What Is Anchor Text and Why Does It Play A Crucial Role In Link Building

What is anchor text? Anchor text refers to the clickable words, used to link one webpage to another. The color of text is usually blue, as it’s an actual hyperlink. However, the text can be whatever color the website owner chooses. And sometimes it’s dependent on what field they are using. If you go back to that example, of the link we had for LevelFinish, you will see in a scenario that anchor text is our brand name, LevelFinish, as that’s the actual clickable text, not the words before or after; it’s simply LevelFinish. So, why is anchor text important? SEO, best practices dictate that anchor text should be relevant to the page you’re linking too, rather than generic.

Google can actually read this anchor text and take it into consideration when ranking a website. For example, if you link to a website with the anchor text, blue hat, Google is going to assume the page you are linking to has some relation to blue hats. As you can imagine, there are different types of anchor texts you can use when linking to a webpage. If we took our carpet installation page as an example, we could link to this page using five different anchors, in total. The first would be an exact match anchor, where we reference the exact keyword we are targeting.

So, carpet installation in Richmond, Virginia, these are super powerful as it’s no doubt as to what the page is going to be about, if we link with an exact match anchor. However, these aren’t the most natural. So, you want to avoid using them frequently. In fact, Google has actually clamped down on these a lot in recent years, due to people trying to manipulate the algorithm. Second type of anchor would be partial match. So carpet installation, service by LevelFinish. This is classified as partial match, as it only has parts of our main keyword in it, which is carpet installation. There’s no mention of Richmond, for example. These are more natural and as a result, are more safer to use.

However, as with most link building campaigns, it’s hard to control what anchor text people will use when linking to our sites. It’s more a case of, if you find you’re getting too many of any type, you want to try your best to mix things up and explore other anchor types. The third type, is what we call branded. This is the type that we saw in the example link for LevelFinish. This is when a website will link to you, using your brand name as anchor text. Branded anchors are great for increasing your brand presence online, but also super safe, as you can’t get penalized by Google for having too many links to your site with anchor text being your brand name.

Just take Amazon for example, the majority of people will link to Amazon online, will link to them saying Amazon, which as we know is a branded type of anchor. The full type of anchor is what we call a naked URL. This one is quite self-explanatory and is essentially when our website will link to your website and it will use the whole URL as the anchor text. So, they will literally go into the content and paste in your URL and then it will make the whole URL an anchor text. The last type of anchor text is what we call miscellaneous. This is when a website will link to your site, using generic text, such as read more, click here.

But that is essentially the five different types of anchor texts you can use when linking out to another website. Right, see you guys in the next video.