How To Structure Anchor Text For Better Google Rankings

Learn what types of links and how to structure anchor text to make sure that Google will show you the love when it comes to rankings.

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Linking is by far one of the most essential aspects of your SEO and marketing strategy. Internal and external links, as well as backlinks, can significantly impact your content’s performance.

This is precisely why it is so important to make the most of your anchor text links – they are crucial for the effectiveness of your links. Hence, here’s how to write a suitable anchor text list for Google.

#1 Understand Different Types of Anchor Texts

First and foremost, you need to understand the different types of links and anchor texts associated with them.

Here are the most common anchor text types:

• Branded Links – These are links where the anchor text is either a brand or website name.
• “Naked” Links – These are links with exact URLs that are often called “naked” because they don’t have an anchor text except for the URL itself.
• Article Titles – These are links where the anchor text is the title of the article or page that you are linking to. Usually, such anchor texts will already have relevant keywords in them because the titles themselves have the keywords.
• Keywords – These are links where the anchor text is a specific keyword, either as a single word or a phrase. The keywords should always be directly related to the page you are linking to. While such links are valuable, they can also be dangerous if you use exact match keywords (Google’s algorithm doesn’t like this). To avoid issues, you can use one of the common tactics for using keywords in anchor texts:
  • Variants – Use variants of your chosen keywords. For example, you can switch up words in a sentence.
  • Related – Use keywords related to your chosen keywords. Instead of using exact match keywords, use related keywords.
  • Generic – Use generic anchor texts (e.g. “click here”, “read more”). While this could be a way to avoid exact match keyword issues, such links are still not a good option to use.
  • Long-Tail – Use long-tail keywords in anchor texts. These are usually over four words long (but not entire sentences). Linking article titles is an example of using long-tail keywords in anchor texts.

Generally, you want to avoid using exact match keywords, “naked” links, and generic anchor texts. All the other types of anchor texts can be used in your linking strategy to make it more diverse.

#2 Choose the Pages You Want to Link

Once you understand how the different types of anchor texts work, you will need to choose the pages you want to link. At this stage, it is best to focus on internal and external linking because you are in full control of both of these. Your aim is to build a network with many links that connect the different pages on your website while also having some relevant external links.

Later on, you can also work with backlinks. For these, anchor texts are also important, so it’s best if you create such backlinks yourself. You can use guest blogging to do this. If you don’t have time to write content for your guest posts, you can hire a professional writer from the writing services reviews site Rated by Students. They will be creating articles for you regularly so that you can publish them and add backlinks to your site.

#3 Learn More About Good Anchor Text Distribution

The next thing you should do is learn more about good anchor text distribution. Essentially, this refers to the types of anchor texts you use and how often you use them. You will need to perform a competitor analysis to determine how often and what kind of anchor text types you should be using. Here are the steps you can follow:

• Perform Google searches for the keywords you intend to use and find the top-ranking pages for each one.
• Check the pages and use a tool like Ahrefs to analyze those pages and check their links and backlinks.
• Create a list of anchors used in the links, define their types, and calculate the percentage of each type from all the anchors.
• Use the anchor text distribution (the percentages you found) to plan your own usage of different anchor text types.

#4 Compile a List of the Keywords You Will Use

If you haven’t done this already, you will need to compile a list of keywords that you will be using in your anchor texts. Even if not all of your anchor texts can be defined as the keyword type, you will still actually be using keywords in one way or another. For example, in branded anchor texts, you are pretty much using brand names as keywords.

Try to make your keyword list as diverse as possible. Find both primary and secondary or related keywords. Use both short- and long-tail keywords. In some cases, you will be writing content on trending topics – that’s when you will be using keywords relevant to those topics. This content should be high-quality and detailed, so you might want to hire an experienced writer from the custom writing reviews site Top Writing Reviews to write it for you.

#5 Balance All the Different Types of Linking

As mentioned earlier, you will need to work with internal and external linking as well as with backlinks. By balancing all these different types of linking while using different types of anchor texts, you can build a truly diverse link profile for your website which will be extremely beneficial to your SEO.

#6 Make Anchor Texts Natural and Relevant

One more thing to keep in mind when adding links is that your anchor texts should be natural and relevant. This refers both to the page they are linking to and the page where they are placed on. This is why you need expert writers that you can hire from respectable writing services. These writers will ensure that all your content corresponds to the links you want to use. Relevance and being natural are both essential.

#7 Update Your Old Links If Necessary

Last but not least, don’t hesitate to update your old links (including broken links) if you feel it is necessary. If there are many older links that could need some touch-ups in their anchor texts, then you should definitely take the time to make these changes.

This is particularly important for internal and external linking, both of which you have full control of. When it comes to backlinks, it can be more difficult to make changes, so it’s best to focus on the new backlinks you make.

Final Thoughts

All in all, creating a comprehensive list of anchor texts for your links can take some time, but it is definitely necessary for your SEO and marketing strategy. Utilize the tips in this article to help you create your own anchor text list.