Anchor text

The anchor text is the visible representation and clickable part of a link in a web page. It is usually highlighted or underlined to stand out from the rest of the text. Anchor texts are also called anchor texts or link texts and are just as important for human visitors as they are for search engines. Well-optimized link texts increase the usability of a website, help search engines analyze the page and have a positive influence on the ranking.

 

The following example shows the HTML code of a typical link in a web page:

#a href="https://example.com/kontakt.html">Contact us right now! #!a

 

The text "Contact us now!" is the link text. Without it, web browsers would display the reference as the URL of the linked page. Users and search engine crawlers would then have far fewer clues to understand what es is about on the target page. The anchor text should always be as informative and easy to understand as possible, as well as encourage visitors to click if necessary. The latter is very important if the link is to function as a call-to-action. In the case of links in body text, it is also important that the link text fits naturally into the text and does not appear artificial.

Anchor texts can be assigned to different types. Depending on the purpose, the link text can be optimized through the targeted inclusion of keywords. The three most common types are money, brand and navigation, whereby an anchor text can also belong to several categories.

  • Money: The link text contains animating terms such as "buy", "book" or "commission".
  • Brand: Here the names of companies or products appear in the anchor text.
  • Navigation: These are links with texts like "Next page" or "More information can be found here".

Anchor text & search engine optimization

The anchor text is very important in SEO, as both external and internal linking has SEO potential. In both cases, search engines use the link text for content analysis and relevance evaluation. Internal link ing is one of the main aspects of on-page optimization. Anchor texts help search engines to analyze the page structure. They allow the crawlers to recognize not only the topic of the linked page, but also which websites are thematically related. The same applies to external backlinks between different websites.

When optimizing anchor texts - this is also referred to as anchor text optimization - es offers many opportunities for a better ranking - but also some sources of error. The central and most important pages - the so-called cornerstone content - is usually the most frequently linked. These can be, for example, start, contact or category pages. Here es is worthwhile to achieve a high keyword coverage with diverse link texts. Not too many keywords should appear per anchor text.

With anchor text optimization, SEO managers consciously control internal links from one URL to another. The aim is es to pass on the "link juice" of a strong URL to a weaker URL. As part of a basic on-page SEO strategy, it is determined which URLs do not receive link juice and which are strengthened by anchor text optimization. In practice, internal follow and nofollow links can pass on link juice. To exclude URLs from crawling, a reference in the Robots.txt file is more effective.