How To Optimize Your Anchor Text Strategy For SEO

Source: Neil Patel

The early days of SEO were like the Wild, Wild West.

Blackhat SEO experts were doing everything imaginable to rank their sites on Google.

That included keyword stuffing and creating spammy backlinks on a regular basis.

And for a time, it totally worked.

But these days, those older SEO hacks are long gone.

Now we deal with a much more sophisticated algorithm that pushes innocent-sounding updates like Hummingbird and Panda.

But as innocent as they sound, they can create some real problems for your ongoing SEO efforts.

One of those updates that affected SEO forever is known as Penguin and it specifically dealt with how Google uses backlinks to evaluate page rank.

And with Penguin now a part of the core Google algorithm, the anchor text you use in your backlinks and internal links is more important than ever.

So in this guide, I want to show you how to optimize your anchor texts so that they will positively impact your SEO.

But before we go there, you have to understand how anchor texts work at all.

What is anchor text, and why bother?

Even if you don’t realize it, there’s a good chance that you use anchor texts on a daily basis.

Anchor text is the clickable text that you see in a hyperlink.

So if the Internet is a highway, then you can think of anchor texts like signs for upcoming exits.

They send signals to both your website’s user and search engines.

And when used correctly, they will connect you to a different “lane” by allowing you to source credible information from another website.

They also play a role in helping users navigate your site as well.

If you were to look into your site’s code, you would see a line that looks like this:

This is the part of your site that Google is going to see.

There is a section that tells your web browser and search engines which link to follow.

Here’s how that translates to what’s on your page:

Or when a user clicks on the link, it will navigate them to the indicated page.

If you’ve never dug into the details of URLs before, it’s easy to imagine that merely creating a link is where the fireworks end.

But there’s a much more profound reason for brands to focus on this one simple element.

As I previously mentioned, in 2012 Google decided to rock the SEO world by releasing the Penguin algorithm.

Due to this change, anchor text quickly became the easiest way to determine how relevant a reliable website was.

Google also started using backlinks and its anchor texts to see if a website had been over-optimized.

And since Google penalizes over-optimization in this case, the role of the anchor text was only magnified.

Since 2012, Google has updated the Penguin algorithm multiple times with dramatic effect each time.

More than a few brands saw massive traffic dips as shown by the orange line:

In many instances, traffic dips like this will also mean a dip in revenue.

Dip too far from too many hits, and your brand could be in trouble.

Or on the opposite side of that coin, if you don’t optimize your anchor texts from the start these days, you’ll never see traffic at all.

The changes hit 3.1% of websites that had been over-optimizing their anchor texts.

And those are just the bigger websites that were visible with each successive update.

At the very least, it’s clear that the anchor text used in backlinks is an SEO signal for the foreseeable future.

In fact, anchor text applies to internal links as much as it applies to backlinks.

And with the recent Penguin 4.0 update in 2016, the game has changed once again.

Instead of rolling out on a progressive basis, Penguin now penalizes offending sites in real time for any anchor text errors.

Google now will only penalize the offending page instead of entire sites, but that could still affect your traffic and revenue in the long run.

So now that you know just how important anchor texts are to your traffic, let’s start diving into the different ways you can create an anchor text.

The different types of anchor texts

When it comes to search engines, SEO experts like to leave no stone unturned.

And in the case of anchor texts, we’ve had more than a decade to parse through all of the available information.

So it should not surprise you that there are a wide variety of ways that you can create anchor texts that are both useful and useless.

First of all, there are exact match anchor texts.

An exact match anchor text is when you use the same words as the targeted keywords for your entire page.

In the early days of SEO, using exact matches enough times on a single page almost guaranteed that your post would do well.

They were overused to such an enormous extent that, as mentioned previously, Google started to penalize overuse.

It’s still a good idea to use some, but in general, you should lean toward other types of anchor texts.

Next is a partial match anchor text, which is when you include your keyword along with other words.

As you can see here, I will typically try to use a few of these on my own site:

This is a helpful method to anchor text because I can still effectively include my keyword without coming across as spammy.

Google can still follow my link and have a better idea of the content that’s on my page without suspecting me of trying to manipulate its algorithm.

And since this will not be seen as manipulative linking practice, it’s a highly recommended way to boost the authority of your page.

Next, you also have branded anchor texts that rely on a brand’s name to establish authority.

As an outbound backlink, this is a great practice.

This is another safe and effective way to build a stronger anchor profile, as it signals to Google that you’re pointing toward other high-quality tools and services.

Of course, you also want to try to find other brands that will help you with your link building efforts in this way as well.

But don’t hesitate to link to another brand, especially with a keyword attached to it.

Google sees that as a healthy practice so long as you’re not over-linking to that brand.

Next up is the naked anchor text, which is basically just the website name.

In most cases, this is considered unhelpful.

When reading content, it’s pretty disruptive to suddenly read a URL instead of text that’s more topically suited.

This type of interruption can be off-putting and ultimately lead them away from your site.

It also might lead your visitor to believe you’re not as technically inclined as you should be, which ultimately calls into question your authority.

So whenever possible, avoid this type of anchor text.

After that comes a slightly better use called a generic anchor text.

You’ve probably seen a lot of these, as they’re much better suited to…

Click here to read more