content.

Check out now Image SEO: Helpful Tips And Tricks

How to optimize the anchor text for SEO in 2020?

When you try to control your anchor text, there is one thing you have to keep in mind-relevance.

In order to show Google that your anchor text and links are not black hats, you need to prove that it is natural-even if it is strategic.

Let us see how you did it.

1. Only when the anchor text is suitable for natural links.

One of the biggest reasons why Penguin update was introduced for the first time was to prevent website owners from adding anchor text in backlinks for SEO purposes.

This means that they are highly vigilant against seemingly inappropriate anchor text.

With the Penguin update, websites who over-optimized their anchor text for their web traffic have been severely punished.

To avoid this situation, every anchor text you want to include naturally fits the content in the content.

For anchor text to be SEO friendly, it should be concise and relevant.

You want your anchor text to describe the content of the link as accurately as possible, with as little text as possible.

Use the anchor text “Start a blog” and link directly to a page on how to start a blog.

This is straightforward, focused, only three words.

However, you also want to avoid using methods that exactly match your keywords as much as possible.

Are you confused?

You don’t need to do this.

When trying to decide what to use as anchor text in backlinks, think about which part of your sentence is most interesting to the reader.

Readers and search engines will know that you are linking to that site because it supports your statement-not because you are trying to populate results for that keyword.

The same idea applies to quotes.

As mentioned earlier, anchor text in backlinks should be straightforward and to the point.

If you are linking to a full quote, this is usually too long anchor text.

Instead, set the anchor text to the name of the individual or the resource or from which the quotes are extracted is on this blog.

2. Make sure your anchor text types are diversified

The change of anchor text may be one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO using external link optimization .

When all your links are in one style, this can lead to a dangerous sign.

For example, if the only anchor text you use throughout your website is an exact match keyword, then you don’t seem to put your real thoughts on the content you link to.

A natural link profile will include many different types of links.

Let’s take a look at what the best anchor text profile you want looks like.

First of all, it must be said that the anchor text configuration file should be different depending on the country or local website you are in.

Your homepage and the internal pages of your website will also look different.

Let’s open the national page first.

Serpstat recommends that you break down the distribution of anchor text in backlinks like this.

Try to use branded anchor text in backlinks.

In fact, more than half of the anchor text should be branded. This includes anchor text with keywords.

You should also notice that the exact match anchor is very small.

In fact, you only want exact matching anchors to account for 1% of your entire link distribution.

The partial match should only be around 2%.

Perhaps surprisingly, naked links should also occupy a considerable part of your link distribution.

Note that the brand anchor text is much smaller than the homepage section.

For sub-pages, the “page title” anchor text has a significant impact on the top-level page.

This effect usually occurs because page titles usually include the keywords you want to target, but they are not considered “exact match” anchor text.

This allows you to easily lock keywords in anchor text without being punished for looking unnatural.

But you will also see that “exact match” keywords are used much more frequently in subpages than on the homepage.

Now, let’s compare the local homepage anchor text configuration file.

3. Use your anchor deeper

Another key aspect of anchor text and backlinks is what they link to.

Google Promotion wants to see you link to a valuable page on a website.

Not only does this increase relevance, it also seems more natural than just linking to the homepage or product page.

When deciding what to link to, choose the most relevant page.

If you link to a research, citation, or statistics, pull out the actual web page, the information comes from-not just the home page.

Always choose shared content, rather than superficial general pages.

This is an example of Moz .

When the anchor text says “Moz Blog”, you will see the link push back to a specific blog-not just the blog page.

This feature pushes Google crawlers and readers to deeper pages, creates more relevance, and leaves a more realistic impression.

It seems more natural to link to this kind of depth, specific content, and will increase your credibility with Google.

However, some anchor text in backlinks can be pushed back to a superficial page.

For example, if you want to link to a specific brand, you can push this link to the company’s homepage.

You don’t want this kind of links to be the majority of your distribution.

4. Stay away from low-quality or toxic websites

When considering who ranks first in their list of results, they will push the site to the top of the site they think is suitable for them.

This means getting high-quality links from awesome pages and avoiding links that might harm your “ranking” factor.

Let’s analyze what the bad link is.

In most cases, a bad link is a link that Google believes you have obtained ethically, whether it is an outgoing link or an incoming link.

On the outgoing side, you can better control who you want to link to.

However, you need to be careful about broken links or people leaving spam links in your comment section.

If you do not monitor your comments, they may fall into low-quality backlinks and damage your reputation.

But the real problem is when you have bad incoming links.

Unfortunately, these can be more difficult to control.

Because you can’t remove these links from your website like you can remove low-quality outgoing links, you need to find and eliminate links to them through Google.

If you don’t notice where your backlinks are coming from, you may ruin your credibility without knowing it.

Big Moz Spam Analysis Tool This is a way to check website quality.

Spam score, which is a feature of their open web explorer, gives you a ranking for every link.

The tool uses 17 different signs to identify links that may be considered spam, including content such as content strength, if there is contact information on the page, or the domain name contains numbers.

If a domain has fewer than four signs, it is considered a strong link.

However, if there are more than 7, this may be considered a bad link and should be seen.

If there are more than ten red flag links, this may seriously damage your online reputation.

Google ranking allows you to deny any low-quality links, which you think will harm your online ranking.

When you deny a link through Google, (you need to go over the wall to open it) you let search engines know that you don’t want to associate your website with that link.

To deny your backlinks, you want to find low-quality links, which will harm your website.

Conclusion

As with any SEO factor, you want to include anchor text and links in your content as naturally as possible while providing clear value to your readers.

If you just cram links into your content, you may seriously damage your reputation on Google.

This may make the already difficult battle to obtain network traffic more difficult.

Understanding the anchor text and fully optimizing each link can help improve your ranking while also driving traffic to your page.

When creating your website and backlink strategy, remember the four optimization techniques above.