Optimizing Anchor Text: Best Practices for 2024

Introduction

Every link builder specialist and marketer has heard about the importance of anchor text optimization in SEO. The importance of anchor text optimization best practices in improving website visibility and user experience cannot be overstated. Especially in 2024! The question is: is anchor text that important, and which types of anchor text should you use? This anchor text guide will help you differentiate various anchor texts, choose the best one, and incorporate anchor text best practices into your SEO strategy.

So, let’s start with a full understanding of the anchor text and its importance!

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The Explanation and Importance of the Anchor Text

Anchor text is a clickable text that directs you to another page. It's not just any text; it's text that's relevant to the source page and the target URL. This relevance is key to its effectiveness. The anchor text is mainly underlined and blue but can easily be changed with HTML and CSS. For instance, here is an anchor text example that leads to the LinkyJuice blog page. In this case, the “LinkyJuice blog page” is the anchor; otherwise, it is link text, hyperlink text, or link title. As it is not modified through code, it is blue and underlined, and if you click on it, it will lead you to our blog page. Here is the code example of this link:

<a href="https://www.linkyjuice.com/blog">LinkyJuice blog page</a>

Anchor text isn't just for search engines; it's designed with you, the user, in mind. It's a tool that helps you understand the context of the target page, making your browsing experience more efficient. Search engines use accurately chosen anchor texts to rank the page higher, ensuring you get the most relevant results. When search engines see that the anchor text is not valuable for the user, the website will be pushed down on the Search Engine Pages. So, the accurate use of anchor text can significantly affect your website authority and, thereby, the authority of your content. 

Finally, wisely chosen anchor text can enhance user navigation and make it smooth and seamless. This way, a user better understands the connection between pages and explores further. 

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Anchor Text Types

There are several different types of anchor texts, each serving a specific purpose. Using the appropriate anchor text can help you understand the link's purpose, which, in turn, will help improve the overall experience of website navigation. If the anchor text is unclear, it can be misleading and confusing for a website visitor. The same can happen with the wrong anchor text type. 

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That’s why it is important to differentiate each anchor text type and understand which one you should use for a particular situation. So, let’s talk about the main types of anchor text that can be used in ​​anchor text best practices: 

• Exact-match

As you can guess, the exact-match anchor text is the same keyword used to rank the webpage. For example, “link building services'' can be a great exact-match keyword for LinkyJuice. 

Besides, here is a sentence where LinkyJuice is mentioned: “Better providers offer low-cost SEO consulting, which can be a big help for business owners who are unfamiliar with keyword research, link building, and other SEO basics.” In this case, the anchor text link “building” that directs the users to the LinkyJuice homepage is an exact-match keyword for our company. 

While this is a very effective SEO strategy, overusing exact-match anchor text can raise red flags and potentially be seen as spammy by search engines. So, if you want to have a natural backlink profile, you should not concentrate only on this type of anchor text.

• Partial-match

What about partial-match anchor text? This type of anchor text includes keywords related to the content of the linked page but is different from the exact match to it. For instance, if the agency’s specialization is providing link building services, the partial-match keyword will be "high-quality link building solutions." This anchor text is a perfect solution if you want to avoid spamming and simply want to show relevance. 

• LSI anchor

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is a technique used by search engines. It helps to understand the relationship between words and content. What concerns LSI anchor text should be semantically related to the topic of the keyword of the website. So, instead of using exact match keywords, you use synonyms, variations, and related words to show their relevance to the target page. This enhances the naturalness and diversity of any backlink profile. An LSI keyword example for LinkyJuice could be "quality backlink services" or "effective link building solutions." These phrases are semantically related to LinkyJuice's primary offering of link building services but offer variation from exact-match keywords.

• Naked link

A naked link is a URL used as the anchor text without any additional text or keywords. For LinkyJuice, a naked link might be "https://www.linkyjuice.com" without any other text. How does it look? Here is an example:

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While it may not provide keyword relevance, it offers a direct and straightforward way to link to the company's website. 

• Branded

Another very popular anchor text type is branded. The branded text includes the name of the organization or its brand as the anchor text. For our company, “LinkyJuice” can simply be branded anchor. Branded anchor text is important for improving brand visibility and recognition. For instance, the LinkyJuice review on Clutch contains a branded anchor text, on the top of the page, that directs reader to the homepage.

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• Generic

Generic anchor text is also widespread among the types of anchor text. When you see a text like “click here” or “learn more” with a hyperlink, be sure it’s a generic anchor. This type of anchor is not very effective SEO but can be used to create natural and diverse backlink profiles. 

• Image

And finally, an image! A lot of content creators and SEO specialists use clickable images to direct visitors to other websites. For instance, the images can be on the homepage or blog posts and will help to drive traffic to specific pages. An image anchor has the ability to attract attention and improve user satisfaction. An important thing that should be taken into consideration is the alt text of the image, used on your website. John Mueller, Search Relations team lead at Google, mentioned the importance of the alt text for SEO. Today’s AI tools are not that smart to understand images without descriptive text. You should indeed think twice before naming your image “123456”.

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The Best Practices to Optimize Anchor Text

When it comes to anchor text, there are several important things to consider. Even though choosing the best anchor text requires detailed analysis, a few things can help the overall process. Employing best practices can significantly improve any SEO strategy. So, let’s talk about those ​​anchor text best practices in detail:

• Using Relevant Anchor Text: Anchor text should always be relevant to the content it is linking to. A user should know in advance what to expect by clicking on the anchor text. For instance if you want to direct users to a page that provides detailed information about the link building services your agency offers, you can use anchor text like "Learn more about our link building services".

• Avoiding Keyword Stuffing and Over-Optimization: Sure, using keywords as anchor text is very important. However, overusing keywords can be very harmful. Keyword stuffing can seem unnatural and spammy. This, in turn, will harm the site’s credibility and rankings. Which anchor text should you use when you want to emphasize the effectiveness of your strategies without over-optimizing anchor text with keywords? Try using text like "Learn how our strategies drive results." 

• Keyword Density: The occurrence of the target keywords in the anchor text should be balanced. The usage of the same keyword in various anchors can lead to penalties. This happens because search engines consider this as a manipulation of rankings. 

• Internal Linking: Finally, let’s talk about internal links. Internal links with accurate anchor text can improve website navigation for both users and search engines. Linking to the relevant pages inside your website can guide visitors to relevant and interesting sources and improve the site's SEO performance! One crucial thing: the descriptive anchor is extremely important for internal links.

These ​​anchor text best practices can help you choose, optimize, and use anchor texts for diverse niche websites. This way, you can significantly ensure you’re getting only relevant backlinks.

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Conclusion

Anchor text optimization in SEO is something requiring a lot of attention. As you already learned, anchor text serves as a bridge between different pages and should be chosen carefully. If you want a seamless SEO process, you cannot ignore the importance of ​​anchor text best practices. By using the above mentioned insights you can improve your link building and SEO strategies, and improve the user engagement of your website.

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