In this article, we will explain what a natural anchor text mix looks like and what anchor text strategy you should adopt. But, first, let us understand what we mean by each type of anchor text:
(For example, our company name is SageDoer LLP, our website is www.sagedoer.com, and our main target keyword is “Managed Virtual Assistant Services”)
- Exact-match: Exact same keyword in the exact same order in this example:- “Managed Virtual Assistant Services”
- Branded Keyword:- Use the company or the brand name as an anchor text. In this example, it is “SageDoer”
- Partial-Match:- Anchor text partially matches with the target keyword. In this example, they might be “virtual assistant company”, “low-cost virtual assistant” or, “hire a virtual assistant”
- Naked link:- only the URL link. In this case, it is www.sagedoer.com
- Other:- Other links are natural non-branded, non-keyword links and image links. For example, some people may link to your website with anchor text like “link”, “click here”, “website” etc.
Creating links using only exactly match anchor text doesn’t look natural. Just think about it, you have written an excellent piece of content or, you launched a useful online tool. Now, say 50 people have linked to your website.
- Will everyone use an anchor text?
- Will those who use an anchor text use the exact same words/phrases?
These are the important questions you must ask yourself while crafting your link-building strategies.
Types of Anchor Texts:
Exact-match – 30%
Branded – 25%
Partial-match – 20%
Naked link- 10%
Others (Generic/Natural/image) -15%
We recommend using a mix-and-match strategy as seen above.
You may ask,
- How will Google index our page against the relevant keyword if we don’t use too many exact-match keywords?
- Will Google not get confused with such a wide variety of anchor text?
Google doesn’t solely rely on your anchor text to index your website against relevant keywords. Besides the anchor text, search engines consider many other parameters like
- Website content e.g. meta data, page body etc.
- CTR (Click-through-rate) against the keyword
- Bounce rate against the keyword
- User engagement against the keyword
- Social Signal etc.
Any effort that is done solely for link building goes against Google’s prescribed SEO best practice guidelines. When the masses will link to your website because of its usefullness, the anchor text will not follow any specific pattern and this unorganised, unsmooth pattern is what we call “natural”.