How to Optimize Your Anchors For SEO
Anchors are HTML tags that identify the visible texts inside links. In other words, it’s clickable text in a hyperlink. For example, in the sentence "JetOctopus is a modern crawler for SEO audit", JetOctopus is the anchor text. The anchors you use in backlinks and internal links are important for SEO because anchors are used by Google to evaluate page rank. You should know how to optimize anchor texts so that they will positively impact your SEO.
You can create anchor using this simple HTML code: <a href="Example Domain">Anchor Text</a> Avoid writing generic texts like "webpage", "post", or "more here” or irrelevant anchors that have no relation to the content of the webpage linked to. Look at the example of low-quality anchors:
Predictably this website is on the 12th webpage in Google search results. The anchor text you add for a link should give at least a basic understanding of what the URL linked to is about. Remember that you can confer some of your website's reputation to another online resource when your website links to it. Sometimes users can take advantage of this by adding links to their own website in your comment sections or message boards. Or you might mention a website in a negative way and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it. This would be a good time to add "nofollow" tag.
The bigger your website, the harder is to optimize anchors properly. If your website is developing, more and more internal and external links appear on webpages. Use web crawler to estimate uniqueness and length of anchors on your website. With Google’s algorithms getting smarter every day, you should avoid empty, keyword-based and duplicate anchors in your website’s anchor text cloud. Failure to do so will definitely result in a penalty. Сomprehensive analysis of anchors and other page rank factors will help you to find real problems that block your SEO.
