What is Anchor Text in SEO: A NewBie Guide

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Anchor Text In SEO
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SEO has changed significantly in the past couple of years, and with algorithm changes like the Penguin update, the entire game of how one build your backlinks has changed.

One of the most important aspects of a backlink is anchor text. In this article, I will explain everything you need to know about anchor text SEO.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the text that appears highlighted in a hypertext link that can be clicked to open a target web page.

For example, see the image below:

Anchor Text
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If you are a regular visitor to ShoutMeLoud, you know that I very frequently link back to my older posts using anchor text.

How anchor text helps with improving your blog ranking:

There are many direct and indirect SEO-related advantages of using anchor text, and I will point out some of the most important ones in this article.

It has been well established that keyword research and on-page optimization are important to every blog post. When you write an article, and you wish to drive traffic from SEO, you need to make it targetable for search engine.

In addition, linking to other articles and information using anchor text is also a very good practice for bloggers to regularly incorporate into their work.

One mistake which many bloggers make, however, is by simply linking back to old articles with text like “read here” or “more information here”, which does not give much technical value to search engines. A more useful way to link back to your articles with anchor text is by creating links that use your target keywords!

This is not only important for internal links, but when you are working on your guest posting campaign, you have to make sure that you are getting links from other domains with the target keywords you want your pages to rank for.

You can use tools like SEMRUSH, Ahrefs to check Anchor text cloud to your pages or your competitor pages. Just for better understanding, in the below image you can see the Anchor text cloud (variations) for all the links pointing to ShoutMeLoud homepage:

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Additionally, I will need to make sure the links are of high quality, and most of my back links, includes my target keywords.

In WordPress, it is very easy to use anchor links. When you add a link to any text, you get an option to add a title, and that serves as your anchor text. See the screenshot below:

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Direct and indirect benefits of linking with anchor text:

Readers:

Let me start with the direct benefits of anchor text from the readers’ perspective.  First, of course, they will be given more related links of interest to visit, (and your bounce rate will go down).  Anchor text also helps to improve the average time a reader spends on the site (as well as your blog’s page views).

An important note: When you are linking back to your article, make sure you link to related topics only. Irrelevant linking will be irritating for readers.

SEO benefits:

Getting backlinks has proven to be directly related to the high ranking. And, by using the right anchor text, you can help the search engine understands the best context of a page.

In fact, what I have noticed here at ShoutMeLoud is, when I add more contextually related internal links, it improves the ranking of targeted pages.

If you are using the WordPress platform for your website/blog, you can use below-mentioned plugins to improve internal link structure.

By optimizing our anchor titles we are not only assisting our readers, but we are also helping search engine bots to better understand the content of our site.

How about you? Do you take care of anchor text when you link to your old articles or any other articles outside your domain?

If you find the information in this post useful, do share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and Google plus.

Here are more hand-picked basic SEO articles for you to learn next:

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

23 thoughts on “What is Anchor Text in SEO: A NewBie Guide”

  1. Munna Hossain

    Hello, Harsh,
    I always learn something new from your article. I thought anchor text is a simple thing and I was not very much careful about it. But now I realize I lost something valuable. This is a simple thing but you have described really well. I got everything I need. Really enjoyable article.

  2. Ábila

    Nice tips! I have a blog and am trying to vary the anchor texts so as not to be penalized by Google.

  3. Amilton Quintela Soares

    Thank you very much for these tips, I was full of doubts on this subject, but now I learned, I have a lot of work ahead of me on my blog.

  4. João Henrique

    What content well explained, I have not yet seen text better than this. I was wondering even more about how to make anchor text. Thanks, very good

  5. akshay rohida

    Great guide for anchor text, its really important to have variations to make it more natural

  6. Rajiv Sethi

    I like the Blog but the SEO smart link premium is beyond my reach due to price. Anything free that would do the job middlingly well.

  7. Victorscorner

    I found the post very useful. I hope to incorporate more internal linking in my subsequent posts. Thanks for sharing.

  8. Chandan

    Hi Harsha, I go through your posts on Anchor Text, Backlinks and more which is written you. Its written in brief and easy to understand. Thanks for sharing such a lovely posts.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Hey Chandan,

      Glad that you liked the post.

  9. Zipship

    Well I have a website can i use the same anchor text 5-6 times on a single page . Do it will affect my ranking.

  10. Elizabeth

    Hey Harsh, the part where you said “When you add a link to any text, you get an option to add a title, and that serves as your anchor text.” I tried entering a title, but it changes my text content. Were you talking about something else? I;m confused 🙁 Please help

  11. Abhishek Gupta

    That was a great article harsh. Helped me a lot in understanding the basic concept behind Anchor Text and backlinking. A great post for those who are looking for ways to increase the traffic via backlinking. Thanks a lot Harsh.

  12. deepa

    @Harsh
    Thanks i will apply this trick to my new blog post. I Hope this will help me to write SEO friendly article.

  13. manish

    Harsh you are too good m a newbie just wanted to confirm that the link we provide in the post editor to over old post with related words are anchor text or anchor link.

  14. Naman dwivedi

    great post harsh. but can you please let me know, what to do with internal linking? like should i open my internal links on the same tab or let it open in a new tab?

  15. Evinizi Yenileyin

    Here’s another tip for using anchor texts. If you are wrapping an image with an anchor link, the title attribute would act like the title of the target page unless is given a nofollow attribute.

    So if you wrap an image, that points to a page with title “Downloads”, but your anchor title is “Click here to download”, Google will index the page as entitled with “Click here to download” . Better watch out for that!

  16. Prateek

    I was using this technique on my blog but wasn’t aware that it is called the anchor text and it’s profits.. Well thanx for the information..

  17. shyantan

    hii Harsh ,
    how can we add nofollow tag in a anchor text ?
    means i wana add a no follow tag in a anchored text so that crawler do not go to that link, but i am not finding no follow in my dashbord so how to add that

  18. Nizam

    Well yes. internal linking is really important and it should be done effectively to provide related/meaningful content to the visitors/readers, so as to improve average time on blog/site. Thanks Harsh for this informative guide on anchor text 🙂

  19. Akash Kumar

    Hi Harsh,

    Nice post. You are very right about the anchor text. A very common mistake that people do is that they target that one keyword that they wanna rank for in the SERPs.

    Mixing the anchor texts up is very essential for your link profile to look natural. Because a natural link profile will contain incoming links with all kinds of anchor text. From highly optimized anchor texts, to the ones with your company name or your name or even without an anchor text. Maybe an image or click here, or read this.

    So the best practice would be to have a list of your 3-4 important keywords and circulate them while building links.

  20. George Serradinho

    Hi Harsh,

    thanks for this tip, I will be incorporating this technique in coming posts.

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