A keyword link is a clickable link, the anchor text (the clickable text of a hyperlink) of which contains keywords. The keyword links are traditionally used to improve the site’s SEO for various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.
For each link publishers can define the following list of actions:
- Add a “nofollow” tag – blocks credit from being passed, so the search engines won’t rank those pages better in results.
- Match only on the first mention.
- Open a new tab/window after clicking a link.
- Match any case (ignore case) in the keyword.
The keywords are linked by default to each of the site’s posts and can improve the internal navigation on your site and its rankings or link to the external partners to improve their rankings. The sites that follow SEO best practices try to use succinct and relevant keywords for certain topics of the site.
There are 2 basic types of anchor text that can contain keywords:
- Exact-match – if the anchor text consists of a keyword that summarizes the topic of a page it’s been linked to. For instance, the keyword link “strawberry smoothies” links to a page about strawberry smoothies.
- Partial-match – if the anchor text consists of a keyword variation on the linked-to page. For example, the keyword link “strawberry smoothie recipes” links to a page about strawberry smoothies.
