Anchor text

The anchor text is the text that you click on in the browser to go to another page. In other words, also a link. Here you see a link where the anchor text is "Danish webshop": Danish webshop.

-Why is the anchor text interesting?

The anchor text is interesting because Google reads it. It also says something about what's on that page. Both to the user and to Google. And in the past, it was given a lot of value by Google, so if you had a page where you wanted to rank for the word "pizza oven", you had to make sure you got a lot of links where the anchor text was "pizza oven". Back in 2005, it was enough to get 10-15 different links with the same anchor text and you could rank at the top in Denmark with a semi-honest site. Unfortunately, it's not that easy today.

Vary your anchor texts

If you work with link building, you will in many cases have the opportunity to influence your anchor text. Make sure to vary your anchor text, so if you get ten links, make them like this:

• Pizza ovens
• Buy your pizza oven here
• See them all here
• See our pizza ovens here
• Click here to see the range of ovens
• Order your pizza oven here
• Buy here
• Buy the pizza oven here
• More pizza ovens
• Click here to see all pizza ovens

Note that some of them do not contain the word "pizza oven". You might think it's a bit silly, but it would be too suspicious if all links contained the word pizza oven. So make sure you have some variety in your anchor texts. Also, make sure you have plurals and synonyms.

So what if an image is a link?

Good question... because an image can be clickable and then it becomes a link.

Google will look at whether your image has an alt attribute. An image is specified with html like this:

The alt attribute on this image tag tells blind, visually impaired and robots what's in the image and in the absence of anchor text, Google will use the alt attribute as anchor text if the image is a link.

This is another reason to always have an alt attribute on your images.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.