How To Improve Your Anchor Link Texts

So, what do you do if Yoast SEO warns you that you have competing links in your text? Follow the tips below to improve your link texts!

1. Create a natural flow

Writing, in general, should have a natural flow. The same is true for link texts. When adding links, make sure they fit well with the rest of the text. Look at it like this. If you are struggling to squeeze in a link in a sentence, the link probably doesn’t belong there. It’s better to put it somewhere else, and avoid making your texts unnatural and difficult to read. So, while links are important for SEO, you should make sure that they don’t get in the way of the message you want to convey.

2. Match the link text with the content you’re linking to

A good practice for writing link texts is matching the text of the link with the content of the page you are linking to. When a reader sees the linked text, they should immediately know what to expect if they click on it. Take a look at the text in the image below.

The links in this example blend in seamlessly with the rest of the text. Moreover, you know precisely what to expect if you click on a link. For example, the link text “content analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin” clearly leads to a post explaining the Yoast SEO content analysis features. How about the link text “meta description.” The sentence the link belongs to is about optimizing your text. So, you would expect that the link leads to a post about optimizing meta descriptions. And that’s what it does.

3. Don’t trick your readers

In the example above, the link texts are used responsibly. That is very important. You should not try to trick your readers with links. For instance, if your link text says “potato chips,” it would be bad practice to have that link take the reader to a car dealership page.

4. Make clear the link text is clickable

Lastly, make it evident to the reader that the link text is clickable. You can do that by using a different color for the link, underline it, or both.

5. Bonus tip: put your entire keyphrase in quotes

Let’s say you are writing an article with the long-tail focus keyphrase ‘learning how to knit.’ If you use any of those words from the focus keyphrase in a link text, you may get feedback from Yoast SEO advising you to change it. To avoid getting a red bullet for the focus keyphrase in link check, you can put the entire keyphrase in quotes, so the analysis only matches the entire phrase, instead of the individual words.