How long should anchor text be? Best practice for anchor text length?
-
site: http://www.cerritosnissan.com/index.htm
On the bottom of this homepage there is an seo content area, basically right under where it says "orange county nissan" welcomes you. The internal links in this area are very long and I'm wondering why they would do this - is there any benefit to making anchor text longer? The longer the anchor text, the less each part of that anchor text passes link juice.
For example, for a page about their reviews, the anchor text of the link is "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership.". If I would have done this the anchor text would be "Cerritos Nissan Reviews" or just plain "reviews" as the anchor text.
-
The two thoughts that come to my mind when thinking of anchor text are:
-
what word or phrase would encourage readers to click
-
what word or phrase would work best for search engines? What is a user likely to type into google?
You offered the phrase: "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership.
I would suggest something along the lines of: Read feedback from Cerritos Nissan customers regarding their experience at this great Orange County Nissan dealer.
"Feedback from Ceritos Nissan customers" would be a link to your our-experience.htm page. "Orange County Nissan dealer" would be a link to your home page.
-
-
In reality, there is not specific "right" length of anchor text. Search engines fully expect everything from single word to several word anchors, a mix of keyword specific, brand, and generic random text.
In an ideal world, it should come down to "what makes the most sense here from a user perspective". In the case of the example you point out, it looks odd, but not from a spammy perspective - you don't get seo value (perceived or otherwise) from including "click here to view" in the link.
Instead, it is less than ideal from a user experience perspective. It's actually a failed marketing attempt at motivating people to click on the links.
-
Yes, I would definitely agree... looks rather spammy. Much of the anchor text is a throw away on some of the links: "Click here to view the..."; "Feel free to browse the..."; "Click here to access..."; etc. No value there!
-
Do you agree with me that their anchor text is too long?
-
The "See what Cerritos Nissan customers...." anchor text is pretty lengthy. If I understand correctly, the 6 - 8 word max or less than 55-60 character rule of thumb should apply to the anchor text. Like most other things related, keeping it in check seems to make the most sense. If the anchor text is more descriptive this will give the link more weight.
On the shorter side of things though... How many times have we seen "click here" to download. Is the link value "click here"... or rather is it about the page or item we're clicking to get to?
-John
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best practice to solve this Unique duplicate page content issue?
I just got Seomoz Pro (it's awesome!), and when I did a campaign for my website I discovered that I have a big issue with duplicate page content (as well as titles). The Crawl Diagnostics Summary told me I have 196 Crawl Errors Found (I had a total of 362 pages crawled on my site), and as much as 160 of these was duplicate page content. Which to me sounds like a big problem, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm very new to SEO). So our website is an ecommerce that sells greeting cards. The unique part about our platform is that we offer the customer to make a customization of the cards.
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett
Let me walk you through each step a customer takes so you fully understand: They find a card they like and visit the product page of that card (just like on any ecommerce store.) They then decide they want to buy it. There is no "Add to cart" button, they will instead click on a "customize the card" button. 3) This takes them to a step by step process of customizing the card. They change the name on the front of the greeting card so it says for example: "Happy Birthday Katy!". And then adds a personal text on the inside of the card. They then add an delivery address and when it should be delivered. After that they proceed to checkout and it's all done. This is my website (it's in Swedish): loveday.se - it will take you to a product page so that you can click the green button and see what I mean with the customization pages. Hopefully it helps even though it's in Swedish. My issue starts at the customization part of the site (the bolded step above), as I can see the permalinks in the diagnostics I got.
This step-by-step process looks exactly the same with every card in the store. Same call-to-action headline, same descriptive text etc. The only difference is a JPEG-file with the unique greeting card design. So, what is your take on this? Let me know if I was unclear about something. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.0 -
How much SEO value does a fashion site get from bolting text onto the bottom of home page? Does the value compensate for cluttering up a page focused on an iconic image?
Getting ready to launch a completely redesigned site for a fashion designer. Since it is a fashion site, visitors do not need text to describe what the site is about., We are weighing three options: 1) clean design with no text (just images and navigational links), 2) bolting on a couple of sentences of text at the bottom of the page to signal keyword terms to the search engines, 3) following the lead of the top ranking site in the category and adding lots of text to the bottom of the page. Do the SEO benefits justify cluttering up the design by bolting text onto the bottom of the home page, and if so, how many characters of text seem to be the minimum to be effective?
On-Page Optimization | | RandyP0 -
Text within a Div Crawlable?
Hi, I have a paragraph of text contained within a Div container ( ).. Is this readable by a search engine spider. Or is it better to enclose it within ? Thanks for any feedback.
On-Page Optimization | | IBMEMM0 -
How long can rich snippets be?
How long (how many words) can a description tag of a rich snippets code?
On-Page Optimization | | seoflorida0 -
Any opinions about the common anchor text?
Hey guys so I was reviewing my website to make sure there are no exact anchor texts repeated throughout the site. But I was wondering what are your thoughts about the common (and useless) anchor text like "read more", "learn more", "see more information", "contact us", and things of that nature. These are usually repeated across the majority of sites out there, how does Google differentiate between over optimized anchor text and these common anchor texts?
On-Page Optimization | | nrv0 -
Long meta description
Hello, I apologize in advance because the question must have already been posted, but 90% of my searches in "Search for a Question" drive me to a "no questions found" (i would be nice to improve this aspect of the Pro Q&A Forum 😉 So, a friend of mine asked to me what he should put for the meta description of automatically generated pages for his project. He has no tool to set a customized meta description for every page (and does not want to find one !) but he asked me the following : what is the less worse between : put the first words of the content (150 characters) put nothing and let google find what will be the better parts of the content for the user request put the whole content (600 characters) in order to avoid having just the begining of the content, which is not always useful in that case Did anyone try these options, what would be the less unproductive ? Thanks Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0 -
What is the best way to handle e-commerce Product title names?
Hello, I'm having a little bit of a conundrum, and I'm hoping someone will be able to help! We have an ecommerce site, and were trying to figure out what is the most SEO friendly way to handle product titles. With our ecommerce software, it currently sets the Product title as the H1 tag (which could be changed if needed). In addition, the product title is what is used as anchor text for any built in links that the ecommerce software builds from the category pages, etc (just like any other ecommerce site). Here's where I'm stuck. I'm trying to determine if it makes sense to use the specific keyword we are aiming for as the product title, or to put variations of the title that would be more descriptive. Here is an example: We have a Wizard of Oz Dorothy Deluxe Girls Shoes. According to all accounts, the best keyword to attack for this would be "dorothy shoes". However, it loses the more accurate description of "Wizard of Oz Dorothy Deluxe Girl Shoes". But, my thinking is that the H1 tag and anchor text would make more sense to use the term "Dorothy Shoes". The title tag could go something like this: "Wizard of Oz Dorothy Deluxe Girls Shoes | Dorothy Shoes" In a situation like this, what do you think would be the "best" way to handle the title tag, product name, H1 tag, and anchor text? I'm sure there will be many different opinions, so I would like to hear what you think is best - and why.
On-Page Optimization | | clickshipcommerce0 -
Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?
We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name. So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link? We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy. It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0