What Is Anchor Text?

Search engines like Google and Bing are continually working overtime to try and determine exactly what the pages on your website are about. The better they’re able to do that, the more likely your site will show up in search results for relevant keywords.

Instead of leaving the algorithms to do all of the hard work, there are a few things we can do to make their life easier – pointers we can implement to help search engines work out what the pages on your site relate to and who they might be useful to. One such pointer is anchor text.

The Basics

Anchor text is simply the text that’s clickable on a hyperlink. Take this link as an example; the anchor text is simply ‘this link.’

There are several reasons why anchor text is a good idea. First thing’s first, it’s tidier. Imagine if every link was typed out in full on a webpage – it’d be pretty messy! We use anchor text to improve readability and make it easier for users to navigate their way around a website, but that’s not the only benefit it brings.

How to write anchor text

As we touched on above, utilising anchor text effectively can positively impact SEO – and potentially boost your position on the search engine results pages of Google, Bing, etc. That doesn’t apply if you use phrases like ‘click here,’ though – your anchor text must describe what the page is about.

Here’s an example of effective anchor text:

‘Visit our Get Help Centre for more information on this subject.’

And here’s how not to do it…

‘More information on this subject is available in our Get Help Centre. Click here.’

See the difference? The second example doesn’t tell a search engine what the page is about or what it relates to, while the first one does. If there’s a particular search term (or keyword) you’d like a page to rank for, you can use that keyword as your anchor text. Don’t do this too often though, or you’ll run the risk of keyword stuffing and potentially undo all your hard work.