[GUIDE] How to Balance Anchor Text Density to Get Amazing SEO Results?
Backlinks are your must-have ranking power in most SEO campaign. It is hard and slow to rank a even very EASY keyword without backlinks nowadays. So, just keep working on your backlinks in order to see the significant movement on SERP.
However, your backlinks might not always produce its miracles. One of the main reasons that your keywords are not moving up might be anchor test density problem. That still remain the myth for many of SEOers, so I am going to break it down in details in this article.
What is an Anchor Text?
I believe most of you should know anchor text well, however, I am still going to explain it to some of newbies who just start SEO.
Anchor text is a piece of text link, clickable and visible. It also represents a vote for the target url in Google eyes, so those target urls should be ranked higher for the certain text keyword.
However, does this mean the more anchor keywords in your backlinks, the faster your keywords would be ranked? No, not really. This is the problem we are going to solve in this article, anchor text density.
What Types of Anchor Text That Really Matter?
Branded Anchor Text
These branded anchor usually represents the website name or business name. For example, WP Rank Top is the brand anchor for https://www.wprank.top
Naked URL
A naked URL anchor is a raw link pointing to your website
Generic Anchor
These are general text anchor, such as “click here”, “source”, “drop visit to”
Image No Anchor
If a image is linked to other website, its alt text is anchor. If alt remain empty, it is a no anchor link.
Brand Keyword Anchor
An anchor link consists of brand name plus a money keyword. For example, “WP Rank Top WooCommerce Silo“, WP Rank Top + WooCommerce Silo
LSI Anchor
As the variation of your targeted keywords are LSI, these variation keywords are also used for anchor text.
Exact Match Anchor
Yeah, you use the exact keyword that you try to rank as the anchor text. That is the exact match anchor.
Fail Proof Anchor Text Formula
You should set your anchor text strategy according to your money sites age.
There are two different approaches that you should take, according to your money site’s ages and previous SEO campaigns.
If your website is old, and already build up a variety of backlinking profile, you have a big room to twist your anchor linking at this stage.
However, if your website is new, and havent shoot much backlinking at the moment, a small mistake might cost you big tanking.
In such situation, you should strictly bear these anchor ratio rules in mind.
- 75% of your links should have Branded Anchors
- 15% of anchors should be naked URLs.
- 5% should be generic anchors.
- 4% should be LSI Anchors.
- <1% should be Exact Match Anchors.
For every page you try to rank, you should always follow these anchor text ratio while doing backlinks. In this way, you are not only safe from anchor related Google penalties, but also see amazing results on SERP.
Exact Match Anchor is always your last resort.
How do you Check Anchor Text Ratio?
To do this, you need Ahrefs tool, and enter exact URL you want to check in site explore, then click “Anchors” menu on the left sidebar.
What is the Biggest Myth on Anchor Text?
The reason I used the above link as an example is because I am about to bust one of the biggest Anchor Text myths the “Pros” suggest.
You will hear this a lot, “Just put the top guys ranking for the keyword you are trying to rank for in Ahrefs and use the keyword density they have”. This is the last thing you wanna do. You see the site above ranks #5 for keto diet and they have that keyword density for keto diet at 6%.
Why are they ranking then? The reason is simple they have a Domain Authority of 85 and secondly their overall anchor text density for the site balances out as per my breakdown above. You should balance out your anchor density based on your overall links, site authority and so on.
Final Words
You should be clear by now that anchor text is not something you can spam around, if you would like to rank keywords quicker and longer. It is easily ignored, but remain the powerful push on your SERP. So, please do your due diligence to correct your anchor ratio if they are not properly deployed.
