13 Tips for Choosing the Best Anchor Text

What Is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the highlighted section of writing that contains a hyperlink. You’ll have seen them scattered through almost every piece of text that you’ve read online. They serve a few purposes:

• Demonstrating content relevance - signalling to search engines that your facts are backed up and presented in context.
• Authority - linking to or from respected sources transfers a little of their authority.
• Helping your readers dig deeper- you may not have space to cover every aspect of a topic, so a link can provide further reading.

In technical terms, an anchor text is content marked by an <a> HTML element, ideally one phrased with an href attribute. They look something like this: <a href=”www.upseo.com”>Buy Backlinks</a>. The target link is contained in the first set of brackets, and the anchor text in this example has been marked in bold.

The best results come from ensuring that your links are anchored on relevant text, adding value for both your readers, the search engines, and the AIs. There are a few different ways to place them effectively, and you want to aim for a mixture of each to create a diverse profile of anchors and avoid coming across as overoptimized.

1. Minimize Using Exact Match Anchor Text

An exact match anchor text is exactly what it sounds like: an anchor placed exactly on a keyword. In our case, that might be “Buy backlinks” or even just the word “backlinks”.

The temptation is always to try to place your links on a keyword that your users are likely to be searching for, and once upon a time, this was a good strategy. Back in the early days of SEO, this sent a very clear signal to the search engines that this content was relevant. It was, however, very easy to manipulate.

Search engines quickly realised that this was being gamed and reduced the weighting they gave these links. Eventually, they even started penalizing sites that were overreliant on exact matches, reducing their rankings. Since Google’s 2012 Penguin update, overoptimized sites have been seeing more and more penalties and ranking lower.

In fact, 38% of respondents to this state of SEO survey from 2019 reported that they found exact match anchor text to be less effective than it once was.

Now, this shouldn’t be taken to mean “avoid exact matches entirely”- sometimes they are absolutely the best place for an anchor. The trick is not to overuse them.

This case study shows that the best results do include exact match anchor text, but it only makes up a small percentage (1-2%) of their total backlinks. The findings suggest that this low number is still helpful, but as it starts to increase, penalties start to creep into the results.

2. How Often To Use Partial Match Anchor Text

A “partial match” or “phrase match” anchor text contains the target keyword, but also contains other text. Think “how to safely buy backlinks” or “guide to buying SEO backlinks”.

Each of our examples includes the keyword “buy backlinks” and provides additional detail and context. This provides more detail to the search engine, allowing the searcher’s intent to be taken into account in ranking results. It also makes things clearer for the reader.

The same case study (linked above) and many others show that these are much safer than direct match anchors. The top-ranking results have around 30% of their anchor texts containing partial matches. (You’ll notice that that was an example of a partial match).

This works because a partial match balances natural usage and relevance. It doesn’t read like you’re trying to game the system (which will bring penalties from search engines), but it does provide extra context for readers and add authority to your content- all things that the search engines want to be able to offer their users.

Partial matches are particularly useful for AI results as they place the link and your content in a greater context. That being said, too many partial matches may be flagged as overoptimization, so it’s important to remember to think about linked semantics and use those too.

3. When to Use Branded Anchor Text

Branded anchor text is simply using a brand name as the link text. For us, that would mean presenting our link under the word UpSeo or UpSeo.com.

These anchor texts are great for building brand recognition and trustworthiness, both for the reader and the search engines. They read naturally, and you’d expect to see them scattered through a text, offering a direct line to an authoritative source or product that you’re talking about. This makes them safe in terms of avoiding SEO penalties from spammy, keyword-stuffed content (with some caveats that we’ll cover in a moment).

They also signal to the search engine crawlers that people are talking about your site. This builds prominence, marking your site out as relevant in your niche and therefore a good result to offer.

They’re ideal for diluting exact match keywords in your content and can be used to direct people to your homepage.

That being said, recent updates to search engine algorithms seem to point towards too many perfectly formed incoming branded anchors being penalized. The solution: ensure that you’re putting effort into making the surrounding text relevant and the linking organic.

This might mean linking to a specific service or product, rather than your homepage. For example, let’s say a bus company wants to highlight its services running to a local attraction. Google is unlikely to think that a local bus company is an expert in tourist attractions, so a simple branded link might be penalized as being irrelevant and spammy. A better solution might be to use a partial match, including the brand name, and linking directly to the service in question.

Using your brand name as anchor text is generally best used when the brand is naturally mentioned in the text. For example, “working with experts in SEO, like UpSEO, means that you can be sure of the results you want”.

