What is the best practice for anchor text?

[skyvia]

I have read that it is better to use words that are closely related to your theme when creating anchor text for back links so as not to look too spammy by search engines.

I would like to know whether this is true and if it is true, if these other words can only be other keywords that you might be targeting on the same page or LSI words that have been deemed relevant to your theme by search engines.

thanks

[adelainewatson]

Getting incoming links to your website from other sites is very important for your ranking in search engines, but it has a huge difference what the anchor text is.

For instance, when I leave a comment on a blog or as a sig file in a forum I put a good keyword “marketing tips” after my name.

When people search for “marketing tips” in the search engines, there is a bigger possibility that my blog will show up in the results rather than if I only used my name as anchor text.

[kaiserthesage]

You can search for other "support keywords" for your main keyword that have substantial monthly search count to be used as variations for your anchor texts when building links. and yes, it can affect/improve your main keyword's rankings. Example:

SEO Tools <- your main keyword

Support keywords:
Free SEO Tools
Cheap SEO Tools
Buy SEO Tools
Best SEO Tools
Best Free SEO Tools
Best Cheap SEO Tools
Advanced SEO Tools
SEO Tool

Which all can direct to one page. You may also target these long-tails through blog posts. I've written an article about this strategy before, you can check it out here:
Anchor Text Link Strategy

[ScrapeBoss]

From my own experience, the best way for creating anchor texts is to make them related to your site. Anchor texts are off-page SEO and they are considered with on-page SEO in search engine results. Optimize each keyword for specific pages of your website. Many anchor texts pointing back to your site with a particular keyword related to the content of your web page will increase your search ranking.

[maryparker]

Start with your own on-site anchor text first. By that I mean the anchor text YOU use to link to your own pages from your own pages. This is especially true for sites that are already ranking fairly well.

[Jason Carter]

Almost all the links I build I use the exact keyword that I am going for as the anchor text. What I find is some of the sites I put links on don't give any anchor text and will just let your website address be the link.

So the only variation I have in anchor text is usually just from the sites that will not let me use anchor text.

Later,
Jason

[Abhinandangarg]

anchor text should be relevant and contain targeted keywords. but always remember keywords variational is also important

[sappacis13]

There are times if I forgot the code on how to insert an html link or a hyper text link, all I have to do is to type that in on the google.

There are many best practices for anchor text link.

Im sure you will find it.

[dadamson]

Yes, keep them related to your site and as kaiserthesage mentions, support keywords is a great way to mix it up.

Even mixing your main keyword up from "SEO Tools" to "Search Engine Optimization Tools", "Web Promotion Devices", etc is a great technique.

I normally use the ratio 80/20 when building links, 80% are my exact kws, 20% are variations. I also mix up the capitalization between the whole lot. - This seems to work great for me.

If you think about it, building thousands of links via anchor text "SEO Tools" is not natural. It is obvious that you are the one building all the links to your site. Although this is the case, Google wants to see more natural results so variations and text that is completely different is actually great, but just focus the majority around your target keyword(s).