The Top 3 Anchor Text Best Practices You HAVE To Be Using in 2015
Hey! I’m Sammy, the new digital marketing strategist here at Adster!
A little about me:
- I recently graduated from the public relations program at MacEwan University, which is where I fell in love with marketing.
- I have been Google AdWords and Analytics certified twice in the past 5 months.
- I have a pet turtle, his name is Fern. He will live to be 50. He is currently 5….
I love digital marketing because it allows you to see the results of your efforts; something traditional marketing has always struggled to do.
I am so excited to be a part of the team here, and I can’t wait to bring my knowledge of communications and public relations to the world of digital marketing.
That’s enough about me… let’s get to the good stuff.
Search engines love anchor text, that’s no surprise. Well crafted anchor text tells both the reader and crawlers what they can expect when they follow a link. Although you can’t control all of the anchor text out there, you can use the following best practices to ensure that internal links for you and your clients are of the highest quality.
1. Keep it Varied
It’s important that there are variations of the anchor text linked to your site. Too many inbound links to a page with the anchor text of “best SEO agency” – while obviously super relevant to us – will probably cause Google to get suspicious. We all know that the point of linking to other content is to help the reader and expand their knowledge on a particular subject, so having the exact same anchor text will probably never be the most useful to readers. Keep your anchor text natural and related to the user’s needs and you shouldn’t ever run into a problem.
2. Be Descriptive
Like it was described above, there is a reason why you are linking to other content, you want to help your readers! So help your readers a little bit more and keep your anchor text descriptive. (Like honestly, what does a link like click here even mean!?) Let your readers know exactly what they are going to get when they click on a link. Not only will it create a better user experience, but it will also help your page rank organically for relevant keywords.
3. Use Optimal Anchor Text Length
Let me start off by saying this: we don’t know all the in’s and out’s of anchor text because Google hasn’t released all that information to the world. That being said, there have been some home experiments that point to six to nine words as being the best length for anchor text. Make it too short and it may not be descriptive enough… make it too long and it could look spammy. It’s a very Goldilocks and the Three Bears situation, and six to nine words is juuuuust right. Generally, if it’s quick and easy for the reader to read then it’s probably okay in the eyes of Google.
EXTRA TIP:
It’s important to keep in mind that the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is the only one that Google will count. So you may have spent hours crafting an anchor text that links to your blog, but if your blog is linked to in your header, Google will ignore your well thought out anchor text below. Sad, I know. But these are the facts. My suggestion in this scenario? Link to a specific blog post that is more relevant to the reader’s needs and you will sidestep the problem.
These couple of tips will help you create user and crawler friendly anchor text that is sure to show results!