Anchor text is the term given to the text highlighted by a hyperlink. It’s a crucial concept to understand in SEO, because the anchor text or a hyperlink is one of the only indicators that Google’s search engine bots can use to understand why one website is linking to another.
For instance, a website that is linking to another website’s original research, say in cosmetic brand trends, could use a variety of types of text as the anchor. They might read “Click here”, or “The report”, or “Trends in cosmetics”. Of these different anchor texts, it’s clear that the latter makes it most obvious what the content is leading to – and therefore which keywords Google’s bots should take into account when evaluating the backlink for its SEO ranking factor.
Briefly, there are five basic types of anchor text, comprising:
- Exact match: The anchor text directly matches the keyword of the page linked to.
- Partial match: The anchor text partially matches the keyword of the page linked to.
- Branded: The anchor text matches the brand of the page linked to.
- Generic: The anchor text is generic, such as “click here” or “read this”.
- Naked: The anchor text is simply the link hyperlinked to – the full URL is presented on the page.
SEO marketers use different types of anchor text in order to optimise the impact of backlinks and the SEO benefits of keywords.
