There’s way more to anchor text and SEO than turning words into clickable links. You need to know when to make use of a certain anchor type, the perfect anchor text ratios for a number of types of content, when it’s “okay” to use exact-match anchors, and when it’s not, plus much, much more.
The very early days of SEO were like the Wild, Wild West. Blackhat SEO experts were doing everything that is imaginable in order to rank their websites on Google. That included keyword stuffing and creating spammy backlinks on a very regular basis.
And for a time, it totally worked.
However, these days those older SEO hacks are long gone. Now we’re dealing with a much more sophisticated algorithm which pushes innocent-sounding updates such as Hummingbird as well as Panda. However, as innocent as they sound, they can create some real problems for your ongoing SEO efforts.
One of those updates that affected SEO forever is known as Penguin and it specifically dealt with how Google makes use of backlinks in order to evaluate page rank. And with Penguin now as part of the core Google algorithm, the anchor text you which you use in your backlinks and internal links is more important than ever.
What Is Anchor Text Ratio SEO?
Anchor text ratio is the allocation of all of the various types of anchor texts in your backlink profile.
For instance, an organic homepage backlink profile will almost certainly have the most part (read 75% or more) of their backlinks that have the brand name or URL as the anchor text. Although a blog post could have a far better mix of keyword to non-keyword anchors in the backlinks which point to it.
In the Google age, where peculiar backlink profiles could decimate your SEO efforts, a much larger emphasis has been placed on achieving the proper anchor text ratio on your backlinks. If you get your ratios right, you will have a much better chance of ranking in the top five search results of Google.
