Commandment 2: Use Anchor Text
Relevant Anchor Text for Internal Linking. In keeping with the content theme of internal linking, your internal links should use anchor text as verses linked images. Image links aren’t bad, provided that images are not the main or only source of links, and assuming the image is properly alt-tagged. Alt-tags allow you to give the image an alternative name that includes searchable keywords or key phrases for SEO purposes.
The proper use of anchor text, of course, opens a new can of worms. Obviously, you don’t want optimized anchors. Instead, use in-optimized sentence fragments as anchor text. You don’t have to overthink it. It’s best just to highlight and link it, and you’re done!
You should aim to use relevant, useful anchor text when linking internally. By using relevant keywords to link to your inner pages, you’ll help those pages earn better SEO ranking.
A useful WordPress plugin that you can use is SEO Smart, Internal Links. This tool automatically hyperlinks keywords other internal pages on your site. You can customize it to only link specific keywords, phrase, and URLs, as well as make sure it only adds one link per page.
The downside to the practice of using automated tools for internal linking purposes is that it doesn’t create a natural look as when an editor links to other pages in an article. If used incorrectly (for instance, linking every occurrence of a word on a page), it can also lead to horrible consequences and poor user experience.
Anchor Text Definition:
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink form. Search Engine Optimization or SEO best practices state that anchor text is relevant to the page and its content that you are linking to, rather than generic text. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard. To make it stand out even more, it is possible to change the color, underlining and even the font and font size through HTML code. The keywords in anchor text are one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a web page, so it is very important to name your anchor text properly.
The anchor text is also known as the link label or link title. The words contained in the anchor text help determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Links without anchor text commonly happen on the web and are called naked URLs, or URL anchor texts. Different browsers will display anchor text differently, and proper use of anchor text can help the page linked to rank for those keywords in search engines.
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