Anchor Text

Anchor text is the part you can click. In the sentence read our refund policy, those four words are the anchor text. It is the label on a door. It tells the reader, and Google, what is behind it before anyone opens it.

The first rule is simple. Describe the destination. Write see the refund policy rather than click here. There are two reasons. Google uses those words to work out what the other page is about. And a blind visitor using a screen reader can ask for a list of every link on the page, read out on its own with no sentence around it. A list that says click here, click here, click here helps nobody.

The second rule is where people get themselves into trouble. If the same keyword-heavy phrase is used as the anchor on every page, the exact words someone wants to rank for repeated a hundred times, it stops looking like writing and starts looking like a scheme. Google has been discounting that pattern since 2012, and sites have lost traffic over it.

Natural anchors vary because sentences vary. The same page might be reached by cheap flights to Cairo in one place, by our Cairo route in another, and by the name of the page somewhere else. Write the sentence first, then link the words that already describe where it goes. If a sentence exists only to hold an anchor, delete the sentence.

One thing people miss. An image can be a link too, and the anchor text of an image is its alt text, the short description typed for people who cannot see it. Leave it empty and the link says nothing at all. Linkysoft checks that on every site it hands over, because an empty alt text is the easiest thing to forget.

At Linkysoft the anchors are written with the page copy, not afterwards, on every website we design and build. And here is the honest caveat from our digital marketing work. You control the words on your own pages, but you cannot control what other sites call you. That part is earned, not written.