Avoid Getting Your Anchor Text Penalized
Estimated Read Time: 3 minutes
Intended Audience: B2B Marketers, B2B Business Owners, Microsoft Partners
The primary driving force for creating optimized content for your website is showing up on search engine results pages. Therefore, content writers and marketers ensure to optimize each piece with ranking keywords. However, there is such a thing as overoptimization, and the major search engines, including Google, will penalize you for unnecessarily loading your content with exact-match anchor text.
What is Anchor Text?
Simply put, anchor text is the clickable text that appears in a hyperlink and usually gives you context into what the link will be. Using descriptive, relevant anchor text can enhance user experience and improve your website’s search engine rankings, as both users and search engines use anchor text to determine what a linked page contains.
As anchor text impacts your SEO, it is important to follow best practices to ensure you are utilizing it correctly and avoiding penalties. We will discuss some of the best practices for optimizing anchor text without overoptimizing and getting penalized.
Best Practices for Optimizing Anchor Text
When using anchor text in your content, you want to make sure that it is relevant to what it is linking to, as this will make it look more natural to your readers and to search engines. You should also pay attention to the words surrounding the anchor text, as these can provide further context and help people decide whether to click your link or not. Search engines prefer natural language because their goal is to deliver accurate search results that mirror how people type and talk in reality.
Avoid Overoptimizing Your Anchor Text
While anchor text is important for SEO and you should be utilizing it to provide readers and search engines with context about your content and website, there is such a thing as overoptimizing.
To avoid overoptimizing, you want to make sure your anchor text is useful, descriptive, and relevant. If search engines detect that you are using exact-match keywords in your anchor text, they will penalize you. If you also have too much anchor text, you will be penalized. If you are using anchor text naturally, it is highly unlikely that it will be an exact match to your keywords anyway.
As algorithms continuously update, search engines are getting better at detecting when websites purposely stuff their content with keywords for the sake of ranking, and this has the opposite effect than what they intended. A general rule of thumb is to insert one link for every 100 words, but make sure the link is highly relevant to the anchor text and that the anchor text isn’t too long or stuffed with keywords.
While you don’t want to be using exact-match keywords, you should also avoid using generic anchors such as click here or learn more, as these can come across as spammy and do not provide context about where users will be taken when they click the link.
You want relevant anchor text that accurately describes what it’s linking to, without being unnaturally stuffed with keywords. Just create valuable content and the opportunity to add links will inherently follow, without the need to use exact-match keywords for each piece of anchor text.
Let the Mavens Help with Your Content Marketing Strategy
We know there is a lot to keep in mind when working on content marketing. You want to make sure your content is optimized to rank higher in search engines, but not too optimized that it gets penalized, which is why we are happy to answer any questions you have regarding your marketing efforts.
For any queries about the best ways to use anchor text, or your content marketing strategy in general, feel free to contact the Mavens.
