Anchor text is one of the most important factors of SEO. If you want to be on the number one result of a search page you got a pay a lot of importance to anchor text. Practicing the anchor text optimization in the right way can make a website very popular. It all depends on how you use the anchor text. There are a lot of people who ask questions such as what anchor text must be used? 

The answer is not that simple because choosing the right anchor text takes practice, study and time and some method that you need to do it over and over again in order to master it and then apply it to your website.

What is Anchor Text?

An anchor text is a normal text that becomes clickable once you edit it with a hyperlink. The word hyperlink in the example above is considered the anchor text.

Why is the anchor text important?

Because Google will determine the relevance of your website based on certain indicators and one of these indicators is the anchor text. 

Let’s take an example if your website is constantly getting linked with an anchor text called ‘plastic bottles’ Google is going to determine in time that your website is about plastic bottles. A few years ago to get your website indexed in the search engine and actually get ranked in the search page all you had to do was send anchor text matching keywords with enough links, and that was it.

But in 2012 Google had an update called Penguin update that could track the backlink manipulation. This update analyzed the quality of the website that you were getting your links from. Now if the anchor text does not match the keyword you get punished. You can send anchor text with the right keywords and gets ranking but the moment you overdo it or you make it look unrealistic your ranking is going to fall real quick. 

But what is realistic you might ask?

Now let’s talk about anchor text optimization. Anchor text optimization is the only way for us to know which anchor text is right and which anchor text is wrong.

Find your niche

The very first thing that you should do in order to optimize the anchor text is to find out who your audience is. What is your niche? What does your business have to offer? There are a couple of things that you can do to determine your niche. First of all, you should analyze your competition. You should analyze their website, see their anchor texts, then choose the websites that most appeal to you.

When we talk about anchor text you need to understand that the distribution must be as natural as possible. That means that you need a perfect and natural distribution of anchor text to have positive results. Searching for your keywords in a backlink checker is another great way to find the right anchor text.

Use backlink checkers

Tools such as Ahrefs allow you to search for keywords and find the anchor text that Google wants. You can do this even yourself. Simply search a keyword on Google and see how many times it appears in the first results and in the blue links of the results. But the backlink checker is just going to give you more results and details. You can go there and search for any keyword and you will get the results of the anchor text that is most preferred.

The importance of anchor text

We started this article by saying that the anchor text one of the most important things for SEO. Now let me explain why and let you see how important anchor text really is. When somebody does a search on Google the results they get are mostly anchor texts. On the results page, you see the blue anchor text, below it, you’ll see the green hyperlink and below that, you see the meta-description. 

The meta-description is not clickable. It’s only something that gives the searcher a hint of what he might find if he clicks on that anchor text. The hyperlink’s just one page of the website. The anchor text is the thing where every person clicks after they’ve done their search on Google. That’s why the anchor text is so important. It’s basically the foundation of every search. That is why Google gives so much the importance of anchor texts.

How to optimize the anchor text?

Do some research about the keywords that you’re going to use on your website. After you have them then go to Google and search them. Go in the first three results and look at the relevancy of the page with the keyword. Do you think that the page matches the keyword? Then get the hyperlink of that page, get the keyword and create your anchor text. It may sound like a lot of work but it is worth it. 

If you are looking for someone to help you with the keyword research, feel free to contact us.

The amount of traffic you can get out of it is crazy. Because Google will see eventually while indexing your website that your anchor texts are strong and relevant. Google promotes that thus you might get a chance to rank on the search engine and even go number one in your niche. Take a look at your competition. See how their websites are. For example, that first result that is going to appear after you Google a keyword. Analyze their website and see how their anchor text is and how relevant it is matching to the keywords that they have used. 

Conclusion

In the world of SEO anchor text is the very base. You can use keywords, you can add backlinks and you can make sure that everything is perfect but if your anchor text is out of place your website is going to be out of place in the search results page. So do your studies and make sure to get that anchor text right. Remember pages that you link to the keywords have to be relevant.