Anchor Text: What Is It And How Can It Be Used?

In the digital world, the aim of every business is to manage the higher ranking. But this objective is not easy to achieve. You’ll have to apply well-developed strategies in order to get to a higher position. The top websites and the people operating them employ a lot of hard work in getting the right SEO strategy that results in high level of traffic for these websites and business along with better ranking and more engagement from the customers. There can be various different elements of SEO strategy. Anchor text is one of the integral parts of the SEO strategy that helps the marketers in getting the desired ranking of their website and web pages. But this phenomenon of anchor text comes with a challenge for most of the users. Making the correct use of this aspect can lead to highest rank whereas improper usage can result in a loss of organic traffic and penalization from the search engines too. So, you can very well understand how important this anchor text phenomenon actually is. So, in order to proceed further, we’ll have to see what anchor text is.

Anchor Text

In very simple words, anchor text is that portion of writing that can be seen under the link on your browser. It is important for them on the page and off page search engine optimization. But the important question is how. It can be taken from various different aspects. Firstly, from your search engine point of view, this anchor text is helpful in determining the relevancy of the content with the query made by the user. Although the Penguin update has reduced the importance of this text a bit, but it is still used for determining the relevancy after the penguin update the anchor text is mostly used for penalizing the website owners for the over optimization of the content.

Types Of Anchor Text

The importance of anchor text for Google is exceptionally high. The following bullet points discuss the different type of anchor text available for the users:

1. Exact match: in this type of anchor text, the website owners or the marketers use the keyword exactly in the same manner in the anchor text as they are.
2. Partial Match: in this case, the keyword used in the anchor text is the same as the one used for ranking of the website.
3. Branded: the name of the brand, which is being discussed or highlighted in the website, is the main focus in the anchor text.
4. Generic: this type of anchor text does not contain any targeted keyword.
5. Naked anchor links: URL for the website is used in this sort of anchor text.
6. Long-tail keywords: such keywords are the synonyms of the actual keywords and used in the anchor text for attracting more customers.

Optimization Of Anchor Text

Following suggestions can help you in managing the anchor texts for your website in a better manner.

1. Use It In The Natural Form

The anchor text must be written in a way that can provide the readers of your website a better value from the text. Google gives this aspect great importance, so you must ensure that your anchor text is not a mere repetition of keywords. It must provide information to users by utilization of the keywords. Through the adoption of this technique, both the users and the search engines can benefit.

2. Avoid Over Optimization

Overdoing anything is bad. Google works on this principle. It does not consider the over optimization of a website as relevant rather it penalizes any such attempt. So, if you are using such a strategy, you can even get a negative impact. So, be careful.

3. Relevant To The Website

You can’t be using the anchors, which are of no use to use, the users or search engines. Make sure the keywords that you have chosen and the anchor text created from it must be relevant to the information available on the website. Otherwise, the search engine will deteriorate the ranking of your website gradually.

4. Keep A Check On The Anchor Text

Make sure to monitor the anchor text and the impact created by it regularly. This will be helpful when it comes to the backlinking. Without keeping a track of the anchor text, you might get your website linked with spam website. Or in the other case, the excessive use of keywords might go undetected, leading to problems with the search engine and loss of organic traffic to your website. So, keeping a check can help you in avoiding all these problems.

5. Distribution Of Anchor Text Is Important

Neither your anchor text must be full of keywords, nor should they be without any keyword. Managing this aspect can be termed as the efficient distribution. You can use more than one types of anchor text to get rid of this issue. Similarly, monitoring the competitors and analyzing the strategy adopted by them could be a good idea when it comes to the efficient distribution of anchor text.

Overall, the ranking of the website is highly dependent upon the anchor text used on the website. You’ll have to manage the anchor text in a way to provide real value to the users and the natural flow to the search engines to consider your anchor text as the best. Once you’ll achieve this status, only then you can expect an increase in the website traffic and higher ranking.