If you’ve been trying to make your article or webpage SEO-friendly, chances are you’ve heard about anchor texts. Well, a big part of SEO implementation is backlinking, whether to an authority page or even your own site. This is where anchor texts come in, so what are they?
What Is An Anchor Text?
Anchor texts are what these links appear as in a write-up. Essentially, they tell us what to expect from a link before clicking it. You can easily spot them by their different colors (often blue), sometimes the text is also underlined.
The Different Types of Anchor Texts
Exact Match Anchor Text
As the name implies, an exact match anchor text is a direct replica of the keywords you plan on targeting. This type of anchor text is very common, but like most things that concern SEO, we don’t want to overdo it.
Naked Anchor Text
The name often gets people confused, how can an anchor text be naked after all? When you don’t cover its awkward long characters with a useful description, it can happen. Naked anchor texts are dropped “as is.” You’d often find this type of anchor text for unimportant information, like a link to a video.
Branded Anchor Text
Certain brands evoke instant trust, sites like Wikipedia, and W.H.O. Branded anchor texts proudly proclaim this, leaving the user with no doubt where they are being taken to. With this type of anchor text, only the brand name will be linked.
Partial Match Anchor Text
A partial match anchor text is a great way to optimize your post. With a partial match type, the keyword is paired with other texts. If the intended keyword is “pet food”, it may be represented as “check out this pet food.”
Generic anchor texts
Thie generic type is widely used, if you surf the web you’ve seen it; even if you didn’t know what it looked like. It’s used to capture the attention of your audience in a subtle way. With a generic anchor text, instead of saying “click here” to go to your store; you’d highlight the important part of the sentence.
It’ll end up looking like “ check out our store, you also get a discount”.
Image anchor text
This type of anchor text is placed on the image. You’d often come upon this type of text on spammy sites, once you click on an image it takes you to another site. This can be a real pain if all you wanted to do was view the image in fullscreen. If the user of the image anchor text is not cautious, your site might be avoided altogether
Semantic anchor text
Think of semantic anchor text as the phrase a prospective user might type when seeking something.. They are written in the natural way people phrase questions; such as “I am looking for a vending machine”. It is very similar to what search engines use to operate and predict what we type. `