What is Anchor Text?
Anchor Text is the clickable text of a link. It typically provides context about the webpage you could visit.
Traditionally anchor text appears as blue and underlined, though many websites use different styles and colors for links.
Example: Here’s a link to cute animal photos.
In this example, the anchor text of the link is “cute animal photos”. Here’s what this link looks like in HTML. In bold is the anchor text.
<a href="http://cuteoverload.com/">cute animal photos</a>
Anchor text gives important information to search engines, since it shows how people describe webpages.
Search engines analyze the anchor text people use when linking to websites to see how authoritative a website is on various topics. Websites are more likely to rank high in search results for keywords related to them.
For instance, according to data curated by Raven’s Research Central, here is some anchor text people use when linking to pages on cuteoverload.com.
- cute animals
- puppeh
- caturday
Cuteoverload.com ranks highly when people search for “cute puppeh” partly because multiple people have linked to their pages using similar anchor text.
Optimizing both internal and external links can impact how your website ranks. Therefore, it’s best to use natural, descriptive anchor text. Using anchor text such as “click here” doesn’t give search engines much context.
Anchor text is just one of many important factors that affect how high pages rank in search results.
Anchor Text Resources
- Anchor Text Best Practices
- The Epic Guide to Anchor Text
- Find Anchor Text with Research Central
- Find Anchor Text with Search Console
- Google’s Definition of Link Schemes
Synonyms
- link text