What is Anchor Text and why is it so important?

Anchor text (or link text) is the visible text you see on a web page for a link. This anchor text should tell you something helpful about the page being linking to. Good anchor text is descriptive, concise and relevant.

Context is important. The anchor text should be relevant to the current page and to the page it links to. Good anchor text should help:

• People decide to click the link or not.
• Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.

The words around the anchor text should also help give context to the links.

Here are some tips on writing good anchor text

• Always write naturally.
• Include relevant keywords.
• Don’t shoehorn in keywords where they won’t comfortably fit.
• The anchor text should not be too long. 5 words is fine, 15 words is far too much.
• Short anchor text. One word is fine if it is descriptive, concise and relevant.
• Generic terms like “Click here” are not descriptive so are not acceptable under link accessibility guidelines.

Examples of good and bad anchor text

Here are some examples of bad and good anchor text links as suggested by Google:

Here you can find more of Google’s examples of good and bad anchor text.

If a link is based on an image rather than text Google will use the image Alt Text as the anchor text.

Good anchor text is helpful to SEO.

Internal links

Internal links are links to other pages within your website.

A good links network throughout the main content (not talking about navigation bars here) helps readers and search engines make sense of your site more easily and find other pages.

Every important page should have a link from at least one other page on your site. But if it doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.

Good anchor text for internal links is very helpful for your readers and SEO.

External links

External links are outbound links to other websites.

Using external links can help establish your sites credibility and trustworthiness (eg. citing your sources).

You should link to external sites when it makes sense and is helpful to your readers.

Linking to unrelated content is unhelpful and will not help your SEO.

What is “nofollow” for?

The default position on links is “follow”. This is telling a search engine that you trust and endorse the page at the other end of the link so go ahead and follow the link. This helps the SEO of the page receiving the link by passing on some of your good reputation.

“Nofollow” is telling the search engine not to go to the page. So the question is: Why put links on your web page that you do not want clicked? Here is Googles advice:

Back links

Back links are links from other websites to your website.

Good back links are hard to get and generally need to be earned by having high quality link worthy content.

Do not buy back links. Google does not like it and you are likely to harm your SEO.

Good back links from trusted sources are very helpful to your SEO.

Conclusion

It is still very common to see poor anchor text practice on many websites. You see “click here” or similar used frequently. Because it is common place it implies that it is ok when it isn’t.

Good anchor text is descriptive, concise and relevant.

Good anchor text helps people (particularly those with accessibility problems) and helps your SEO efforts.