Follow That Link! Why You Need SEO-Friendly Anchor Text

Anchor text — the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink — is probably something your average website visitor never thinks about as they’re reading a web page. If it’s relevant to their interest, they’ll feel compelled to click on it for some other destination on your site or the wider web. On the other hand, if someone just scrolls past that familiar blue type, or they click it and bounce, that means the anchor text isn’t doing its job effectively.

Good anchor text is important to your SEO strategy because it works on the page and also behind the scenes to tell the user and Google, respectively, something about the page you’re linking them to. When a reader sees the anchor text “Gen Z guide to TikTok” laced into a Starmark.com article about strategic thinking, she understands what she can expect to find if she clicks that link. Likewise, when Google crawls that same page, it’s using the companion hyperlink (<a href=“https://www.starmark.com”>Gen Z guide to TikTok</a>) to find other pages on the Starmark site.

Why it’s important to get it right

As we explained in the vintage eTip “Anchor Text: Link Building Done Right,” you don’t want anchor text to be too generic or too narrow. “Click here” and “Download here” don’t tell a reader who’s simply browsing your site anything useful at a glance. It also doesn’t convey any useful information to Google.

On the other hand, anchor text can also be too ultra-specific. Google isn’t a big fan of “exact match” and “phrase match” anchor text, in which the anchor text is the specific keyword or phrase you’re targeting, such as “Georgia schools near you” or “Florida vacation hotel deals.” (Plus, these keyword speed bumps disrupt the flow of the copy when a real human is reading it.) Basically, use keyword-rich anchor text sparingly, or Google will think you’re being spammy.

Good anchor text is descriptive, relevant and gets to the point. When users see the anchor text, they should have a very good idea where the link will take them, like in this example from the Art Lovers Itinerary on our client’s website, ameliaisland.com:

To Know Us Is to Love Us

Also on 3rd Street is the Amelia Island Museum Of History. To understand a little more about our island paradise, you’re going to want to take a docent-led tour inside the museum or walking tour around downtown. Truth is, we have a few dark secrets here that don’t always coincide with the gorgeous place you see today but pair those secrets with some amazing historical figures and you’ve got quite the storied island! Soak it all in then head over to the Welcome Center where you can pick up brochures and see all eight flags that we’ve flown under! If that just whets your whistle for more history, view all of our island museums and make a day of it.

It’s well-known that Google uses anchor text as one of its ranking signals, which are characteristics used to determine the position of a website in a search engine. That’s why anchor text best practices should definitely be part of your SEO strategy. Go through your website and see where you can optimize. It’s low-investment with high reward.

If you’d like to learn more about Starmark’s tips for optimizing your website, get in touch.