The Role Played by Anchor Text in SEO

Anchor text comprises the words that are visible in the hyperlink. It looks like this in a sentence: Home repair service is necessary especially if your house has already worn out. Point your mouse cursor into it and it will reveal this link: www.dgdhomerepairservice.com. In HTML code, search engines view this like this:

http://www.dgdhomerepairservice.com/home repair service

Anchor text plays a key role in Search Engine Optimisation. It positively affects Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) because it directly informs search engine spiders about the content of the link. Through this, they are able to index that specific site easily. This then helps companies improve their search engine ranking. However, placing anchor text on your website is not enough for a page to rank higher. You still have to take into consideration its quality. Now, how can you guarantee superiority in anchor text? Check these:

Avoid Using Generic Anchor Text

Do not just go for any word or phrase as your anchor text. Be particular with your selection. Do not use the words “Click here” when you can basically apply your keywords into it. This will be useful in your aim to get attention from search engine spiders. More importantly, you will be able to establish the relevance of the anchor text to the inquiry of the user.

Use Your Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Each time you create an anchor text, you have to see to it that your keywords or keyword phrases are included. Search engines will easily understand the summary of your content and may possibly index it in the search engine results. Use several keywords and keywords phrases as many as you can but do not attempt to do overstuffing. In addition, make sure that you do not affect the natural flow of your article with it.

Guarantee Its Relevance to the Link

If your anchor text says “home repair service”, your link must direct you to a content that talks about the same phrase. In this way, search engines will give more importance to it.

Do Not Link Your Anchor Text to Your Home Page

Remember: In your anchor text, you must link a specific page in your site and not simply your home page. Or else, your visitors will always fall on the same page, which of course, will irritate them. Likewise, you are not maximizing the potentials of your anchor text if you keep on linking it to your home page. Search engines will read the same thing: www.dgdhomerepairservice.com. How can you possibly think that this will help improve your page ranking? As mentioned above, link them to relevant content and make the most out of your keywords.

Vary the Keywords that You Use for the Anchor Text

Do not always make the “home repair service” as your keyword. Add something to it from time to time so you are able to target other search inquiries over the Internet. For instance, think about using “low-cost home repair service”, “cheap home repair service,” and “affordable home repair”. By doing this, you will also avoid receiving the red flag from search engines all because they suspect you of doing something.

Write Descriptive Anchor Text

One of the most important things to keep in mind when writing anchor text is to use descriptive words and phrases to help the search engines connect the anchor text with the hyperlink it leads to. This doesn’t mean you have to go into great detail describing everything that viewers can find if they click the link, but you should still keep the text as relevant and descriptive as possible.

Not only will using descriptive anchor text help you avoid penalties for what Google calls “unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links”, but it also makes your website more authoritative and trustworthy – not only in the eyes of the search engine but your visitors’ as well.

Don’t Link to Spammy Sites

The way you use external links has a direct influence on your website’s ranking, which means that one of the surest ways to prevent a ranking drop is by linking only to high-quality, trusted websites.

Using anchor text to send readers to spammy sites is the one mistake you don’t want to make as it falls under the category of unnatural link building and will send your website to the penalty box. By sending your readers to pages with little to no value, you’re basically telling Google that you’re trying to artificially boost the rankings of these irrelevant pages, which is a direct violation of Google Webmaster Guideline.

This is why it’s crucial to stay clear of the link exchange schemes where you use spammy anchor text to link to a website owner or a blogger and have them do the same thing for you without paying attention to the value you provide to the users. So, the bottom line is this: if you’re not a spammy site, then don’t risk ruining your reputation by linking to the ones that are.

Avoid Over-Optimisation

As with most things life, anchor text optimisation is all about balance. If there’s a suspiciously large amount of anchor text linking to a single page, Google’s algorithms will sooner or later pick up on this and interpret it as an attempt at manipulation. If the anchor text keeps popping up in places where neither the writer nor the reader would normally use them, it’s a clear sign of over-optimisation.

A healthy ratio of anchor text to the surrounding text should feel natural and unbiased to users. Don’t use more than a 100 links per page and remember to keep your anchor text varied with semantically related keywords, brand names, and proper capitalization.

Track Your Links

Last but not least, for your anchor text strategy to work you need to keep track of the anchor text you use and the pages you link to in order to avoid linking to broken or deleted pages. Having broken links on your website can harm the relationship with your audience and hinder your SEO progress.

To build authority and drive more traffic to your website, you need to make sure all the content is up-to-date and functioning – and that includes anchor text links. Use an online broken link checker to help you identify all links that may be hurting your site’s ranking and either replace them with fresh links or remove them altogether.

Anchor text offers huge contributions to your search engine ranking. This is because search engines regularly monitor it. Every time you get linked from another website, they will take note of the anchor text of that specific link. So whenever a user makes a query and writes words or phrases that refer to your anchor text, your site may possibly appear in the ranking.

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