Anchor Text
Short Definition:
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. Search engine algorithms use the anchor text of a hyperlink to determine the theme of the destination webpage. Anchor text is a vital link building strategy for search engine optimization (SEO). A website’s theme is an important factor in determining search engine rankings, so using keywords in anchor text can improve a site’s search engine rankings.
Defined Answer:
What Is Anchor Text?
Our clients often ask us what an anchor text is and what it has to do with SEO. Most people know that search engines like Google rank pages higher if they contain keywords, but the relationship between anchor text and SEO goes a bit deeper. Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink.
In HTML coding, an anchor text is what comes between the <a> and </a> tags. What makes the anchor text so important to SEO? In the context of a search engine, an anchor text is a phrase on your web page that a user clicks on when they hover over a link. In other words, the only part of a link that Google reads is the anchor text.
Many people are not aware that it’s called anchor text. It’s called anchor text because you are literally attaching keywords to your anchor text to help people find your website. Your anchor text is the visible part of your hyperlink, usually highlighted in blue.
If you are using anchor text, make sure you use it properly, meaning you are not stuffing it with keywords. That looks extremely unnatural to search engines and will hurt your search rankings. The anchor text is what helps your website get ranked. It is also something that you want to be high quality. If you are not using anchor text, you are missing out on a huge ranking factor.
Anchor text is one of the most powerful SEO tactics in today’s online marketing world because it can increase your website rank on search engines like Google. There are three different types of anchor text: exact match, phrase match, and partial match. We will dive a bit deeper into each type below.
Types Of Anchor Text
Exact Match: Exact match is a type of anchor text that uses an exact keyword or phrase for which we want to rank. It is an essential element to successful on-page SEO since it allows webmasters to optimize their webpages and blog posts so that search engines can determine the content’s topic and context more easily.
Using various exact match keywords in anchor text can help users searching for specific content and products to find what they are looking for.
For example, when we want to rank #1 for the keyword “best widgets,” we place the phrase “best widgets” in the anchor text of the link to our website. Exact match anchors are known as “descriptive” or “pure” anchors.
Phrase Match: A phrase match is when an anchor text has a phrase we want to rank for. By utilizing the anchor text’s keywords, we can get more relevant traffic. Sometimes we want to make sure that the anchor text is a phrase match instead of a specific keyword.
These are links that have the same words in both the link text and the page/post linked to. This is really important as search engines like to see phrases in links pointing to a page, as it helps them figure out if your page is relevant to the topic of the post that the phrase in the link is pointing to.
For example, if your article is talking about the best types of organic dog foods, the phrase match can be “best organic dog food” in your anchor text so that when someone searches for that phrase, the article can appear in the SERPs.
Partial Match: Partial match anchor text is a type of anchor text that is not an exact match. In other words, the anchor text has at least one word that is different than the target keyword. This type of anchor text is often used for branding purposes since the user is likely to know the brand name or other popular keywords and can still be directed to the appropriate page.
Partial match anchor text can also be used as a way to improve your search engine rankings since partial match anchor text is more likely to attract click-throughs from Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) than anchor text with an exact match.
How Anchor Text Affects SEO?
Search engines look at how you use anchor text to determine how a page is relevant to a specific search query. For example, if you have a page about realtors in Denver, Colorado, you might use the anchor text “Denver Realtors” in the links that appear on that page. Search engines can use those links to determine what the page is about and then show it to searchers looking for that information.
When a person uses a search engine to find information, Google employs several techniques to improve search quality, including page rank, anchor text, and proximity information. Page rank describes the importance of a web page based on how many other pages point to it. Anchor text describes the clickable words on a web page. Proximity describes the relationship between words on a web page.
Final Thoughts
As a reflection of how other people view your page and, by extension, what your pages may be about, search engines use external anchor text. While website owners typically can not control how other websites link to theirs, you can ensure that the anchor text you use is useful, descriptive, and relevant within your own website.
If you have the opportunity to suggest a specific anchor text when another website links to yours, then take advantage of it but don’t’ worry about it too much. But make sure that you are using a variety of anchor text types to link to your own pages on your website design.
« Back to Marketing Terms & Definitions