How to write better anchor texts – 8 examples

Anchor texts are short, but they still play an important role for both the user experience and SEO on your website.  

You might have found your way to this article because you have a website, an online shop, or a blog where you make use of internal and external links in your texts. We hope you will enjoy reading along as we review examples of anchor texts and give you specific writing tips, as well as a handy list of dos and don’ts for your own anchor texts. 

What are anchor texts?

An anchor text is the visible, clickable text part of a link. Let’s say you have a blog where you have published a post about orange trees in Spain. By inserting an internal link in the text, you can guide the reader on to other related posts. 

To expand on the blog example, let’s assume that you have a different article about pomegranate trees. If your readers are interested in orange trees, they may also want to read about other fruit trees. Here, the anchor text in your article about orange trees could look like this: 

The orange tree is just one of Spain’s many fruit trees. If you travel to the south of Alicante, you will also be able to enjoy the sight of the beautiful pomegranate trees. 

In this example, the text in bold is the anchor text that, had we inserted a link, would be clickable. 

In the rest of the article, we will continue to mark the anchor text examples in bold as we can’t add that many actual links to the article.  

Are anchor texts important for SEO?

Good anchor texts are important for the search engine optimisation of your website. This is because they can help improve the user experience by making it easier for your visitors to find more content they are interested in reading. 

Your anchor texts can also affect your page’s ranking in search results because they give search engines information about the type of content you are linking to. The text also sends a signal to the search engines about how the content on your individual pages is related. 

However, this doesn’t mean that you should start inserting internal links and anchor texts everywhere in your content. Too much of a good thing can have the opposite effect, as we will see a little later in the article. 

8 examples of anchor texts

There are several types of anchor text that are used in different contexts. Below we have put together a list with examples of some of the most common. 

1 – Generic anchor texts

Generic anchor texts are typically very general and do not contain relevant keywords that tell the user or search engines what type of content is being linked to. 

On some of the many websites you have visited online, you are guaranteed to have come across links with generic anchor texts. Here are four of the most common: 

• Click here 
• See more 
• Get more information 
• Visit this page  

2 – Naked links

Pure HTML links or naked links, as they are aptly called, are effectively links without anchor texts. But, because no anchor text is inserted, the link acts as its own anchor text, hence the name “naked link.” 

It is not that common for this type of link to be inserted in the middle of a text, but they are occasionally used at the bottom of a page. Here are a few examples where we have of course taken the opportunity to insert our own links: 

With the Website Builder from one.com (https://www.one.com/en/websitebuilder) you can create a nice website in a few minutes. 

On our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@onecom) we give you a wide range of good tips for optimising your website and your marketing strategies. 

3 – Branded anchor texts

Branded anchor texts contain the name of a brand or company. They can be used in several different contexts. For example, if you want to tell your readers that your local café bakes the world’s best cinnamon rolls, you can use the café’s name in your anchor text. It might look like this: 

Don’t miss out on the delicious cinnamon rolls at CafeNavn. They are organic, vegan, and undoubtedly better than all other cinnamon rolls in Copenhagen, and probably also the rest of the world. 

A branded anchor text can also be used if, for example, you refer to a well-known external source, such as a major newspaper, an aid organisation, a scientific journal or the like. It might look like this: 

According to Nasa, most of North America will have the chance to see the moon pass in front of the sun during a solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024. 

4 – Brand and keyword

An anchor text with brand and keywords is very similar to the text from the example in the previous section. The only difference is that you combine the brand or company name with a keyword, typically a product or service that the company in question sells, e.g. Dr. Martens boots. 

5 – Anchor with exact keyword match

An exact keyword match anchor text is an anchor text that consists entirely of a keyword or search term that the writer wants to rank for. 

Let’s assume that you have an online shop where you sell coffee beans. On your blog, you write a post about coffee plantations in different countries. In this post you could, for example, use the anchor text coffee beans from Bolivia, and then link to the respective Bolivian coffee beans in your product selection.

6 – Anchor with partial keyword match

This type of anchor text also contains keywords, but not necessarily in a sentence that matches the search term exactly. Instead, the word order can be moved around, and the search words can be merged into a shorter or longer sentence, which still conveys the same information. Let’s continue with the coffee beans from the previous section. 

Here, an anchor text with partial keyword match could look like this: 

Coffee beans from Bolivia’s Yungas region have a completely unique taste. 

7 – Anchor with related keyword matches

Anchor texts with related searches are somewhat similar to the partial keyword match texts but differ in that they don’t contain the primary keyword the writer wants to rank for. Related searches instead consist of words that are related to the primary search term.  

