When it’s done right, search engine optimisation (SEO) can drastically alter the fortunes of your website and entire operation, for the better. Among the many elements that comprise the practice, and how it’s carried out via an ongoing strategy and campaign, anchor text in link building stands out as one of the most important factors in ranking online.
But different people have different views on how to anchor text when running a link building campaign. Some say it’s fine to pepper content with exact-match anchor text while others insist you should limit and also vary the usage or you’ll attract over-optimisation penalties from Google. SEO experts have been arguing about it for the last two decades, as long as search engines started popping up on the internet and before Google became the runaway leader in search.
We’ve looked at all the recommendations for anchor text link building – all sides to the arguments – as well as Google and other guidelines on best practices to link anchor text and distilled it down for you in this comprehensive guide
What Is Anchor Text?
In any piece of online content – primarily articles – you’ll see hyperlinked text that’s blue by default and underlined. Some are links to external sources, to provide readers with further information or to back up facts and claims with verified information. It’s standard practice for digital journalism and writing on the web in general.
In some content, however, the links will be to a website whose owner has been working on their SEO. The hyperlinked text will be on a set of keywords that the person or company has researched and is relevant to their business and sector. This is anchor text, and, like all the other links in the content, clicking it takes you to another website. The text should read naturally and be relevant to the article it’s in, or you could suffer a fall in rankings as Google penalises your site – more on that later.
Looking at the HTML, or web code that forms pages (use Ctrl + U or right-click on a page and select “View page source” to see a web page’s code), where anchor text is placed and you see something like this:
<a href=”https://www.example.com”>Visit our website</a>
Here, the anchor text, which is what people reading the content see, is “Visit our website” and, if clicked, would take people to https://www.example.com (not visible in the article).
The example above is just one type of anchor text, and we’ll show you more further down this guide, so you’ll know how to anchor text in different ways to suit content and also so that you don’t fall foul of Google’s guidelines.
Why Is Anchor Text Important for SEO?
Anchor text is a fundamental part of any SEO campaign because it has a number of roles that together help to boost a site’s online visibility. The site may then find itself returning higher in search results, thereby increasing traffic, or the number of people who click on web results and go to a particular website. The main uses of anchor text are for:
- Backlinks: Links from one website to another are the cornerstone of SEO, helping to boost rankings and traffic. They originate in (or on) anchor text – a page on your website hyperlinked to keyword phrases in content on another website. Google considers links from quality sites to others one of its main ranking factors.
- Ranking factor: Google also views keywords in anchor text to be a ranking factor, as long as the text is relevant to the page it’s linked to and indicates what it might be, because it helps Google to understand what the page on the external site is about. So, for example, if the anchor text is “best hotels in London”, and the link points to a hotel in London, this gives Google an idea of the destination site, instead of generic anchor text like “click here”, which doesn’t reveal anything about the page hyperlinked on the text.
- Internal linking: Anchor text is not only vital for external link building campaigns but on-page SEO too – all the pages that make up your own website. Linking to each with relevant anchor text provides Google with a way to crawl your site for indexing and also offers ease of navigation to users, allowing for a positive web experience instead of having to search around for something.
Internal & External Links
Almost every website – and there are over 1.5 billion of them – has two types of links in its content: internal and external. As we touched on in the previous section, internal links are those that point to and connect various pages on the same website. External links are generally used in web copy and blog posts to provide further information for readers; they’re usually high-authority sites like those of news outlets that have verifiable information.
As we’ve mentioned, internal and external links provide context about the page they’re on, whether they’re hyperlinked to anchor text in your own website’s content or an external one, allowing for crawling and indexing by search engines and also improving relevance in people’s online searches. This then contributes to improved performance of your site, as your rankings improve and you get more traffic.
You should carry out a regular internal link audit of your website, ensuring every section – from the homepage to product or service pages to blog posts – has links to other pages on the site. But they must be relevant to the page they’re on and the one they’re pointing to – a natural flow that provides more information for the reader, and search engines. While conducting your audit, you can also check for broken links and remedy them, as links that are no longer working can negatively affect your SEO, as well as the user experience.
If you have a large number of blog posts and they’re in need of internal links, consider using a plug-in like Link Whisper to automatically suggest other posts on your blog to link to (based on relevance of topics); it will provide the URLs and let you add them in a flash. The goal is to ensure you have a balance of internal links on your site and external ones from other websites that send people to yours. And with internal linking, you can also boost the popularity of some pages by passing authority from ones that get more traffic, by linking them.
Anchor Text Match Types
Not all anchor text is the same, and SEO professionals have different views on which type to use, and how much of it. Our recommendation is you should use a variety of anchor text in a piece of content, not sticking solely to just one and perhaps over-using it – a practice that could see you penalised. These are the different kinds of anchor text to use in a link building campaign:
Exact-Match Anchor Text
This is where your exact keywords are used as the anchor text – “dog training tips” in the example below. It’s clear to the reader that they can get more information (tips) by clicking on the link; and Google will know that the link is pointing to an external website that has tips for training dogs.
<a href=”https://www.example.com/dog-training-tips”>dog training tips</a>
Partial-Match Anchor Text
Here, we’re using a variation of the keywords – they’re still all in there, but in a different order. This can often be a more natural way to add anchor text to an article.
<a href=”https://www.example.com/dog-training-tips”>helpful tips for training your dog</a>
Branded-Anchor Text
Another way to use anchor text is to just mention a company or brand and link to its website.