4. When to Use Naked URLS

A naked URL is exactly what it sounds like: a link that uses the web address as the anchor with no additional text. In our case, that would look like: www.upseo.com/buybacklinks.

While this might look a little jarring in natural text, it’s ideal for building transparency and a powerful tool for building trust with your audience. There’s nothing hidden- the reader can see exactly what the link is, encouraging them to click it (which is great for the engagement metrics search engines love). They can also give the impression of a piece of copy being more “academic” to readers.

These are best used in a few specific places, rather than scattered about in the body of your content:

• Social Media and Forum Posts
• Social media comments
• When citing references or sources

From a purely SEO perspective, naked links still count as backlinks, with no obvious penalties applied for using them. There’s no particular number that you should aim for in your copy, but you should aim for natural placement and usage.

Naked anchor text is generally best used if you’re referencing something in the body as a footnote, posting on social media or a forum, or particularly looking to build brand awareness through phrasing like “If you’re looking for help with your SEO strategy, you should contact us at www.upseo.com“.

5. When to Use Generic Anchor Texts

Generic anchor texts are hyperlinks that are placed on words like “click here”, “learn more” or “see details”. They’re neutral phrases that don’t contain the keyword, but the content of the link is generally pretty obvious to human readers from the context.

From a human perspective, they avoid cluttering up your concise copy with unnecessary words, keeping your page design neat. For the search engines, they help to dilute your backlink profile, reducing the risk of being penalized for having too many direct or partial match anchor texts and seeming overoptimized.

These anchors are generally best used for “extra” information. Use them to link to a blog explaining a topic or a landing page where your visitors can take an action.

6. When to Use Longtail Anchor Text

A longtail anchor text is a descriptive text, containing the keyword and 4 or more words that place it in context. For us, that might read something like “our complete guide on how to safely buy seo backlinks” or “how to start buying backlinks for your website”.

Longtail anchors help to reinforce and contextualize the semantic relevance of your link, allowing Google to make sense of it in terms of topic. In our examples, the search engine would know that these links lead to guides, so a user looking for “backlining guides” might be interested in the content.

They also read more naturally, avoiding penalties for sending overoptimization signals, allowing you to include more links without damaging your backlink profile.

There are two reasons to opt for a longtail anchor in your texts. Firstly, they reduce the number of exact matches, helping to avoid overoptimization. Secondly, they allow you to create deeper semantic links, placing the anchor in more context. This second point is particularly important for AI search results, where sentence-level context plays a much bigger role.

7. Related Keywords in Anchor Text

Not all keywords that you include in your anchor texts need to be direct matches. Search engines group keywords into broader topics. These are known as latent semantic indexed (LSI), or simply, semantic keywords.

Examples of these for UpSeo might include things like:

• Trusted link acquisitions
• Link building campaigns
• SEO authority-building services

None of these contains our main keyword “backlinks”, but Google is able to make the semantic link and rank our content accordingly because they all signal the same topic and intent.
These are important to include as they allow you to fit more links into more natural-sounding texts without fear of triggering overoptimization penalties and damaging your ranking.

Using LSI keywords might also help you bring in more organic traffic, as search engine users will use a variety of phrasings in their queries but have the same intent.

AI results place a heavy emphasis on LSIs as they generally read more like natural language, so if you’re aiming to appear prominently, it’s worth making heavy usage of semantically linked anchor text.

8. How to Choose an Anchor For Internal Links

Internal links, as the name suggests, lead from one part of a site to another. Using our site as an example again, we might link to our Buy Backlinks page with text like “fill out the form on our Buy Backlinks page”.

In this example, you can see what a good internal link placement looks like. The link and surrounding text are natural, and it contains our target keyword (“buy backlinks”) while being a partial match. No one is left in any doubt about which page clicking that link will bring them to.

Alternatively, we could have linked the whole sentence in that example, providing us with a longtail anchor to avoid penalties for overoptimization, should we already have used too many exact matches.

While these links are less important in terms of SEO than backlinks from external sites, they do play more of a role than many people think. Internal linking helps to boost rankings, improve user experiences and can help draw in more organic traffic.

Internal links allow the search engine crawlers to understand your site’s structure better and transfer some authority between the two pages. This transfer does have to be contextual- there needs to be a natural semantic link between the text and the target page.

When choosing anchors, give a little thought to how semantically linked the target page is to your text. If they’re the same, say “buying backlinks” linking to a page about buying backlinks, then a short anchor is ideal. If there’s more semantic distance, you should choose a longer anchor text to create this link naturally.

