What is Anchor Text in SEO?

What is Anchor Text in SEO? 

If you’re a beginner in SEO, you may be wondering, “What is anchor text?” Well, anchor text is the label you place on links. There are several different types of anchor text. Some of them are exact match, long-tail, and brand. Exact match anchor text is the most precise. Exact match anchor text is based on an exact keyword. 

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Relevance 

When it comes to SEO, relevancy is key. Google values relevance and won’t rank pages that aren’t relevant to search terms. Relevancy not only applies to keywords but also to the surrounding text. Choosing relevant anchor text will make your links look more natural to readers. This is important because both Google and human users read anchor text to learn about the content on a page. 

Relevant anchor text will provide the Google algorithm with more information about the content of a page. It will also give website visitors context. This is not possible with generic anchor text, which provides zero context. 

Exact match 

Exact match anchor text is a form of SEO linking that consists of a hyperlink containing your targeted keyword. The anchor text should match the content on the external page. It is important to understand how to use exact match anchor text to improve your search engine rankings. Here are a few tips to help you maximize the potential of this technique. 

Exact match anchor text is used to link to different documents. It can be a blog post title, SEO title, or page title. There are also partial match anchors and empty anchors. Exact match anchors contain the target keyword directly in the link, while partial match anchors use a variation of the target keyword and other words to provide context. 

Long-tail 

Long-tail anchors are similar to partial anchors, except they include more words. These anchors can contain anything from a keyword to an entire subheading, headline, or even an entire sentence. The key to using long-tail anchors for SEO is to keep them natural. Google wants to see a link’s context, and doesn’t like a bunch of links that have the same anchor text. 

Long-tail anchors are more relevant to a website’s content, and are thus more difficult to remove. To get started, simply insert the website’s URL into the Site Explorer. From there, you can access the “Link Anchor” tab and manually scan the anchor text data. You can also export the data to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. You can use the same tool to categorize anchor text by type. 

Branded 

Branded anchor text is a great way to generate link juice from your website. Rather than a generic URL, the text should include keywords, which will help the Google algorithm better understand your site and content. It also adds context to your pages, whereas generic anchor text has no context and is less helpful to the search engine. Branded anchor text consists of a brand name and keyword and works well for citing a source or linking directly to a website. 

Branded anchor text should match the content that it links to. This can be done by using a variation of the target keyword, a brand name, or both.