Here we can again use the coffee beans but change the sentence by removing both coffee beans and Bolivia. 

This week’s South American brew is a real treat – you can almost taste the sun rising over the Andes and shining down into your cup. 

8 – Alt text as anchor text

Alt texts are also anchor texts. Alt texts are texts that describe images on a website. Their purpose is to enable people with reduced vision to use screen readers when visiting the site. At the same time, the texts have the advantage that they give the search engines more information about the content on the page. 

The reason alt texts are also categorised as anchor texts is that they are still clickable even if an image does not load correctly. And, in the same way as other anchor texts, they should be short and in a precise way convey the necessary information. However, because alt texts describe images, they are typically slightly longer than anchor texts. In our article “What is alt text“, you can read more about how alt texts are written and used. 

Anchor texts dos and don’ts

In the sections above, we have reviewed examples of different types of anchor text. Now we dive into a few aspects to think about when using and writing anchor texts for your website. 

Do this

What constitutes a good anchor text naturally depends on the context, but there are still rules of thumb that are useful to know.  

Short and sweet

A good anchor text is short, concise, and conveys useful information. As much as possible, try to keep your anchor text to 5 words or less.

Set expectations with relevant keywords

Only include relevant keywords that tell the reader what to expect when they click the link. 

Keep links to relevant pages only

It can be tempting to spice up a text with a lot of internal links, but you should still only link to pages that are related to the text. If you write about orange trees, for example, it will be difficult to argue that a link to a text about Formula 1 racing is a good idea. We’re not saying it’s completely unthinkable, but there are very few cases where it would make sense. 

Think about the text around the link

When writing an anchor text, it’s best if you can have it weave into the text in a natural way, so that it doesn’t just feel like a link that suddenly appears without context. See our examples in the list of different anchor texts above.  

Anchor text don’ts – avoid these

As we touched on at the beginning of the article, anchor texts can be beneficial to your website’s SEO, but because Google knows that it can be tempting to abuse them, there are certain things you should avoid. We’ve listed them below.  

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is where someone tries to cram as many keywords into a text as possible. Keywords are important for SEO, but in recent years, search engines such as Google have begun to place more emphasis on content having value for the reader. Therefore, it can affect your website’s ranking in a negative direction if you use too many keywords in your anchor texts.

Too many internal links

Just like with keywords, the number of internal links you include in a text should feel natural. You must be able to read the text without noticing that you are constantly coming across a link. Google’s algorithm can also register too many internal links as an attempt to manipulate the search result ranking.  

Generic anchor texts

We mentioned generic anchor texts earlier in the article. These are the ones with click here, see more, etc. In most cases, it’s best to avoid these. They tell neither the reader nor the search engines anything about what is hidden behind the link. In addition, they can be perceived as slightly spammy, which can affect trust in your brand. 

How to insert anchor texts on your website

The procedure for inserting anchor texts depends on which CMS or website maker you use. Below we have made a list with a quick review of methods in different systems. 

HTML code

If you code your website yourself, the anchor text should be inserted in this format. 

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Your fantastic anchor text</a> 

If you want to try right now, you can test the HTML code in W3School’s HTML Tryit editor.  

WordPress

If you write your text in WordPress, you can mark the word or phrase in the text that you want to use as anchor text. When you do, the toolbar will appear. Here you can click on the link icon to insert the desired internal or external link.  

If you already have a link but want to edit the anchor text, you can highlight the link and instead click on the pencil icon, which gives you the option to edit the anchor text or write a completely new one. 

one.com’s Website Builder

If you create your page or online shop in the Website Builder from one.com, you can click in a text box, select edit text, write your anchor text, highlight the text and click on the link icon. When you do, a window will open where you can choose whether you want to insert an external link or an internal link to another page or section of your website. If you want to edit the anchor text, you can do so directly in the text box.  

The AI writing assistant in the Website Builder can also help you write texts in an instant, which is both practical and timesaving if you need to write a lot of text. 

Other systems and applications

The procedure in other CMS and word processing programs will typically resemble the two methods we have described above. For example, if you write a text in Microsoft Word, you can mark the anchor text and insert a link in the same way. If you later copy the text from your document and paste it directly into a text box in the Website Builder, WordPress or another CMS, the link is typically included, so you do not need to add it again. 

Conclusion – don’t neglect your anchor texts

Whether you have an online shop, a blog, or maintain a website for your association, anchor texts are very useful and effective. Good anchor texts for links that are relevant to your readers improve the user experience and increase your chances of achieving a better ranking in the search results. We hope that this article has given you some insights about how to use, write, and implement good anchor texts.