The role of anchor text in your back-linking strategy is something you can’t afford to overlook. It plays an integral part in how search engines rank your website. When embarking on a linking campaign, it’s essential that the anchor text used by external websites accurately reflects the keywords and phrases relevant to your content.

Often, websites linking to yours may simply use your company’s name as the anchor text. While this might serve to enhance brand recognition, it doesn’t really offer a descriptive overview of your company’s offerings or services. In fact, most companies already appear prominently in search results for queries involving their brand names.

Let’s use the hypothetical example of “Acme Plumbing Supplies” to illustrate the point:

Commonly, people might link to your site using just the name “Acme”. While this isn’t necessarily bad, it doesn’t give searchers or search engines any additional context about what the company does. By incorporating industry-specific terms into the anchor text like “plumbing” or “plumbing supplies”—for example, “Acme Plumbing” or “Acme Plumbing Supplies”—you can potentially attract a broader audience who may not have otherwise discovered your website.

By giving careful thought to the anchor text in your external links, you can optimise for keywords that are essential for your business, thereby improving your visibility in search engine results.