For those of you who are still not clear as to what an anchor text is, let’s help you with it first.

In the internet world, any kind of clickable and visible text in a given link is known as an anchor text.

The ranking received by the page through search engines is determined by the anchor text words – and while the importance given to anchor text words by Google has decreased down the years, it’s still relevant. Generally an anchor text remains below 60 characters. Anchor texts are mostly analyzed by Web Search Engines from web pages hyperlinks. Here’s an example of anchor text. Let’s suppose you had the keyword “anchor text percentages”. Then, you can possibly use it like this – anchor text percentages.

The concept and use of anchor text has changed over time. Here are 10 things that you must know about anchor texts in today’s time are:

1. Before Google Penguin 1.0, you could use a complete match for all their back links and yet rank in the search engine, making it a child’s play to cheat. However, after its update in 2012, Penguin targeted artificial and low-quality link building and did away with them.
2. In order to avoid getting penalized, one needs to understand when and how the keyword-rich anchors should be used.
3. To create diverse and ‘natural’ anchor profile or links, one must first understand the various types of anchors involved.
4. If you refrain from using an exactly same domain match, then branded anchors happen to be the safest of them all. One can take a look at the branded anchors percentage of any big brand’s link profile and follow it to get it right.
5. The 3 most commonly used types of generic anchors are ‘click here’, ‘go here’ and ‘check this site out’ with all 3 being equally effective.
6. A great trick which works most of the time is that of using a ‘No anchor trick’. One can diversify the profile’s anchor by using not even a single word. One can simply pretend to forget having inserted an anchor in the article.
7. Image links make for a good diversification and the ‘ALT’ tag is used by Google as the image’s anchor text.
8. If you wish to build a natural anchor profile and stay ‘safe’ at all times, then it is advisable to opt for a brand and keyword anchor combination. For example, if the brand is ABC and ‘link building’ is the targeted keywords then an appropriate text would be ‘ABC link building strategies’ or ‘link building strategies by ABC’.
9. When you use LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing Anchors ‘visit here’, it simply means that you are using some variations of the main keyword. One can use options suggested by Google or use a Keyword Planner.
10. If you use keywords that are opposed to Goggles suggestions or keywords with low search volume, it’s known as Partial-Match Anchors.