Why Anchor Texts are Vital for SEO

Generally, links are vital for SEO. It could be the embedding of internal links to make search engines understand the structure of your site. The internal link’s text helps search engines clearly understand what your internal link is about.

When you create links to other posts, Google uses the link’s text. This is to indicate the topic of the page that the link will open. So, if the link text and key phrase match, Google will find it hard to rank your site. This is because it cannot tell the most relevant of the contents for that topic.

In addition, apart from making the context of links clear to search engines, anchor texts also help your users. It makes the purpose of clicking a link obvious to your readers by telling them where it’ll take them. Therefore, if you don’t want to confuse both your readers and the search engines, avoid using the focus keyphrase.

Various Forms of Link Text

Whether you’re using internal or external links, anchor text is important to both. Below are the different ways in which external sites link to your content.

• The actual URL.

This is the most common way to link a site. It is usually without text and contains the site’s URL. But most times, this doesn’t help readers. If I have to click on a link, I have to know what to expect, right?

• Name of the site.

This is usually presented by adding “.com” to the site’s name. This doesn’t specify anything, so it begs the question of what’s on the site.

• Branded links.

This is usually a link that uses the name of brands as its text. They are great links that make readers recognize your brand easily. There’s less chance that you’ll be flagged for spam with these links.

Now, branded links are great but you must be wary of over-optimizing when it comes to using target keywords. This is because doing so attracts a penalty from Google. Below is what branded links appear like: Eric of Textaddicts.inc; Neil Patel says in his blog; According to CNN; As Sahara reporters claim; TextAddicts, etc.

• Related keywords.

This doesn’t directly match the main key phrase but only relates to it.

• Generic Links.

These links used to be the thing back in the day but not anymore. You have to avoid this outdated method because people aren’t comfortable with it anymore.

These days, people prefer you to tell them what a link is about. A generic link is void of texts that reference keywords.

Although generic links may appear like spam to your readers and put them off, they mostly contain compelling words. Examples are: “click here” and “read more". Other examples of generic links are: Download here; See more info; about the author; this page, etc

• Keywords that match partially.

This uses different forms of your focus keyword. The anchor text contains every word in the query but doesn’t match the phrase completely.

• Article title.

This tells readers the title of what they’re about to click.