Anchor Text

Anchor text is the part of a link you can click. In the sentence read our refund policy, those four words are the anchor, and they work like the label on a door. The label tells a reader what is behind it before anyone opens it, and Google reads the very same label.

The first rule is easy, and it is simply to describe where the link goes. So write see the refund policy rather than click here. Google leans on those words to work out what the page on the other side is about. A blind visitor matters just as much, because a screen reader can read out every link on the page as a bare list, with no sentence around it. Read that way, click here, click here, click here helps nobody.

The second rule is where people get themselves into trouble. One keyword-heavy phrase used as the anchor on every page stops looking like writing and starts looking like a scheme. Repeat the exact words you want to rank for a hundred times and Google notices, which is why it has been discounting that pattern since 2012. Real sites have lost real traffic over it.

Natural anchors vary because the sentences around them 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 is that an image can be a link too. The anchor text of an image is its alt text, the short description typed for people who cannot see it. Leave that empty and the link says nothing at all, which is why Linkysoft checks it on every site it hands over. An empty alt text is the easiest thing in a build to forget.

At Linkysoft the anchors are written with the page copy rather than bolted on afterwards, on every website we design and build. Our digital marketing work adds one honest caveat to all of it. You control the words on your own pages, but you cannot control what other sites call you, and that part is earned rather than written.