What is “anchor text” and how is it used?

Best practice for configuring back-links

As part of our marketing campaigns for dentists, we always encourage practice staff to seek out good quality back-links to their website to supplement the search engine optimisation work that we do on their behalf.

We regularly find that the dentists and practice managers have good relationship with suppliers and can often glean some very useful links from authoritative websites. As part of this link acquisition process it’s useful to know how a link should be configured and also how to ensure that the linking site is suitable.

A quick recap on why links to your website are useful

In short, Google views back links as a “vote of confidence” for a website which will help a website’s search ranking. Although there are many other ranking factors, good back-links are still considered to be the best way to help website SEO. However, it is important to understand what a “good” link is, particularly now that Google will actually penalise a website which has poor back-links pointing to it. This is covered in more detail in other posts on this blog but to summarise, a link is “good” if it comes from an authoritative site, preferably on a similar theme to the target site. Additionally, the link must not be paid for as this will also lead to a Google ranking penalty.

How is a back-link structured?

A key structural component of a back-link is something called the “anchor” text. These are actually the words that form the link to the target site. Up until recently, it used to be best practice to use relevant keywords in your anchor text as frequently as possible. So for example, lots of links to a dental implants page would contain words such as “implant dentist”, “dental implants”, “tooth replacement” etc.

However, this tool became over used in an attempt to manipulate ranking – so much so that Google introduced over-optimisation penalties for sites that had pushed link building too far; particularly where “exact match” anchor text had been employed.

So although back-links are still very important, there is now new advice on how to structure them. This is another great example of how Google changes its search algorithm where it believes there have been attempts to manipulate results.

So what is the latest guidance for structuring back-links?

Over-use of keywords in anchor text is now dangerous. Our advice is to use your brand name e.g. “Dental Media” in 35% of your back-links, your website url e.g. www.dental-media.co.uk in a further 35% of cases and the remainder, a mix of keywords relevant to your target page. These ratios are not definitive but serve as a reasonable guide.

Keep these relevant but mix them up. This way your anchor text will appear natural i.e. not forced, and also provide the “brand” signals that Google now seems to favour. This guidance is particularly relevant for off-site links into your site but it’s also good practice to mix up the anchor text on internal site links, for example from your blog to your headline pages.

Summary

Back-links are still very important for search ranking. However, the sites they are from must be of a suitable quality and their structure must be appropriate to avoid over-optimisation penalties. Ultimately, the best way to increase back-links to your website is to produce content that will attract links naturally. However, if you do get the opportunity to glean a link from a great site to help your rankings, it’s well worth knowing best practice on how to structure it.

If you need more advice on this or any other aspect of optimising for search engines, please call us on 01332 672548.