Link Anchor Text - Best Practice?

[Mark_Ch]

Moz - Open Site Explorer using the following setup:

Tab: Inbound Links
Show: "all"
from: "Only Internal"

I have run a number of random tests and have noticed the following results in the link anchor text.

[No Anchor Text]
company name
website url
Home
etc.

What is the best practice and naming convention to be used?

Regards Mark

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Mark,

Is the link part of a navigation menu? If so I don't see any problem with leaving it as 'Home'. If you're linking within the body of a page (for instance in a blogpost), something like 'visit the homepage' or just a branded term should be fine.

[Mark_Ch]

Thank you for your quick and detailed response.
Apologies, I think I have not explained my question well...

See link: http://imgur.com/iDy0E1Z

As you can see, every url has the same link anchor text named 'Home'.

My question is:
What is the best naming convention for this link anchor text. Should i simply leave it blank, call it 'Home', my website url, etc.

Regards Mark

[SajeetNair]

Hi Mark,

When it comes to link building (internal or external) there are few thumb rules -

• The link should look natural
• The link should point to a useful resource

Lets take the example of internal links -

If say i own a digital marketing agency, and i want the home page to rank for the keyword "digital marketing". Old school SEO would suggest that I use "digital marketing" as one of the anchor texts and create links from inner pages to the home page. Trust me two years ago that tactic worked. But now lets evaluate from a users perspective, a user is say reading a blog that talks about Facebook as a marketing tool and sees the anchor text "digital marketing".With the reading flow, the user would probably expect a post that gives more insight into digital marketing but alas he is taken to the home page. You getting the drift? Same logic is used by search engines, on the website the links should be used to indicate hierarchy and more importantly help the users. Occasional use of keywords in the anchor text is fine.

Now lets look at external links -

With the advent of Penguin update that focuses on over optimization (both on page and off page), having keyword rich anchor texts (example - car loans) to point to your website from third party websites is not at all recommended. Also having links from general directories, general blogs etc is not considered a good practice. In short no shady link building techniques work. An ideal link profile will consist of anchor texts that are either brand terms or title of the post or other natural identifiers such as Click here. If you think about it, say you read an article that was very useful and wanted to link to it, would you use a keyword as anchor text or brand name as anchor text? Obviously you will chose the latter. So in order to have natural looking link profile, do not focus on keyword rich anchor text, focus on high quality relevant sites, focus on high quality content and more importantly focus on the target audience.

• Sajeet

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Mark,

With internal linking, your anchor text needs to be as descriptive as possible. Look at the page it leads to - does the anchor text accurately describe that? However, do not be spammy with it. Keep it clean and engaging and you will find people will click on it.

-Andy