What should be perfect anchor text ratios? One of the reasons why this question is so relevant is because google’s algorithm pays close attention to backlinks and more specifically to anchor texts. But what is the perfect ration? Is there such a thing? This debate is always very subjective but here is my take on it.
Types of Anchor Text Keywords
What are the different types of keywords that can be used to diversify our anchor text? Well, a good starting point is to understand there are generic keywords that point towards what we are doing – or who we are as a business – and more specific ones that aim to target our reason for existence – and therefore our target keyword/s.
It’s difficult to say, most of the times and for larger projects, what these target keywords are. But leaving this discussion aside, our goal here is to understand that there are mainly four types of anchor text keywords:
. Generic keywords – these are broad keywords like “visit us”, “download now”, “check here”
. Brand – these are directly related to our brand “brand.com”, “brand”
. Core keyword – this is the core keyword that we aim to target through exact match
. Semantic variation of core keywords – these are variations that aim to bring a less target tone to our strategy.
Google After Penguin Revisions
An interesting study was developed by Ahrefs, that aimed to address this important topic of anchor-text ratios. They concluded, after analysing a quite significant amount of websites and their rankings, that websites that are currently ranking in position 1 in google use 24% of semantic variation of their keyword as anchor text, and 13% of exact match keyword.
What are then, for me, the relevant guiding principles when it comes to optimising keyword anchor text. I fully respect the authority of Ahrefs study but I feel we can go a bit further. I would say that if we have 10 links pointing back to our website, they should try to respect, as much as possible, the following ratio:
4/40% semantic variation of core keyword
2/20% exact match keyword
2/20% brand keyword
2/20% generic keyword
If you are doing this at the moment then you are probably on the right track. Anchor text is an important factor when we are trying to rank websites in google. We should therefore pay close attention to what we are doing.
