Your website’s Google ranking depends on various factors. Consider, for example, SEO techniques, your domain authority, and SEO content. An important aspect of SEO content consists of anchor texts.
What is anchor text?
An anchor text is a piece of text that also contains a link to another site or page. Anyone who clicks on an anchor text will be taken to that other site or page. Within a website, this will occur within the same window, and for another website, it will often open in a new tab or window.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about anchor texts. You’ll discover what makes a good anchor text and the differences between linking from text and linking from an image. For now, let’s first take a closer look at the impact of anchor texts on your online discoverability.
The importance of anchor texts for SEO
Anchor texts have a significant impact on your SEO. This is certainly true for the backlinks you acquire through link building. These backlinks are also typically “hidden” behind an anchor text. Together, these anchor texts form a kind of link profile for your website. Ideally, a website should have backlinks with sufficient variation in the anchor texts.
What makes for good anchor text?
If you want to link from your own website to another site and are therefore creating anchor text, try to follow these recommendations:
- Make sure the reader knows what to expect if they click on the link behind the anchor text.
- An anchor text is ideally a few words long. A single word or a whole (not too long) sentence is also acceptable. It is better not to use anchor text consisting of multiple sentences or dozens of words.
- Good readability is essential in any case. In that sense, it is not advisable to stubbornly stick to exact search terms as anchor text. Feel free to break these search terms up if it improves readability.
- Avoid using the word “here” in your anchor text. When you use that word, Google doesn’t understand what it’s referring to, and from an SEO perspective, it doesn’t benefit you.
Tip: Use SEO tools such as SEMrush or Screaming Frog to see which anchor texts are being used in backlinks to your website.
Links with an image
You can link to another website not only from text but also from an image. Of course, the page to which you redirect visitors must offer added value. If you’re going to implement this, include the desired anchor text in the image’s alt attribute. This also signals to search engines which anchor text you’re using.
