{"id":32766,"date":"2019-11-18T09:40:57","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T09:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clickintelligence.co\/?p=32766"},"modified":"2023-08-03T08:06:21","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T07:06:21","slug":"anchor-text-ratio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging-uk.clickintelligence.com\/us\/anchor-text-ratio\/","title":{"rendered":"Anchor Text Ratio"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re all told if we want to help our websites rank better, then we need to start link building. Less often are we told how and why we need to start building these links.<\/p>\n

While Google will look at your links on an individual basis, your website\u2019s entire link profile will also play a big part in your website\u2019s ability to rank. Within this link profile, there are some eye-catching trends to look at when it comes to the quality of your links and your anchor text ratios.<\/p>\n

It might seem like a small detail, but the text you include your links with, the anchor text, can make a difference to how well your site can rank, and being able to make these links look as natural as possible can help you improve your domain authority with fewer links.<\/p>\n

So, let’s start at the beginning and take a look at why anchor text ratios are another thing you should be paying attention to with your SEO.<\/p>\n

Why You Need a Link Building Strategy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Simply put, having strong links pointing back to your website is going to help you rank better in the search engines. Google uses a number of metrics (over 200) to help it analyze your site, and the number and quality of your backlinks feature highly in that process.<\/p>\n

Backlinks are one of the ways Google establishes your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT), and in many ways, it follows the same process we do as humans.<\/p>\n

Say you hear your favorite band is coming to town, but you\u2019re not sure if it\u2019s just a rumor, or whether it\u2019s actually true, what do you do? You check authoritative sources to see if they corroborate the story you\u2019ve heard.<\/p>\n

Google and the search engines do much the same thing, they check to see who is backing what you say in the form of linking to your site. The more high-quality links you get to your site from websites in similar niches to yours, the more Google is going to think you are a reputable source and be willing to send its users to your pages.<\/p>\n

The search engines want to know they\u2019re sending their users to high-quality results, so in order to do this, they need to be able to establish your level of authority, and one of the key ways they do this is by analyzing your backlinks.<\/p>\n

Natural Links<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In a perfect world, you would create amazing content, and people will link to it without a nudge \u2013 this would create what we call natural links. Although this image of link building is created by Google, and an ideal one, it can cause a lot of hassle.<\/p>\n

So, if the links don\u2019t come to us naturally, that means we need to find other ways to build links and boost our authority in the eyes of the search engines. To do this, we develop a link building strategy<\/a> to create those links.<\/p>\n

The problem is – and this is where we come back to anchor text ratios \u2013 Google still enjoys this idea of natural linking, and it has ways of trying to promote websites that seem to be linking naturally.<\/p>\n

In many ways, looking for natural links does make sense. They should, in theory, be the most authoritative links, and it stops people from trying to jump up the rankings through spammy, black hat link building techniques. However, even the best, white hat link building requires you to do your own backlinking outreach, so you need to be able to make those links look natural.<\/p>\n

This is where anchor text ratio comes in.<\/p>\n

Types of Anchor Text<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The reason anchor text becomes important is because if lots of different people were linking to your website naturally, they would all do it in their own way. Sure, many will put the link on your brand name, and some will put it on a keyword, but many will put it on some arbitrary words within a sentence.<\/p>\n

To reflect the different text people use to include their links, there are different categories of anchor text.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Keyword<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Keyword anchor texts are an exact match of your target keyword. For example, the main keyword for this page is anchor text ratios, so the link would be on \u201canchor text ratios.\u201d<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Page Title<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      A page title anchor text would simply have the page title of the target page as the anchor text.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Keyword Plus<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        For example, a link to this page could be \u201canchor text ratios and why you should use them.\u201d The whole of the sentence would link to the page, rather than just the keyword of anchor text ratios.<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Brand Plus Keyword<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Brand plus keyword would include your brand, say Click Intelligence, and your keyword, so your link would be \u201cClick Intelligence anchor text ratios.\u201d<\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Brand<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            Your brand and nothing else as your anchor text, so \u201cClick Intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

              \n
            1. Partial Keyword<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              A partial keyword anchor text will contain part of your keyword, but not all of it. For example, \u201cselecting the right anchor.\u201d<\/p>\n

                \n
              1. Natural<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                A natural anchor will have no reference to your brand or your keywords, just a completely natural selection of words, something like \u201cthis will help you.\u201d<\/p>\n

                  \n
                1. Full URL<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  The complete URL the page your link is pointing to as a link.<\/p>\n

                    \n
                  1. com<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                    In this case, to link to this article, we would use ClickIntelligence.com as our anchor text.<\/p>\n

                      \n
                    1. Home URL<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                      A home URL is where you use the home URL of your website, but you\u2019re actually linking to an internal page. So, you might be linking to your page on anchor text ratios, but you use your home URL as the anchor text.<\/p>\n

                        \n
                      1. No Text<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                        You can have a no text anchor when your link is an image and there is no image alt text.<\/p>\n

                          \n
                        1. URL with www\u2019s<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                          Rather than including the whole web address, starting with https:\/\/ you just put www. followed by the domain name.<\/p>\n

                          Categorizing Different Anchor Texts<\/strong><\/h3>\n

                          These twelve different anchor text types can be neatly put into three main categories, each of which signal something slightly different to the search engines.<\/p>\n