The use of anchor texts is a critical element in content marketing. Learn about anchor text optimization best practices.
Over the past years, SEO has proved to be a very useful digital marketing tool. Thanks to SEO, businesses have been able to give their customers exceptional user experience, generating more leads, and making more conversions. All these have been beneficial to the bottom line of these businesses.
SEO covers several strategies that work together to increase the visibility of a website, create brand awareness, and consequently boost profits. Link building is among the SEO OFFPAGE strategies that have made this possible. SEO experts like LinkBuildingServices.net help websites with their link building strategies helping them share engaging content with targeted audiences to boost their traffic and build authority. The idea is guest posting, whereby they help track down authority websites in the specific niches where they can post content.
Anchor texts are essential elements in link building. Understanding anchor text best practices will go a long way in creating a foolproof link building strategy. Here are tips for optimizing your anchor texts.
1. Using relevant anchor texts
The rules are always to stick to natural anchor texts. Natural anchor texts are relevant to the content, and they will help in ranking. Note that Google algorithms are always looking for pages that are helpful to users. The use of relevant links and anchors allows Google to connect the users to content in relevant web pages.
The use of relevant anchors will go a long way in helping the search engine algorithms index and rank your pages.
2. Place the anchor text where users are more likely to see it
Only on rare occasions do users read content word for word. Most of the time, they will go through the first few paragraphs and probably conclude where they can get a summary of the content. Therefore, the best place to place an anchor text would be where the users pay the most attention. That would be in the first few paragraphs.
It is also a smart strategy to place anchors in the various focal points of content, including imagery and subheadings. Users are more likely to see them when placed in the high attention areas, and if they are useful, the users will certainly click on them.
3. Use anchors in the right proportions
Different types of anchors can be used in the content, and they need to be balanced. There are branded anchors, naked URLs, website names, partial match keywords, page titles, and generic anchor texts.
The common mistake made when using anchor texts is using just one kind across an entire text. Your content should mostly focus on branded and website name anchors as they are recognized by Google and will help a great deal in ranking and indexing your page. Page title anchors, on the other hand, should be used sparingly. At the same time, you should avoid stuffing your content with partial match anchor texts.
4. Do not link everything
Overdoing anchor texts will do your content marketing strategy more harm than good. As much as what you intend to achieve with the anchor texts is link building, the bigger goal here is to give the users a fantastic experience. Note that this is not something they will enjoy if your sentences consist of several anchor texts.
Not only will you impede the readability of the content, but you are likely to come across a spammy website. Only use anchor texts where necessary and make them natural.
5. Stay relevant to guest blogging
While selecting the anchor texts, you need to align with the hosting website if you are guest blogging. For instance, if you are talking about SEO strategy, you should not link the keyword to a website with nothing to do with SEO. The anchor texts should also stay relevant to the topic of the content. Relevance is what will make your guest blogging campaign fruitful.
6. Steer away from links to spammy websites
Note that not every website qualifies to be linked to it. You should stay away from low-quality websites if you want your link building campaign to bear fruits. As much as Google will majorly focus on your website’s quality, the algorithms will also look at the websites you are linking to. It is, therefore, vital to audit all the websites you link to beforehand.
Content marketing has long term benefits for your website and brand. The only challenge that most people face is doing it right. Anchor text optimization is essential to the success of a content marketing campaign. The tips above will go a long way in helping you improve your anchor text usage.