Clickable, visible text in a hyperlink displayed on a webpage is called “anchor text”. Although any SEO agency expert knows about the importance of anchor text (or the link title/label), if you’re new to internet marketing, we are happy to provide an explanation.
Search engines, such as Google, use the anchor text of a link to determine the topical nature and relevancy of the page it’s linking to. So, even though some bombastic words could provide better traffic to any webpage, if search engines realize they are not relevant, the source webpage (the page with the anchor text) could be banned. On the other hand, if a particular website has lots of backlinks with, for example, the anchor “wedding dresses”, “wedding gowns”, “bridal dresses”, search engines will understand and recognize the context of the page that is targeted. In addition, if you put more than one link pointing to the same destination on a same page, search engines will count the anchor text of the “first” link when determining content and relevancy.
Even though having relevant, targeted anchor text is a good idea when it comes to SEO, the abuse of artificial title links by SEO specialists eventually led to Google launching a new optimization penalties. So, how should you build anchor texts, if they are crucial to SEO, and yet search engines give out penalties for over-using them. Nowadays, Google bots are able to detect the relevance of a website based on title tag, synonyms and keywords alone. So, go for just 5-10 links with mixed anchor text covering some of your main keywords. For instance, if you wanted to rank for a term such as “wedding dresses” at weddingdresses.com, then you might go for links with the following anchor texts: weddingdresses.com, wedding dresses, click here, check this site, buy wedding dresses, bridal dresses, visit this place etc.
Finally, the best practice would be to have a high quality product or an established company; the links and the anchor texts to your webpage would be the most natural then.
