The anchor texttranslated as anchor textis one of the keys to any SEO link strategy. This small text can be one word, a set of words, or even a sentence (or, well, more than one sentence, although this is not recommended).
What characterises this text is that, in reality, its purpose does not lie in the site itselfbut on the one it links to. This does not mean that its relationship with the surrounding text is not relevant, which it is, but it is not really what makes us choose certain words or others.
Although working correctly on the anchor text would be one of the SEO tips I have come across many of the most basic mistakes in this area in my career.
So I decided to write this article and tell you a little bit more about the anchor textthe link juice and other related aspects, easy to understand and implement, that will help you achieve the best results with your SEO content strategy.
What is an anchor text?
Let's start at the beginning. The answer to this question is very simple. The anchor text is the text that is linked to in an article. It is called anchor text because it "anchors" the link to the article.
In other words, it is the text setting an external link or hyperlink to a website. When you fixate and remain static on the web, you create a comparison with a ship's anchor.
As of today, whatever you put in the text has quite relevant in terms of SEO.
Initially, the content of the text was practically irrelevant and only internal and, above all, external links counted. Thus, it began to be used in black hat SEO to position other pages.
Interestingly enough, my first job in the field of SEOas a freelancer, had to do with these linked sites. I had to write articles for third-party sites where, really, the content was irrelevant and what mattered was the link.
In fact, the agency that subcontracted my services paid any kind of blogger or webmaster a fee for posting one of our articles with the corresponding link.
That was more than a decade ago and already at that time the text started to become relevant. We went from just looking for it to be linked or also asking for a specific text.
The reason for this, which still holds today, is explained below.
How to use anchor text in SEO?
I have commented many times that to make a good SEO content to which should be added links. I often say it's like the bibliography of an academic paper. It allows Google to see what your sources are and where the credibility of what you are defending lies.
However, in this article we are going to move to the opposite side. That is, what it means for the page that is linked to.
Main keyword
The most basic way of working the anchor text (basic, but correct and often the most advisable) is to use the main keyword of the target article. This is especially relevant for internal links, where we have control over what is put in.
That is, if after making the keyword research we should have chosen a main keyword for the article. In this case, for example, it would be "anchor text". Then, when I had to talk about anchor text in another article on this blog, I would link to it on "anchor text".
That is, no linking in "we'll tell you more about the anchor text here" or "in this article", which are super common constructions, linking the here or the whole sentence.
By linking only on the main keyword we are giving valuable information to the search engine. We are telling their algorithm that the main theme of that article and the keyword we think it should rank for is "anchor text".
The relevance is also important because at the end of the day we are also communicating that everything we say about anchor text in that article is based on this one. And of course it has to make sense to talk about anchor text, as in the article by SEO content I linked above.
If I am writing about, for example, travelling to Indonesia, it would be completely unrelated to the topic and Google could penalise it. This used to be allowed in the past and fortunately it has not been allowed for quite a few years now.
Expanding semantic fields
Another recommended way to work with links is to broaden semantic fields o use synonyms for which we also want to rank. In the case of this article, there is an obvious keyword which is "anchor text".
If I want to increase my chances of the search engine not only positioning me by anchor text, but also with anchor text, linking the article with anchor text as link text can help us. In this case, as it is a translation, it is very obvious, but it also works in less obvious cases.
To give an example, we could also try to rank for "link SEO work".
However, I would always leave this option as a secondary option, once we have achieved the goal of rank for the main keyword.
In any case, you must always use a keyword to which the article corresponds perfectly. In other words, I can't link this page with "SEO content tips", because, although it is related, it is not the main topic of the article.
What not to do
As for the practices to avoid, some of them have already been mentioned above. We must not link common words which have no meaning like here or this article
In the case of links to external sites that we do not want to "help" can be done, but it also benefits us if Google can easily find out why we have linked to it, i.e. what concept has helped us to understand or what we have based it on.
Nor does it make sense to put the full URL directly, without anchor text. Or link to the domain name instead of the subject of the specific page.
In other words, if you are going to talk about anchor texts on your page and you are going to link to this article, put anchor text, don't put Ddigitalsbecause that does not give Google's robot any information about the content.
And you'll say, rightly so, but the bot is going to go into that content and it's going to read it and it's going to link to it and yes, but it's not going to know clearly the "reason" why you've linked to that page, which is something we can achieve with the anchor text.
Controlling external links
As the anchor text In addition to the information they provide about our website, we must take into account not only the ones we have, but also the ones that link to us from third party websites.
In fact, these links are super-relevant because they give us the so-called link juiceby giving us part of his page authority and domain. However, this can also harm us in two different ways.
One of them is that they link to us with a keyword that we are not interested in at all and that we believe will to the detriment of our positioning possibilities.. In case it was a bona fide mistake, it is a good idea to contact the webmaster and request that change this text.
Another option is that it is a competitor's move to damage us or that the link comes from a page that has nothing to do with us or that is considered to be a toxic by Google.
In such cases, the best option is to use the tool Disavow and disavow them. In this way, Google will not take them into account. For this reason, it is advisable to check the links that point to us periodically.
If we have a lot of toxic links pointing to us, for example, it can be very detrimental to our positioning, even if all the "internal" work is perfect. In the end the SEO doesn't just depend on what you dobut also what others are doing about your page.
