Don’t drop your anchor text

We’ve established that links are really important in determining your site’s ranking in Google.

So the next step for your business is to just go ahead and start building links, right? Not quite. Understanding the different components of a link is vitally important to getting the most out of your link building efforts.

Today we’re focussing on the anchor text of the link. The anchor text of the link simply refers to the keyword/s that are contained within the link itself.

For example, the following link: <a href:”https://www.myswissarmyknife.com.au”>swiss army knives</a> contains the anchor text ‘swiss army knives’ and links to the https://www.myswissarmyknife.com.au website.

The anchor text of a link is highly important because it tells Google what the link is all about. A link to smartcompany.com.au with the anchor text of ‘start-up advice’ is better than the anchor text ‘smartcompany.com.au’ because of the more descriptive nature of the former.

Where possible, be sure to build/ask for links that contain the keywords that you’re targeting. In fact, among all the ranking factors in Google, link anchor text is among the top three that have the most weight.

Finally, a word of caution. Do not build all your links with the targeted keywords in the anchor text. Mix it up!

By default, most sites wouldn’t link to your website with your specified anchor text. As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to exceed a 30/70 ratio between optimised anchor text links vs non-optimised ones.

Having websites linking back to yours with your URL or company name is helpful in keeping your overall link profile natural. This ensures that you don’t get flagged by Google for an overly optimised link profile.