Anchor
TL;DR
The anchor text represents the visible & clickable text in a hyperlink placed on a page. It can usually be spotted based on the underline and blue color.
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text represents the phrase or word that links to another page or website. The standard anchor text is usually underlined and blue, but it can be easily changed for design or branding purposes.
The keywords used in the anchor text should be highly relevant to the linked website or page, as it helps readers understand where they are being redirected to, and it is also one of the many matching algorithms and pieces of information used by search engines to determine the industry and the topic of a web site and its pages.
Why is Anchor Text important?
Anchor text is essential for your site ranking as it helps crawlers and search engines better understand the page topic (and relevance), and so your visitors can easily see where you are redirecting them.
As an example, if you write a post where you need to link to an app, the link and the anchor text should be like this: Use our app to see your website statistics. As you can easily see, the anchor looks very natural for the reader, and it is relevant to the hyperlink as well.
The hyperlink can be the URL to an external page or an internal one, and it has to be relevant, no matter the case.
There are multiple types of links and anchor texts to consider when you add them to your pages. Here are a few examples:
- Branded links. These are the type of links that link with your brand name in the anchor text.
- Some people may use the URL itself as an anchor text as well. However, it is not really recommended.
- Article or Page title. You can use the exact matching page title as an anchor text, like "Why is anchor text important?"
- Similar to the exact page title, you can use exact keywords as anchor text, e.g., anchor text.
- Use partially matching keywords or related keywords: this will keep the relevance of your text and links, and make your text easier to read and follow.
- The most common links to should avoid are click here, view more, read more, etc. These links do not tell crawlers or people what the link about is.
