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Anchor Text: What Is It And How to Optimize It?


If you are a blogger or an internet marketer, you must have read many of articles on SEO, link building, etc. and there is a commonly used term "anchor text." But how many of you know why it is important for your website and how to optimize it?
In this post, I'm going to cover everything about the anchor text and how you can use it to improve your SEO practices.
What Is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is that clickable and visible text which is pointed to another URL within the same website or to the different site. In other words, it's a clickable text in a hyperlink.
The HTML format of anchor text looks like this:

Why Is Anchor Text Optimization Is Important?
The importance of anchor text in SEO is the same as of backlinks. Before Google's Penguin update arrived in 2012, anchor text was one of the ways Google considered for the ranking of a website.
It was easy to rank with 100% exact match anchor text for all your SEO backlinks. But after changes in Google algorithms, anchor text is considered as one of the reasons for Google to penalize your website if you do it in a wrong way, called the anchor text over-optimization.
After Penguin update, Google takes it more seriously to check keywords in your anchor text. Now, if Google finds any website that is of low-quality and doing abusive use of anchor text, it starts penalizes this website and drops its rankings in the search results as it's against the Google's Webmaster Guidelines. After being penalized, you will lose a significant amount of traffic because of the rankings drop.
Googlebots can quickly detect which website is a spammer one and not following Google's rules based on their keywords, synonyms and the title tag used as the anchor text.
As mentioned in post-penguin anchor text case study by MOZ, you don't need to create 100s of links with exact match anchor text to get better ranking in search results. It would be sufficient if you build 5-10 links with a wide range of mixed anchor text with some of your main keywords.
Let's take the How to Perform an Actionable SEO Audit post as an example. If I want to rank for a keyword such as "SEO Audit" on serpstat.com then I might use following anchor text having links to that post:
- Serpstat.com;
- https://serpstat.com/;
- Guide for SEO Audit;
- SEO Audit Checklist;
- Tips for SEO Audit;
- what is SEO audit;
- How To Perform an SEO Audit;
- Click here.
Types of Anchor Texts
There are following types of anchor text:
#1: Exact-match
An exact match anchor text is the simplest and most powerful type of all anchor text. It includes the same keyword that we are trying to optimize our target page.
For example, a link to a target page about SEO tips includes the keyword "SEO tips."
The distribution of exact-match anchors should be less than or equal to 1%. Otherwise, they can become the reason for the penalty of your site.
#2: Partial-match
Partial match stands for nearly similar. This type of anchor text contains some keywords similar to the exact-match anchor text. The only difference is that it includes other words too.
For example, if your exact-match anchor is "SEO tips." A partial match anchors could be:
- SEO tips guide;
- Learn more about SEO tips;
- SEO tips for beginners;
- SEO tips for bloggers.
This is the best way to include your target keyword within your anchor text because it appears as the natural way of link building.
#3: Branded
Branded anchors are those anchor text that includes the actual brand name of the business as the link's text.
For example, "Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform which consists of five modules: Rank Tracking, Backlink Analysis, SEO-audit, Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis."
Branded anchors are the safest types of anchor text, but if your domain includes the primary keywords you're optimizing for, then you should avoid their over-optimization. For example, if your website was "besttoolbox.com and all your anchor text are "Best Tool Box," it would appear to be very spammy and you would get penalized.
#4: Naked Anchor Link
Naked links are the actual URL of a specific webpage. They contain the hyperlink as the anchor text itself. For example, https://serpstat.com/blog/ instead of Serpstat.
- Інвестування;
- Трейдинг;
- Токенсейли;
- NFT-маркетплейси;
- Airdrop токенів — безкоштовна роздача з певними умовами;
- Робота з Discord з метою потрапити в Whitelist і заробити на покупці NFT;
- Робота з Discord з метою потрапити в Whitelist і заробити на покупці NFT;Ноди (вузли, що забезпечують безпеку блокчейну) та майнінг;
- Навчання.
Тепер розглянемо основні напрямки у крипто-бізнесі:
#5: Generic
Generic simple anchors are generally those text links that convince people to click, for example:
- Click here;
- Click to learn more;
- Click this link;
- Read more;
- View more.
#6: LSI keywords
LSI keywords or Latent semantic indexing keywords are the variations of your target keywords.
The LSI anchors are the anchor text that might not be similar to your exact keyword but they are typically synonyms of your keyword phrase.
To find LSI keywords, just type your search keyword on Google and you will get some LSI keywords ideas at the bottom of the search page. In the screenshot below, you can see the related search suggestions:

You can also find the LSI keywords at Serpstat's Related Keywords report. Just enter your target keyword it the search bar and go to the report. You'll see the keywords related to yours with their search volume, CPC, competition in PPC and connection strength (how many mutual domains these keywords have in the top search results, 10 is the max value).

Serpstat also shows a complete list of anchors used with the analyzed website. Go to the Backlink Analysis module and choose Anchors tool. Here you can see the types of anchor text mentioned above have been used to link to a guide from the Search Engine Land website.

How to Perform Anchor Text Optimization
Anchor text plays a major role in the better search engine ranking of your website, but many website owners use over-optimized anchor texts in their link building strategy and get hit by Google penalty.
To avoid it, you should use the best practices of anchor text optimization.
Here are some tips you should use for anchor text optimization for better SEO practices.
- Branded anchor text: 50%;
- Naked links: 20%
- Generic anchors: 5%
- LSI, partial match anchors: 1-5%
- Exact match anchor text: 1-2%

FAQ
How to use anchors?
You can use anchors for short description of the link content.
How to create anchor text?
Type your anchor text between tags <a href= "site.com> and </a>
What is an anchor link?
An anchor link is a web page element that links to another location on the same page.
Why are link texts important for SEO?
Links are important for SEO because there is a direct connection between quality and quantity of links to your website and how much search traffic your site receives.
Wrapping up
Anchor texts are an element that plays a major role in your rankings and getting it wrong increase the chance of your website being penalized.
Try to use them in a way that looks natural with the flow of content. Don't build dozens of links at once. Build one or two at a time, and move forward.
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