7 Easy Ways to Optimize Your Anchor Text Strategy for SEO
Are you tightening your SEO strategy? If so, then anchor text is a key component you must understand. It can send your webpage soaring to the top in searches, or send it crashing to the bottom if done incorrectly.
Getting it right is still simple with a few strategies. Below, we present our 7 must-know tips on anchor texts.
1. Mix Partial and Exact Anchor Text
Exact anchor text contains the precise keyword you are trying to rank for. Partial anchor text has a very similar word or a variation of it. Ideally, you want to get a good mix of both of these, on both internal and external anchor texts.
2. Don’t Stuff Keywords
Keywords can be both a blessing and a curse and are a fine line that you need to tread. Too many can lead to a penalty from Google, so you need to aim to make them as natural as possible. Make sure that any keywords and secondary keywords in your text flow naturally.
Anchor texts should never contain the exact words as the URL you are linking to. Try to use a variation or sum up the product in your anchor text.
3. Make Links Relevant
Search engines are becoming increasingly aware of user engagement. This means that links have to send people to something relevant. If not, the links they follow will be useless and they will leave the destination webpage quickly.
Links to topics that are relevant, but without linking to competitors. This will give them an advantage over you. Statistics and news are great sources of external links.
4. Use a Variety of Keywords
You should attempt to use a mix of keywords, combining both single words and longer phrases. This indicates that content is relevant and useful across different phrases and words. If too many links have exactly the same anchor text and phrasing, then google will be suspicious and lower search engine rankings.
5. Avoid Spammy Links
Selling backlinks is a big business. The science behind it working is conflicting, with those selling them telling you it works, and SEO experts telling you to avoid it at all costs. The truth is that it could go either way.
If you get a few links from a bad site, your SEO rating can plummet. This works the other way, and linking to bad, spam-filled sites will do more harm than good. If you are buying backlinks, consult a reputable digital consultancy that will take a rounded approach to SEO and provide quality links.
6. Place It Carefully
Where your anchor text sits is just as important. If you hide it amidst large paragraphs and sentences the chances are it will not get seen, as people scan blogs and pages as opposed to read them. Place them where they are easy to find, near headings, images, and other sources.
7. Go Beyond Home and Landing Pages
Linking to home and landing pages are well and good, but it does not provide a lot of value to a visitor. It also looks quite unnatural to search engines, as links do not fall naturally this way. Do not forget to link to deeper, secondary pages with value.
Embed SEO
Anchor text is just one part of a wider SEO strategy. You need to have a holistic approach, incorporating multiple facets of SEO into everything you create on your website. Only then will you start to see results.
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