When picking your internal link anchor text, avoid using branded anchors. These don’t make it clear what the reader is clicking on in this context, and they already know who you are. This could well send overoptimization signals to the search engines without any benefits for your readers.

9. External Linking With Quality Sources

As well as linking to your own content that you want to rank, it’s important to ensure that you’re also linking to quality external sources and placing the anchors for the best effect.

An external anchor should clearly describe the content of the target while reading naturally. For example, we could say something like: “a recent study on reciprocal links from Ahrefs said…”. From this anchor, we know the main thrust of the linked article, and we’ve added a longtail branded anchor too.

This particular link is a very authoritative source. Ahrefs runs dozens of studies on digital marketing techniques and earns dozens of backlinks from other reputable sources. The search engines read this as them being experts on the subject, marking them out as an authoritative source and therefore a quality link for us to use. Through linking to a relevant source and carefully considering how we phrase the anchor text, we can “borrow” some of this authority for our own content, signalling that we’ve done our research.

External links are important for both traditional SERPs and AI results, proving that your content is based on authoritative sources.

10. When to Use Call-To-Action Anchor Text

Calls to action are a valuable marketing technique that you should be using in your copy. In fact, using CTAs in your text can boost conversions by 120%. These include things like “subscribe for more”, “schedule a call today” or even “buy now”- anything that prompts an immediate action from your readers.

They also make a fantastic place to put an internal link, despite lacking the context we spoke about above.

While these don’t have a pronounced effect on how you appear in SERPs, they do improve user experience. Unsurprisingly, the best use of this internal link anchor style is on landing pages or tool/resource pages. Here, they can prompt readers to take the next step most effectively.

11. Which Anchors to use for Local SEO?

When picking your anchors for maximum effect for local SEO, you want to use brand and location (both general and specific) anchors, as well as descriptions of your services. You should aim to have as much diversity in your anchor text as possible, while keeping to these general themes.

If, for example, you sell pizza in Edinburgh, you might want to embed links in text such as “Morningside, Edinburgh’s best pepperoni pizza” or “Authentic Italian pizza in the Scottish capital”.

These longtail anchors both contain the product and location (both city and neighborhood), read naturally and contain the information that searchers are looking for.

Diversity, as always, is key here. Simply repeating your brand and city name will be read as spam and penalized appropriately by the search engines. The aim should always be for text to read naturally.

12. Make Surrouding Text Relevant

As well as the words we choose to embed our hyperlink into, the words around it also play an important role in how search engines rank our content. While the anchor itself is the most vital feature, the relevance of the surrounding text is also worth thinking about when writing your content.

The surrounding text puts your link into context. This allows the search engines to decide how relevant the link might be to their users. As search gets more sophisticated and AI results become more important for users, the context increases in importance too.

If the text around the link is directly relevant to the content, this is deemed to increase credibility, both for the search engines and readers alike. Having relevant, natural text around the link also helps to avoid penalties being applied, as it does not read like spam.

This is particularly vital when appearing in AI results is your main aim (though it shouldn’t be forgotten about for traditional SEO either). In these results, a huge emphasis is placed on the natural use of language, so the text surrounding your anchor and how clear the reference is is even more important.

13. Anchors For AI Results

If you’re aiming for your content to appear more prominently in AI answers- and with around 2 billion searchers making use of Google’s summaries in 2025, you should- the context around the link plays an even greater role.

While traditional search engines like Google look mainly for keyword relevance (including semantically linked phrases), the context of the link and how diverse your anchor profile is, AI has a different emphasis.

As AI processes language more naturally, you should focus on the sentence and paragraph level context. It also takes much more account of semantic and entity relationships and how clearly linked the reference is to your text.

This means that your anchor text must be descriptive, natural and full of context, focusing on actually answering the question rather than stuffing keywords. Think about how a question might be asked if you were having a conversation with a person- the position of the link is less important than the context that it’s in.

With algorithms becoming ever more sophisticated, AI is becoming better at noticing things like exact matches and penalizing them. However, the bots do understand semantic links, so rather than using “link building” as your anchor text, something like “effective ways of building links” might show better results.

Conclusion: Link often, Link Naturally, Link Differently

How you present links in your content can have a surprisingly large impact on how you’re ranked in search engine results pages.

The aim is always to avoid appearing spammy, like you’re trying to game the system, as this will be counterproductive. The days of link farms are well and truly in the past, and good riddance to them.

Instead, use links to add context and authority to your texts, write naturally and have as diverse a backlink profile, using as many types of anchor text in your content as possible.