What is Anchor Text and How to optimize it?

What is Anchor Text? 

Anchor text is the hyperlink in a clickable format used for link building. You can easily identify the anchor text by moving a cursor point along with the blog or any website content. Mostly Anchor text is visible to the naked eye, highlighted or underlined by blue.

Example: ‘How to start a blog‘ is the anchor text that links to the site https://www.clickdo.co.uk/how-to-start-a-blog/

Sample code

<a href=”https://www.clickdo.co.uk/how-to-start-a-blog”>How to start a blog</a> The text “How to start a blog “ is the anchor  text.

Importance of Anchor Text

• Anchor text also boosts the SEO by Building a link to the target page.
• Anchor text is the visible and highlighted phrase of words that links to the other location of the document within the site or to another site to provide page ranking.
• Anchor text helps the search engines and users to reach the relevant content in the same page or to another page site.

Anchor text Types

Exact match– Anchor text that matches to the exact page link, the URL of the page is same as the Anchor text

For Example: “On-page SEO” is the anchor text that links to the page or blog about “On-page SEO “

Partial Match– Anchor text that slightly varies from the keyword of the linking page.

For Example:” On-Page SEO uses” is the anchor text that links to the page about “On-page SEO”

Brand Name- Anchor text used as the brand name

For Example: Anchor text “Microsoft” is linking to the article or blog on the Microsoft site.

Naked Anchor

A website URL or page URL used as an anchor text is a naked anchor text.

Generic Anchor

The generic anchor is the word or phrase used as the anchor text itself.

For Example: “signup” or “click here” used as the anchor text linked to the respective page is referred to as the generic anchor.

Image Anchor

Linking the image to the page or site, here anchor text is the alt text you have given for the image.

How to optimize SEO friendly anchor text

• Use short Succinct length of keywords
• Make an anchor text relevant to the page you going to link
• Don’t always use exact keyword match anchor text or use low- volumed keyword 
• Don’t use generic Anchor text
• Always keep the natural Anchor text
• Don’t over-optimize the Anchor text
• Avoid Linking to the spam sites