WILO does not automate anything for you, and that includes choosing the anchor texts.
If you don’t know what an anchor text is, it’s simply the text that you use in your link.
To get the best SEO results, your anchor texts need to be optimised for two things:
- The page the link is on
- The page the link is linking to
There are many different ways to choose anchor texts for your internal links, and in this tutorial, we will look at the most common.
Choose them yourself.
When you have a good understanding of a site, the best option for optimising your anchor link texts is to trust your gut.
If you know the site you are working on inside out, you already know the niche, the context, the types of articles on the site, and so on.
You can use this knowledge to choose anchor texts to get started with optimisation and then use more complex methods later on.
Use tools like ahrefs or SEM rush to research keywords to use as anchor texts.
If you are working on a client site, you may need to do some digging into the best anchor tests to use for internal linking. If you have a paid account with either tool, you can look at competitors’ internal links, ranking keywords, and so on to build a picture of what other high-ranking sites are doing.
There’s a lot that goes into this single internal link, so let’s explore all the things you need to take into consideration.
Relevance
The anchor you choose should be contextually relevant to the page you are linking to – for example, don’t link to a page about dogs from a page about coffee – it makes no sense.
The search engines (and users) need to understand the connection between the two pieces of content.
Even if the example page about dogs mentions coffee, is it worth the link – is there enough relevance on the entire page rather than just the coffee page having the word ‘dog’ on it?
Keyword Optimisation
Using keywords in your anchor links helps to add relevance and boost SEO, but this must be done carefully you don’t want 50 pages on your site internally linking to a landing page all with the same keyword – this looks natural and spammy.
Natural Language Flow
Your anchors need to make sense and flow with the page’s content; you can’t just stuff them anywhere. Anchor texts should not feel ‘forced’ or make the surrounding content unintelligible.
You can also consider NLP for your paragraphs that contain anchor links – this helps the search engines understand your content better.
SUBJECT > VERB > MODIFIER.
- The SEO expert created an amazing plan of action for the site.
Rather than:
- An amazing plan of action was created by the SEO expert.
This might sound very subtle, but welcome to the world of SEO!
Variation & Diversity
You want to mix up your anchor texts into exact matches, broad matches, partial matches, and so on.
For example, if we are linking back to a landing page for a ‘brochure design service’ we’d use the anchor texts as follows:
- Brochure design service
- Professional brochure design services
- Brochure designers
- Creative brochure design
- Creative brochure solutions
- Sales brochure design services
- Brand-name-here brochure design agency
- And so on…
This can look more natural and prevents over-optimisation of the anchor texts on your site.
Branded Anchors
We added one of these above—branded anchors can help build brand authority and get you ranking for brand-related searches. Internally, you should use this with caution as you are, after all, already on your site and internally linking rather than backlinking.
Descriptive & Concise
You should provide both the user and the search engine with a clear idea of what they can expect from the page they are about to visit.
Using ‘all about cats’ as an anchor that links to a page about Dog food is not a good idea.
Context & Surrounding Content
Search engines and visitors do not see an anchor link in isolation, they read the text before and after the link to gain some context. The entire paragraph you add the link to should also be optimised and must be relevant.
Avoiding Spammy or Irrelevant Links
If you have low-value pages on your site, consider a page with little text as an example. Consider whether you should use this page to link; it’s not going to pass much link juice.
Placement on the Page
Links in the first paragraph can carry more weight than a link at the end of the article, so consider this when choosing where to place a new anchor.
A lot is going on with that single anchor link.
The above gets into the details, and there’s much to consider here. However, consider that this can make the difference between ranking 11th and getting no traffic to your site and ranking 3rd, where you can pick up 10% of all click-throughs for the keyword.
If you are serious about SEO, this type of work can have a huge impact on your website—investing the time in making sure all your anchor texts are optimised is time well spent.
When it comes to SEO, you have to sweat the small stuff, and not doing so is the main reason that 99.99999% of sites don’t rank in the top 10.
