10 Types Of Anchor Texts You Must Use

Anchor Texts Plays a great role in SEO. There are many types of anchor texts you can use. We will elaborate this later in this post. Anchor Text helps you to determine the links in a better way. It also helps you to boost up your ranking in search engines.

Links are one of the key assets in on-page SEO. If you are an Internet marketer, you must know the necessity of “anchor text” in search engine optimization.

However it is a commonly-used phrase, many marketers are yet to discover what it really means after Google’s Penguin and Hummingbird updates. Anchor texts are a vital part of SEO and strongly impact your search engine ranking.

In this article you will learn:

• What is Anchor Text?
• How it is important in SEO?
• Types of Anchor texts that you use for better SEO.

In this post, I am trying to elaborate you types of anchor texts and how to use them. It will help you to optimize your site for better search engine rankings. So, let’s get started:

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is a clickable text which sends you to another web source or website. The text or phrase where you see the links are known as anchor text.  The anchor text is sometimes known as the link label or link title. The words contained in the anchor text help determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.

Here is the example of Anchor Text:

<a href=”http://www.domain.com”>Domain</a>

Here “Domain” is considering as an Anchor text.  You can create anchor text by using the above HTML code. So, it is quite easy. Check the image below for a better understanding of Anchor text:

Anchor Text Variation

When you are aggressively building exact match anchor text links, It will trigger the Google spam filter. It is completely unnatural for web pages that link to your website to all have exact match anchor text. Having A bit of anchor text variation is natural, just like how a great portion of the internet’s links is naked URLs.

How it is important in SEO?

Since backlinks are an important SEO ranking factor, anchor text is going to play a significant role. It’s added for the benefit of search engines so that they can determine what the “linked-to page” is about.

Before the Google Penguin update, Google used anchor texts to determine whether or not a particular website was relevant. After Penguin update, anchor texts serve as a great way for the search engine to penalize websites for spam and over-optimization.

Before Google’s Penguin update anybody could go crazy with their anchor texts. You can literally build hundreds or even thousands of links to your website with the exact keywords you wanted. So, It was very easy to rank your website.

Types of Anchor texts that you use for better SEO

As you know that Anchor text plays a major role in your site on-page SEO.  There are different kinds of anchor text you can use.  You have to maintain a good balance with your anchor texts.

When the search engines look at your backlink profile, they want to see a natural mix of anchor text from backlinks. Whether you are running a link-building campaign or created it naturally, you must have to maintain a clean mix of backlinks with a well-balanced mix of anchor text.

Types of Anchor Text List

• Exact match anchors
• Naked link anchors
• Generic anchors
• Branded anchors
• Image anchors
• Keyword anchors
• Latent semantic indexing (LSI) anchors
• Long anchors
• Partial match anchors
• Co-occurrence anchors

Based on several types of research, below are the types of anchor texts to use and keep you on the safe side:

1. Partially matching and long-tail keywords (you can use long-long tail keywords, like articles or pages titles, e.g. “Best Current Fixed 10-Year Mortgage Rates + Refinance Rates” or “Quick Weight Loss Program – Healthy, Easy, Fast Weight Loss”; if your targeted keyword is “mortgage calculator”, you can also use: “calculate your mortgage”, “bad credit mortgage loans”, etc.)
2. Anchors with synonyms. If you want to rank for “cheap hotels”, also use “cheap hotel deals”, “cheap hotel prices”, “discount hotels”, “hotel deals”, “lodging”, etc.
3. All variations of naked URLs: www.example.com, example.com, Example.com, EXAMPLE.COM, http://www.example.com.
4. Non-descriptive anchor texts. Since they are not widely used at the moment, check the list below to diversify your anchors:

• Website, visit the website to learn more
• view publisher site
• Click here to visit the website, here
• Watch the video
• video
• Click here to download
• Click here for details/for more info
• Click here to view the source of the post
• Article
• Source
• View source
• Learn more
• Read more
• find out more
• Detailed info here
• more details
• See survey results
• Go to [URL]/ brand website
• Details

5. If your website is multi-language, use anchors in other languages (“Página de Internet:”, “Registo de Domínios”).
6. Brand name or brand-keyword hybrids. (“Semrush keyword tool”, “Godaddy – hosting and domains”, “Domain registrar – Godaddy”, etc.).
7. Image links with optimized alt text. Alt texts in image links are also a ranking factor, but alongside filling alt texts with “money keywords” only, use such alt texts as [banner], “example.com” or leave them empty.

To diversify your anchor profile further, you should be considering using image anchors. In an image, Google reads the “alt” tag as an anchor text. Leaving this blank will result in a “no text” anchor. Ex:

<a href=”http://example.com”><imgsrc=”http://example.com/sample-image.jpg” alt=”alt as anchor text” /> </a>

8. LSI anchors– LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. But it’s really not complicated, despite the name. LSI is just other ways of phrasing your keywords. So if you rearrange the words in your keyword, or replace a word with a synonym, you’re using LSI.

LSI anchors are a really good way to prove the relevance of your links without getting penalized for using the same key phrases over and over again. A few examples of LSI Anchor Text: Target Keyword: Web Design

• Top Web Design Companies
• Web Design Examples
• Web Design Projects
• Web Design Patterns

Best practice for anchor texts

It is not rocket science. Creating a relevant anchor text is purely a common sense. A link must provide value for a user, and the anchor text is the most important way to conveying the value of that link. Keep it natural. Don’t make up crappy sentences to shoehorn in your exact match keywords or keyphrases. If it doesn’t sound natural when you say it aloud, don’t write it. Also, don’t turn a complete sentence into the anchor text. Keep it condensed and easy to understand. If you don’t do this then it will increase your Spam score and the chances are high that you get penalized by search engines.

Internal Links and Anchor text

Interlink is one of the crucial parts of On-Page SEO. To make the most out of your internal links, try to add links that add real value to users. Write a great anchor text for them. So readers know that the link has been carefully selected to help them find out more. Don’t link for the sake of it. Make it relevant and useful. And of course, don’t spam!

If you are using Yoast SEO plugin for your blog then you can use their built-in internal link tool that makes it a lot easier to find related content to link to on your site.

What Percentage should you use?

There are so many misconceptions of using the density of anchor text on your website. You can use the following percentage of anchor text on your website for better SEO:

• Branded Anchors: 60-80%
• Naked link anchors: 10-20%
• Generic anchors: 5-10%
• Image anchors 5-10%
• Latent semantic indexing (LSI) anchors 5-10%
• Exact match anchors: -5%
• Keyword anchors -5%
• Long anchors -5%
• Partial match anchors -5%

Some of the key tips to be considered when using Anchor text:

• Don’t link to toxic sites.
• Avoid Interlinking with rich keywords anchor.
• Write relevant and quality guest posts.
• Track your Anchor text using SEMrush.
• Acquire links from high authority websites.

Conclusion

Since the search engine, bots are getting smarter and smarter every day, it is becoming more and more rewarding to write good, interesting text that uses sentence structure variations that wouldn’t have had good SEO results in the past.

The main types of anchor texts that are safe and effective are naked link anchors and branded anchors. Focus on building your links organically using quality content and a diverse range of anchor texts with proper co-citation and co-occurrence. This will help you optimize your link profile and make it next to impossible for Google to penalize you. I hope this post has helped you to understand the types of Anchor Text.