In an ocean full of majestic SEO boats don’t let the anchor text drag your site down!
What is anchor text you say?
SEO really isn’t just about backlinks and content, SEO is complex and breaks down to thousands of little detailed fixes, anchor text being one of those details.
In short, anchor text is link text that is visible and clickable as a hyperlink on a website.
This may seem like a minor thing, but it not only tells the user what they are clicking onto, but it tells the google algorithm what that link is and whether it is legitimate or not.
It’s also great for backlinks, think of it as that extra support you need from your friend.
Let’s go over backlinks real quick. A backlink is an incoming link to your website from another website, in an ideal world you only want links from well known and trusted websites which boosts your SEO score telling Google that your website is trusted by others. You can read more about backlinks here.
The anchor text supports the backlink with a keyword – so for example if you’re a business that sells vegan brownies, you would want to link to the anchor text of “try our range of plant based vegan brownies” rather than “click here”.
Over time with enough internal and external backlinks pointing your way using right anchor text, you will see a great keyword improvement for your site.
Let’s take a step up: Anchor Text Variables
Anchor text variables are really indicators that focus on the hyperlink and tell the Google bots what the link is associated with.
This is HTML that sits within the code, and looks something like this:
Feeling like an anchor text whizz yet? Let’s take a look at the different variables used for anchor text:
- Nofollow: Nofollow attributes tell Google not to take the backlink into account when crawling the page for SEO value. Since March 2020 Google has been hitting hard on the nofollow links as a hint in determining a website’s position and value in SERP.
- Sponsored: Sponsored attributes tell Google that this link was obtained through paid sponsorship between you and a publisher, these are common on informative sites/blogs and guest posting.
- UGC (User generated content): This is a rare one, however some SEO’s like to add this in as it tells Google that the link (and the whole content) was placed on this page by users.
- Follow: Following a link, leaving it “blank” tells Google to give credit to the page you’re linking to.
Things to avoid when you’re anchoring ahoy
Repeat after me, “I will not use generic anchor words”, “I will not use generic anchor words”, “I will not use generic anchor words!!!!”
A generic anchor doesn’t include any text referencing a keyword like mentioned above, the classic “click here” trick.
Generic anchor texts are good for a CTA as it draws direct attention to the link, however its best to mention this outside the anchor text.
Generic anchor text looks a little like these:
- Click here
- Read more
- Download this
- More info
- This page
- Find out more here
Anchors Away!
We hope that you’ve learnt to love and nurture your site’s anchor text in all the right ways after reading this post, never forget that anchor text is an important factor in your website’s SEO health and the little things all add up and count towards a great performing website!
Don’t let anchor text be an afterthought.
