How to Optimize Your Anchor Text for SEO

One of the most important things you can learn as a website creator or content writer is how to use anchor text in a way that works for you and helps get more traffic to your website. 

A hyperlink, or anchor text, is a significantly pivotal aspect of SEO. Having the correct anchor text on your website can be the difference between ranking at the top of Google’s search engine results or being ranked very poorly. 

This sounds pretty straightforward, but still creates questions such as what is anchor text, how do you seamlessly put it into your content, how does it work to help drive traffic to your website, etc.

Learning how to use anchor text is an essential learned skill to have if you wish to move forward with your SEO strategy. 

Below is a full guide that will tell you:

• how to create anchor text on your website, 
• tricks that will set you set yourself apart from other websites (AKA your competition), and, 
• how to balance out your anchor text ratios so you don’t hurt your SEO performance. 

What Exactly is Anchor Text?

This type of text really isn’t complicated. Anchor text is the what we call hyperlinked text people can click on. For example, here is link for a blog post titled “How to Use SEO Semantics in Your Content Strategy.” In that example, the title of the blog post is “anchor text.” Alternatively, if you want to read a blog post about whether or not an SEO agency is taking advantage of you, you can click here. Those words, “click here,” is another instance of anchor text. You see anchor text when words become links. If you see the link itself, such as “www.[your-website].com” that isn’t an example of anchor text. 

The linked text usually becomes highlighted in a different color. Although a web developer can customize the formatting so the hyperlinked text looks like regular text.

Why is Anchor Text Important?

This type of text is highly important because it tells Google how relevant your website is when people search for something that has to do with the product or service you offer. 

The better and more relevant it is, in relation to the content on the page, the more likely Google will move your website further up in the rankings. 

Getting Started

When you first start looking into which anchor text is right for you to use, start with figuring out if you can place it relevantly into your content. For example, the two links we gave above both fit very smoothly with this post. Not only that, but we choose to share blog articles for those hyperlinks that we think you might find interesting, as they relate to this post. Being able to do this is extremely important, as that ensures a natural flow of the content.

Analyze What Your Competition is Doing And How They Are Getting Noticed

After you find the content relevant to your niche, you then need to do your research about your competitors. 

This will help you learn how they are taking advantage of SEO techniques and integrating natural anchor text throughout their websites. Then, knowing what they are doing, you can emulate this and make it better on your own website.

This will enable you to stand out from your competition and be the website that pops up highest in search engines. For example, after collaborating with the owner of this website, we happen to know that Joshua Lyons Marketing researched a marketing agency in Australia before they started doing their SEO. Some of their SEO success is due to that competitor research.

How Your Anchor Text Should be Written

There is a certain way in which your anchor text needs to be distributed throughout your website. 

Below is what your text should typically look like:

• About 50% of your text anchors should link to different brands or URLs that you are promoting. As an example, the “SEO techniques” hyperlink above goes to a different SEO website entirely. 
• Another 25% of text anchors should be topic anchors. This would be URLs linked to very specific topics that are a common theme throughout your site. You’ll see a video at the end of this blog post with a link going to a related blog post. That’s an example of this post using a topic anchor.
• 10% of the anchors should be linked to target keywords that you want to stick out. The first link in this post is an example of a target keyword (anchor text).
• The last 15% of the text anchors should be linked to calls of action words at the end. They will allow people to read more, click for more information, links to go to another website, etc. You can see this in the YouTube video embed and also in the bio section of this blog post. 

This list could be even more specific if you wanted, but this is a very general guide to go by and allows you to take what is there and make it into your thoughts and ideas. 

The important thing to do is stick to a decent and natural number of keywords. Our anchors throughout the text must read naturally and not come off forced or awkward throughout. 

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Knowing Which Text to Use And How Many Times to Use It

During any given time throughout the text, you should not stick to using only one specific anchor. There should be several different selections that you use that say the same thing but in a different way. 

For instance, instead of using the phrase “dog training” on the entire website, use other phrases like “dog obedience class,” “obedience dog class,” “obedience training,” or “training for dogs.” Changing up your phrasing throughout the text will help mix things up. 

In this post, we used text anchor, anchor text, anchors, hyperlinks, hyperlinked text, and other related keywords.

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