<a href=”https://www.example.com”>company name</a>
Naked URLs
You can also use a hyperlinked website as anchor text – called a naked URL.
Generic Anchor Text
It’s not the best anchor text to use in link building, because a non-specific “click here” or “learn more” doesn’t give readers or search engines a clue about the linked website – so use sparingly, if at all.
<a href=”https://www.example.com/dog-training-tips”>Click here to learn more</a>
UK Linkology Experts’ Preferred Use of Anchor Text
We asked some of the SEO experts here at UK Linkology about anchor text, as they’re using it every day, for us and our clients. Here’s what they said.
Account Director Rachel Thompson
Anchor text is an area of SEO where opinion has always been divided. Before the Google Penguin update, exact-match was the game and people were getting away with it — more than that, they were succeeding!
But Google quickly caught on that this technique was being used to manipulate the SERPs and it was flagged as a spammy technique.
Everything is better in moderation, and the same is true with anchor texts. Just building one type won’t get you anywhere; you need to be diverse. Establishing a natural profile means building links from a variety of sources, in a variety of ways.
Ultimately what matters most is how well your page is actually optimised for the keywords. If your keywords are then also used around where your link is placed, Google is smart enough to know what you’re about and what you should be ranking for. The anchor doesn’t need to include the keyword at all to achieve that. However, it of course can’t hurt to have your keyword in there — just don’t overdo it!
SEO Executive Daisy Allam
From my experience, it’s really important to keep anchor text natural. If a page carries commercial intent , then an optimised product anchor may be appropriate. You have to make sure that the anchor text connects the relevancy between the referring and receiving page and that it works for both Google and the end user.
General Outreach Manager Luca Yates
As an outreach team, we use anchor text to look for new linking opportunities. It’s a really powerful way to find new blogs that we can work with. We always start on Ahrefs, as you can easily analyse all the anchor texts on a website, or all of the anchor texts on a website’s backlink profile.
If I was looking to find and outreach automotive sites, I’d start off by finding a site that we already work with regularly. Then, I’d enter the site into Ahrefs and go into “Outgoing links” and then to “Anchors”. I can now see all of the anchor texts that are on this site, and the links that are on them.
We now start looking for relevant anchor texts. Anything that’s relevant, we can view the websites that are linked to them. If we’re looking for automotive sites, we will look for anything relevant. For example, it could be anything about “cars”, “motors”, etc. Any anchor texts that look like this will theoretically be linking to the type of websites we are targeting.
Overall, it’s a super-powerful way to find linking opportunities. It’s very easy, so beginners can even do this.
The Google Penguin Update
The use of anchor text in websites was transformed with the arrival of an update to Google’s core algorithm called Penguin. It was rolled out in 2012 and updated in 2016, with the aim of punishing website owners who violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (now called Google Search Essentials) with the use of spammy content including keyword stuffing and too much anchor text.
So websites that have unnatural and over-optimised anchor text in their content – too many links with the exact-match anchor text – will almost certainly see their Google rankings fall, as Penguin picks up on this “black-hat SEO” trick and punishes the site.
To avoid that happening to you, make sure you vary your anchor text usage, like we discussed above, that the text is informative and that you link your anchor text to content that’s relevant and also high quality. Trying to game the system and get around Penguin just won’t work – it’s counterproductive and all your efforts will only result in trouble for you.
How To Select Your Anchors
If you’re wondering how to anchor text so that your website benefits in rankings, keep users and search engines foremost in your mind – not your own website. So if your anchor text informs people and also Google about what to expect if they click on the link, you’re off to a good start.
And as we keep saying, relevancy is also key when you want to link anchor text – your link should be relevant to the topic of the page it’s on. If, for example, the article is about cycling but your anchor text links to something entirely different – say, a page about pet supplies – that’s not going to work for anyone, including yourself.
Use relevant keywords as part or all of your anchor text, and keep them short and concise; long anchor text might be picked up as spammy. Something else to bear in mind is that Google also considers the text surrounding anchors, so make sure it’s relevant too. And you can simply just use your brand name as part of your anchor text link building strategy, as long as it fits with the flow of the content.
Competitor Research
A good way to understand how to use anchor text is to look at what other people are doing – your competitors. Start by:
- Identifying your competitors. Use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and SpyFu to find out who the competitors in your sector are (you most likely already know).
- Examining their anchor text. With one of the above tools, look at their content and see what kind of anchor text they’re using – exact or partial match, branded, naked URLs or generic?
- Viewing their linked content. Click on your rivals’ anchor text and see where it brings you. If they’re doing their anchor text work right, it will be to pages that have something in common with the content the links are coming from.
- Identifying the most linked pages. Which pages on your competitors’ sites are linked the most, and why? What anchor text and variations of them are they using to point to them? Their strategy might work for you too, or you may be able to figure out patterns or trends you could adopt for your own anchor text link building campaign.
Anchoring People to the World Wide Web
Anchor text is a small but vital part of any SEO strategy and campaign, with the power to boost the presence of your website and give you more traffic. Its dual function serves people on the internet who are reading content and search engines too, and it’s a mistake to forget about the former and focus all your efforts towards Google, because you would almost certainly be penalised.
The internet is a vast ecosystem of content that people mostly want, and it’s the search engines’ job of finding them what they’re looking for, with the help of context-relevant anchor text.
