The anchor text of your links plays a fundamental role in the effectiveness of your link building strategy. This element can significantly influence the performance of your website in search results.
The use of anchor text in a link building campaign is a crucial factor that will determine its success. If you are too aggressive, you risk having on page seo service Google disavow and ignore the links you build.
Properly optimizing anchor text not only helps improve the relevance and quality of links, but also ensures that your website stays within good SEO practices.
In this article, we'll explore 12 ways to optimize your link anchor text to maximize its impact and avoid penalties.
If you’ve ever looked into bad links or Black Tail SEO, you already know that there’s such a thing as over-optimization (or even unethical optimization). From buying links to publishing duplicate content, there are a variety of questionable techniques that can get sites into trouble. And, as a key component of any SEO strategy, it’s clear that anchor text can be subject to over-optimization as well.
But what exactly is over-optimized anchor text? It usually has some obvious characteristics, including:
Too many keywords.
Too many internal links in one place.
Text that is not relevant to the link it is attached to.
A large number of links that share the same anchor text.
Fortunately, all of these problems are relatively easy to avoid. To do so, simply:
Avoid adding more than one or two natural-sounding keywords to any piece of anchor text.
Don't put hundreds of links on a page that doesn't need them.
Make sure all anchor text is relevant to the page you are linking to.
Don't reuse the same anchor text over and over again.
- Don't use target keywords for external links
The link to which an anchor text is attached can lead to an internal or external page. And if it leads to an external page, the words contained in the anchor text will affect how search engines view it.
Therefore, it is important for SEO specialists to remember that while external links can benefit their own site's rankings, they should also avoid using their own target keywords (at least when linking to competing sites).
For example, let’s say you’re optimizing a site for a digital marketing agency. As such, you want it to rank higher for the term “digital marketing.” But on one of the pages on the site, you create an external link that leads to another agency’s website and has anchor text containing the phrase “digital marketing.”
In that case, you’d be telling Google that the other agency’s website should rank for “digital marketing.” For obvious reasons, that’s something you don’t want to do.