What are Anchor Texts?

Anchor Text is a word or a group of words which are visible and clickable on a web page and contain a link to another web page. The following is an example of Anchor Text:

The blue words that you can see in this sentence are Anchor Text.

The Anchor Text link may lead to a web page within the website or to a different website. Links that lead to web pages on the same website are called inbound links, whereas, the links which lead to web pages on other websites are called outbound links. Anchor Texts serve the purpose of directing the readers to different web pages on the Internet. Anchor Texts serve the purpose of increasing web traffic on different websites.

The evolution of Anchor Texts

The initial Anchor Texts had a very basic structure. They would either be in the form of direct web links or the names of web pages to which they lead. However, the evolution of Google drastically changed the way that Anchor Texts were being used. In the very initial years of the development of the search engine, Google used keywords and Anchor texts as some of the main criteria to rank websites. Consequently, developers started using Keywords as Anchor Texts to create a high amount of web traffic towards particular websites. If a web developer wants to create traffic for the keyword ‘Car Insurance’, he would just use the words ‘Car Insurance’ as Anchor Text everywhere on the website – regardless of where the link led. Google, soon, caught up with the trend and changed their algorithms to ensure that developers couldn’t divert web traffic so easily.

Things you should know about Anchor Texts but you don’t

Anchor Texts are not just some random words which are used to denote backlinks. Anchor Texts are far more important with regards to SEO, especially because backlinks are important. Anchor Texts prompt the reader to click on the backlink to divert and generate more traffic towards other websites. Backlinks generate much more organic traffic than any other practised methods of SEO. SEO spiders crawl through all the backlinks and anchor texts and rank the Anchor Texts with regards to their relevance with the backlinks. However, if Anchor Texts to most of the backlinks to a website are keywords which are relevant to the website, then it may result in severe penalties by search engines, especially after Google implemented the Penguin algorithm. There are various workarounds for Anchor texts which can be used to get around the penalties without affecting the SERP.

Did you know that you can use Anchor Texts in different ways?

There are many ways in which you can use Anchor Texts to get around the search engine penalties. The following are different ways in which you can use the Anchor Texts which cause little on or effect on the SEO ranking of the websites:

Exact Match

Exact Match Anchor Text are those which utilise the exact keyword for which the linked page is to be ranked. However, such Anchor Texts score very high with Search Engine rankings, high use of such Anchor Texts can lead to the Search Engines penalising the website. For example,

If a company wishes to rank their website for ‘SEO services’, then they would use the following Anchor Text:

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Partial Match/Phrase Match

Partial Match or Phrase Match Anchor Texts are those which utilise longer phrases containing Keywords to create backlinks to the website they want to rank. The high usage of such backlinks can lead to Search Engines penalising the website. For Example:

If a company wishes to rank their website for SEO services, then they would use the following Anchor Text:

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Branded

Branded Anchor Texts are usually the best bet, as they seldom lead to Search Engines penalising the websites. Here, the name of the websites or the brands are used as Anchor Texts. For example,

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Naked URLs

Naked URLs used as Anchor Text have been used for a very long time. However, not very effective to enhance the SEO rankings of the websites, they do provide an effective way to create backlinks. For example,

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Generic

Generic Anchor Texts have been used for a long time. Here, generic words are used as Anchor Texts. While not very effective to enhance the SEO rankings of the website, it offers a good way to create backlinks. For example,

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LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing for Anchor Texts. Here, the exact keywords are not used as Anchor Texts. The sentence structure is modified to use close synonyms or antonyms of the keywords, which are then used as Anchor Texts to create backlinks. For example,

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Long Tail

When entire sentences or very long phrases are used as Anchor Texts, they are termed as Long Tail Anchor Texts. For example,

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Optimize Anchor Texts for your website

The above article provides easy solutions to optimise the Anchor Texts to enhance the SEO rankings of your websites. If you are someone who is learning Search Engine Optimisation, then this article would go a long in way in helping you enhance the SEO rankings of your website. If you are someone who is seeking expert solutions for Search Engine Optimisation of websites, you can check out the wide range of Search Engine Optimisation services offered by Writopedia.