Anchor text is a clickable text in a hyperlink that leads you to a different page. It is a visible part of the link and it often shows up as a blue piece of text.
You can create an anchor text using the following HTML code:
<a href="https://www.yourdomain.com">Example anchor text</a>
As you can see from the example above, our anchor text is: Example anchor text (ideally you want your links to have anchor text that includes your keywords).
This blue piece of text will point to this page https://www.yourdomain.com.
How to use anchor text?
The anchor text of your link should always be relevant to the page you are linking to so readers know where the link will direct them to if they click on it. It’s also important for Google bots as they use anchor text to understand the context of the link.
You should also pay attention to context clues around anchors. Google uses the text around your link as a signal when checking its relevance to your target topic. That’s why you should make sure that the text around your link is descriptive and relevant to the page you’re linking to.
Image anchor text
You probably already know what alt tag is and how important it is to use it. Alt text for images is another critical element that impacts your SEO results. It provides contextual relevance about the page where the image is attached (alt text helps search engines to understand what your page is about and improve your image search ranking as well). Whenever an image is linked, a search engine will use the text contained in the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text.
Anchor text diversity
It is important to diversify the anchor text you use as natural links will come from various anchor texts as all website owners link differently. Try to avoid using the same anchor text
for your links to not get penalized (the anchor text of your backlinks should mostly contain your brand’s keyword to build a natural backlink profile)
You might also heard about anchor text spamming which is one the most common black hat SEO practices used to manipulate website rankings. This involves links with anchor texts that have no relationship to the page it is linking with.