Anchor text

How search engines use anchor text

When many pages link to a page with similar words, those words tell a search engine what the target is about. This is why a page can rank for a phrase that barely appears on it: other sites describe it that way.

For links on your own site, anchor text is how you tell crawlers and readers what the next page is. "Click here" says nothing. "Free robots.txt tester" says everything.

Natural and unnatural anchors

Links that other people give you usually use your brand name, your URL or a plain description. A profile where most links use the same exact money keyword looks engineered, and Google's spam systems watch for it.

So when you ask for a link, let the other person describe you in their own words. On your own site, use descriptive anchors freely, because there is nothing unnatural about clear navigation.

Image links

When the link is an image, such as a badge, the image's alt text plays the role of anchor text. A badge whose alt says "Acme is live on Aback Launch" describes the link. A badge with no alt describes nothing.

Anchor text on your own site

Internal links are where you control anchor text completely, and they matter. Link from blog posts to your product and tool pages using the words people search for. Keep navigation labels descriptive. When two links on a page point to the same URL, make the first one count, because search engines may give it more weight.

Example

In <a href="/tools/robots-txt-tester">free robots.txt tester</a>, the words "free robots.txt tester" are the anchor text.

Questions people ask

Should I use keywords in anchor text?

On your own site, yes, when they describe the page. For links from other sites, a mix of brand, URL and descriptive anchors is natural. Forcing exact keywords into every external link is risky.