Anchor Text Ratio in Backlinks – How to build links to improve ranks?

Backlinks are the core part of the Off Page SEO. But there are many factors which you need to look for before building the links. In the blog, let’s see some smart ways to build the backlinks and improve the ranks organically. 

Anchor text is the linking text which you use to link to your website from guest posts. Anchor text plays main role in the link building. As a business owner or SEO consultant, you should always follow some basic SEO guidelines while building backlinks and should be more disciplined with anchor text ratio.

Below are the different types of anchor text which you can use to build backlinks,

1. Branded Anchor
2. Naked URL Anchor
3. Keyword Rich Anchor
4. Long Tail Anchor

These are the most common types of anchor text which you can use to build backlinks. Let’s see in detail about the each type in detail.

1. Branded Anchor

Branded anchor as the name suggests, you will give the link with the name of the domain name or brand name. For example, if you have the domain name like www.clickdo.co.uk, then the branded anchor will be like “clickdo”. So as an SEO Consultant, if you are planning to build links to a new website, branded anchor are more safe and its recommended to use more percentage of the branded anchor links when compared to the other links. Even if you check any top ranking websites in any niche, you can easily spot that maximum percentage of the links will be with the branded anchors.

When you are using the branded anchors to build links. It’s always recommended to link to the home of the website. This will help you to boost the domain authority and improve the ranks easily.

2. Naked URL Anchor

Naked URL anchors are the normal links which you build using the URL of the landing page. That is the target landing page URL itself will act as an anchor text. Naked URL links should be given equal importance like branded anchors and should build some links to the home page and internal pages with the naked URL anchors. 

Naked URL’s links are always safe to build and it will add value to your SEO. Naked URL’s links will boost your ranks if it is done in the right way. 

For example, if you submit your business websites in the directories (citation building). The links will be either branded anchor or naked URL’s. Hence such links will help you to increase the authority of your website in Google Search.

For example, when you check the below image which shows the ahref’s data of one of the cleaning company website, you can see the maximum percentage of the anchor text used is branded anchor and the naked URL links,

This is the data of a cleaning company website and this site is already ranking in top for the main terms in the cleaning niche.

3. Keyword Rich Anchor

Keyword rich anchors are the anchor text which you link using the target keywords. For example, if you are planning to rank any specific page for keywords like “best plumber in london”, then you will be using the same keyword in the linking text and link to the target page. Usually this type of keyword rich anchors should be used very safely and not much. 

Of course you are trying to rank for a particular keyword, but you should only give very less percentage of links with keyword rich anchors. Using more keyword rich anchors will sometimes harm your website and will drop your site from top positions. Hence as a business owner or SEO consultant, you should give only very few keyword rich anchors. You can use the keyword rich anchors when linking from high authority websites.

4. Long Tail Anchor

Long tail anchor texts are one of the safest ways to build links. As the name suggests, long tail anchors are the anchor texts with more words (like sentence). Even though if you are planning to rank a particular page for main search terms. You should also link to sub pages and the blog pages in the website. When linking to the blog pages, you can use the long tail keywords and link to the respective pages. 

These are the four common type of anchor texts which you can chose to build backlinks to your website. Professional SEO services expert like Dinesh Kumar VM from ClickDo uses these smart ways to build links in an effective way. And if you look at the past SEO works done by London based digital entrepreneur and founder of ClickDo Fernando Raymond you can see that he has ranked many business websites in London with these link building tips and provides best link building services at ClickDo.