What Is Anchor Text and How To Write It Well
With everything you can do to optimize your web presence, anchor text might seem like a small detail, but it can play a significant role in how users interact with your site and how search engines rank it.
What Is Anchor Text?
When reading a sentence on a webpage, how do you know which words will take you to another page? They may be a different color or format. The default is blue and underlined, but here in this article, we use olive green. These linked words are called anchor text. It gives clues about what page you will open if you click the link.
In HTML, this “anchor text” looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.contentjourney.com“>anchor text</a>
Anchor text provides a smoother experience for your readers. They can enjoy reading the content on your blog and understand that they can find more relevant information through the link without being disrupted by a long web URL in the middle of a paragraph.
If I were to write an article on email marketing, I could let readers know they could find more information on growing their list at our page at https://contentjourney.com/boost-your-list-learn-how-to-get-more-email-subscribers/
Or I could write that a healthy email marketing program hinges on your ability to consistently get more email subscribers.
Both ways of providing the link to the new page take you to the same place, but anchor text provides a more enjoyable and smoother experience.
Why Is Anchor Text Important?
Not only does anchor text make for a smoother experience for your website visitors and provide additional context, but it can even improve your website’s rankings on Google. Just like your visitors, search engines also use anchor text to understand what a linked page may be about. The search engine crawlers analyzing your site use anchor text as one of the many clues to understand how your site is structured and how your pages are related.
Anchor text also emphasizes your brand authority. As you write articles about the fabulous industry you are in or the products or services you provide, seeing many related links indicates to your website visitor that you are an expert in your field.
Types of Anchor Text and Linking Strategies
You may find multiple types of anchor text and linking strategies on any website.
Exact Match
Anchor text that is an exact match mirrors the site’s content it is linking to. There is no question that anchor text that says our “webinar on making sense of SEO” will take you to a page about our webinar called “Making Sense of SEO.”
Partial Match
Anchor text is considered a partial match when the content is related to the linked words (but not an exact match). For the webinar example above, linking the webinar page to the words “understanding SEO” would be considered a partial match anchor text strategy.
Phrase Match
When you use the complete primary keyword phrase from your article as anchor text on another page, that is considered a phrase match.
For example, say I wrote an article called “7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Website’s Traffic” to target the keyword phrase “grow your web traffic.” If I linked the words “grow your web traffic” to that page in another article, that would be considered a phrase match.
Branded
Branded anchor text links a brand name to the brand name’s site. Linking the words New York Times to the New York Times website is an example of branded anchor text.
Naked Link
A naked link has no anchor text! Seeing the www. of a URL on a page means that the link is (gasp) naked.
www.contentjourney.com is a naked link.
Images
When you link an image, search engines will review your alt text and consider it your anchor text when they crawl the page. Keep that in mind when writing your alt text. Don’t let it be an afterthought!
Generic (i.e., “click here”)
It’s incredibly tempting to say “click here” for “XYZ.” It’s easy and to the point, but it’s generic, and you won’t get the benefits of a thoughtful anchor text strategy!
Best Practices for Writing Anchor Text
Like with most things, there are many ways to include anchor text on your site, and it seems every expert has a preference for how to do it. Here are some of the best practices we’ve identified.
Use Descriptive Keywords
You want your anchor text to be descriptive and use your keywords for the post, but avoid keyword stuffing! Search engines can tell if your content is not put together naturally when you try to game the system! Keep it relevant and high quality.
Keep It Succinct
While short phrases are great, try to keep them under five words. There is rarely a reason for anchor text to continue onto another line. The more targeted and simple your phrasing, the better.
Ensure Links Are Relevant and Trustworthy
Keep it focused! Ensure the pages you link are related to the words you use as your anchor text and don’t link to a spammy or suspect site. Your visitors trust you. Keep them safe and provide them with an enjoyable browsing experience.
Make It Stand Out
You don’t have to make your anchor text blue and underlined (it could be green, as in this article), but if you stray from the default, choose a style that will still make your links stand out.
If the style only shows up on hover, for example, it could easily be missed that you have more related content to explore.
Clean Up URLs
Don’t scare your readers by using a long URL string. Simplify and clean them up whenever possible. Unless it is for your own tracking information, you can often delete anything after a question mark. And for goodness sake, check the link before you publish!
Links also break, especially if they contain time-sensitive content. Plan to link to an archived version of an external URL or create a maintenance plan to check your links regularly.
Create Quality Content
When linking to internal content, ensure it is also high quality. Sending someone off to a page that hasn’t been updated or isn’t up to your standards is a surefire way to hurt your reputation or erode the trust you have built with your site visitors.
Common Mistakes to Avoid With Anchor Text
Just like there are best practices, there also are some common things to avoid. Here are mistakes to avoid with anchor text.
Overusing Keywords in Anchor Text
Google knows when you are trying to cheat the system. Avoid using keywords in your anchor text when they don’t apply or using them too much. It will not feel natural to your reader, and Google can start to suspect your site is a bit spammy.
Also, be sure not to link to the same piece more than once on a post or page. Google will think you’re trying to trick it and ding your site.
Too Many or Too Few Links
Pages with too much anchor text are hard to read and feel spammy. It breaks the readers’ attention, interrupting the flow of the writing. Too few links mean you are leaving an increased time on site and more pages visited per session (two website stats that can show how your internal linking strategy is working) on the table.
So, how many links should you have in a post? That depends wholly on who you ask. We recommend no more than 10 on a single post or page of 1,000 words or more.
Broken or Irrelevant Links
If someone clicks on one of your links and is surprised at the page they end up on, you’re doing it wrong. Web visitors should know what to expect when they open a page based on the anchor text they click on. If the content is irrelevant or the link or page is broken, they may not want to click on any other links from your site.
Linking To Pages With a Poor User Experience
You want your web visitors to trust you. You erode that trust when you link to a page with a poor user experience or one that feels spammy. Even worse, if the external page has even been deemed spammy by Google, just linking to it will make Google think you can’t be trusted either, and your search engine placement will suffer.
Using Only One Type of Anchor Text
There are plenty of strategies for using anchor text effectively. Using just one style will limit your options and likely harm your user experience. Each anchor text tactic has its place in your linking toolbox. If you always strive for clarity and helpfulness for your reader, you should be okay.
Let Content Journey Help
Ready to take your content to the next level and get all the benefits anchor text has to offer? Let Content Journey’s team help you with SEO writing services that drive results. With Content Journey, you can trust that your content will be well-written, optimized for search engines, and tailored to your audience. Contact us today to get started.
