The Two Anchor Text Types You Need To Use

I see a lot of common wisdom about anchor texts used to rank a website. I can honestly say, we have come a long way. When I was first learning seo, I read about:

1. Exact Match
2. Partial Match
3. LSI
4. Naked URL
5. Generic Anchor

This was after the great spam age. The way to make money was with small micro sites, blasted with black hat spam. All the guides I read said the same thing.

The problem?

This isn't natural. And SEOs evolved. Soon I saw branded anchor text being advised. A huge step up.

The Missing Link

The first, that any website can use, is entire sentance anchors. These anchors are an odity, and should be a low percentage (one of 100) but most natural profiles have them.

An example is:

I found on black hat world how to build backlinks.

Perfectly natural. But is often ignored.

The second, are article title links.

Why Wimbledon Leaves $60 Million On Centre Court

Again, perfectly natural for people to link with the article title.

Over Use of Anchor Texts

Sadly, a lot of common anchor texts are mis used.

It makes sense for a brand to have a lot of branded anchors. Not for your micro niche site targeting a single affiliate product.

Generic anchors are great, but 'click here' not something you typically see in the middle of an article, unless it is a promotional post. Which is something google frows on.

Find Your Backlink Hole

SEO is hard. It is not just about building links. You need the right links, with the right diversity, with the right anchors to rank.

SEOs normally focus on the caps of anchor ratios. They often neglect the fact that natural is different from what SEOs call natural.

We forget what real websites do. Before you toss in a 'click here' anchor, consider an entire sentence anchor or an article title anchor. You still get the diversity and prevent the unnatural flags generic anchors can set off.

Anchor text is important in SEO but the long tail anchor still works in seo. Infact, i haven't seen any development in the use of anchor text.

Todays era is to promote the brand name if use anchor text during link building then do in this manner "Brandname + Anchor text" or "Anchor text +Brandname" - 70% of the links creation done in this manner.

Branded Anchor Text: 70%
Naked Links: 20%
Generic Anchors: 5%
LSI, Partial Match Anchors: 5%

Great post. I've used sentence anchors, for some reason I had never thought of article titles, since I do consider partial / long tails which include the keyword. It's a solid case of technical vs. practical thinking. It's not always about this keyword or brand anchor, it's about mimicking a natural link profile.

Another form of sentence anchors that I use are question anchors. especially if linking out through forums / reddit.

DeadJoe said:

Great post. I've used sentence anchors, for some reason I had never thought of article titles, since I do consider partial / long tails which include the keyword. It's a solid case of technical vs. practical thinking. It's not always about this keyword or brand anchor, it's about mimicking a natural link profile.

Another form of sentence anchors that I use are question anchors. especially if linking out through forums / reddit.

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I found the article title anchors in a competitors profile.

It works the best, in my opinion, with thin affiliate sites. If the article title is "ten best matresses on amazon" you get the anchor text you want without vastly over optimizing your exact match profile.

I think the advice on anchor text remains the same, especialyl when it comes to diversifying your anchors and avoiding over-optimisation. Salient advice, thank you

Kuz32 said:

I think the advice on anchor text remains the same, especialyl when it comes to diversifying your anchors and avoiding over-optimisation. Salient advice, thank you

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Finally a post where you didn't vomit promoting your guest post BST.

very informative post, great for newbies like me

I love how you expressed your thoughts by the way. I completely agree with you! Thank you for this!