What is Anchor Text? – 2020 Best SEO Practice

The anchor text means a word that can be clicked in a web page used to link another web page. It’s a visual text, which can be clicked on a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it tends to be blue and redundant, such as a link to the most homepage.

The anchor text of the anchor is visible and active on the target page (e.g., the link page). Anchor text can provide both search engines and users relevant status information related to local content in a link.

Search engines use external anchor text (the text some pages use to link your site) as an indication of how other people view your page – and to expand what your pages may be. While website owners often cannot control how other sites interact with their site, “you can make sure that the anchor text you use within your site is valid, descriptive, and useful.”

Fair Play

Anchor text is an “exact match” when it includes a keyword that indicates a linked page—for example, a ‘construction site’ that links to a page about a link building.

Similarity

Anchor text that includes keyword variations on a linked page. For example: ‘link management strategies’ link to a page about link building.

Naked Link

The URL used as the anchor ‘www.moz.com‘ is a link to a naked link.

Pictures

Whenever an image is encountered, Google will use the text contained in the alt image as the anchor text.

Product

Product name used as anchor text. For example: ‘MOS’ links to an article on Moz Blog.

General Type

A general term or phrase used as an anchor. “Click here” is a common identifier.

Anchor Text Space

With the renewal of the Penguin algorithm, Google began to look more closely at the keywords in the anchor text. If multiple link site links contain the same anchor text, it may start to appear suspicious and may be a sign that links were not found naturally.

Generally, it is still a good practice to find and use the keyword- and anchor text relevant to the topic if possible. However, SEO can get better results by striving for different anchor text phrases than always the same keyword.

By those lines, one important note: Do not overload the heavy internal links. Internal linking is certainly a very good practice, but be careful with the anchor text you use to link your pages together. If too many page links use all the same anchor text, even if it’s on your website, Google may feel it is acting on spam behavior.