Welcome to the off-page SEO tutorial, and anchor text is a first topic for the same. If you are a new to:
- Blogging
- SEO
- Online business
Then do give importance to anchor text, It is an important part of off-page SEO. Let’s understand the working model of an anchor text.
What is anchor text
“It is a clickable text, which is used to link from one page to another.”
You must have seen the blue, and underlined text (anchor text) while surfing on internet. It is a web standard, and that is why you see it in blue color. You can change the color of anchor text.
For example: Sharplesson is a fun educational website for everyone and we provide education on SEO, backlinks and many other topics.
Now you can easily find out “SEO and Backlinks” are a visible text, but it is a hyperlink, and it is made so by the use of anchor text.
Look at the above picture and tell me, what did you get from it? If you will use anchor text in a proper way, then for sure Google or other search engines will appreciate your work, else if they will find fishy things then get ready for penalty as well. To understand it more clearly, lets see types of anchor text.
Types of anchor text
- Branded anchors – Any anchor text that uses a brand in it. Let’s say for example : “ Sharplesson is a healthy platform for fun and easy education”.
- Generic anchors – It is a link that avoids using keywords that search engines use to determine the context of what you are linking to. For example: visit here, visit site, read more and click here.
Note: Avoid using such generic anchor text.
- Naked link anchor text – Linking back to a website, using its URL. For example: or
- Image anchor – It is used when an image is linked and Google or other search engines will use the “ ALT” tag as the anchor text.
- Exact match anchors – This type of anchor text we will for the keywords in the link. It will clear your way for more visibility in the search results.
Note: It has the power to increase your rankings, but if misused then same power will work against you.
Importance of Anchor text
We will see how it is important for visitors of your website, how help full it is in relating things and benefits of using for SEO. Let’s take one by one:
Visitors
If you will implement anchor text effectively, then you will minimize the bounce rate for your website. If the reader or visitor will get quality information on your website in the form of relevant links then for sure he will not go for further search. It will help you to improve:
- Average time on the website.
- Page views by a single visitor.
Note: Always link relevant articles, else it will give a bad impression of your website.
Good for SEO
Search engines use the text in the anchor of a link to understand the relevancy and topical nature of the page it is linked. Not only this, search engines also analyze the content of the source page and the keywords and title tag of the target page. It will help the search engines to return relevant results to the user.
For example: a website has lots of backlinks with the anchor “html”,” html tutorial”, “learn html course” and so on, then the search engine will understand the context of the target page.
Relate Similar content
Let’s understand with the simple example:
xyz blog writes about SEO, and if he will link one of his articles on SEO to health or sports, then it will shock both the visitor and the search engine.
The effects of this will be:
- High bounce rate
- The Search engine will be less interested in showing in search results.
To rank best for your post always link a relevant content, if you are writing on SEO then you can link on-page SEO or off-page SEO or other topic related to SEO.
Conclusion
We have seen anchor text, types of anchor text and its importance. Never forget to use anchor text for relevant topics and always avoid irrelevant linking of the contents. Use of generic links or irrelevant linking is like you are inviting Google for penalty.