The Smart, Smarter, Smartest Way to Use Anchor Text
Even if you are relatively new as a marketer you probably already know how Google’s recent Panda update has affected the ranking of pages in the search results. Today’s reality is that Google is demanding quality. Of course Google expects your pages to be high in quality, but even more importantly they expect the pages linking back to you, your backlinks, to be high in quality.
It’s well known in the SEO world that in the early days the Big G was looking heavily at the shear number of backlinks, regardless of quality, to determine ranking. This was easily manipulated and the SERPs which were quickly clogged with non relevant results.
So today Google is still looking at the number of backlinks, but more importantly they are looking at the quality of the backlink. If your page is linked to from a quality page, and you have enough of these types of links, then you’re golden as far as Google is concerned. However if your links are from low quality sites, then Google treats them accordingly.
One very important feature of a backlink is anchor text and I’ll explain how to use this in just a bit.
But first a story about a Panda purge.
When all else fails…read the instructions!I received a call from a supposedly professional SEO firm looking for help. They had a client that had an important page showing up on page 3 when suddenly, overnight, page 30 of the results. Now I’m no SEO expert but I do know organic search so I asked them what strategy they used to rank their client.
To my surprise they were buying 400 to 450 word “SEO articles” with a keyword density of about 3%. They then submitted them to 200 article directories.
I asked them what anchor text keyword phrases they were including in the articles. Their response was every article had the exact same anchor text link.
It was pretty obvious to me what happened to their client’s ranking. For starters they were using articles that were designed to be read by spiders rather than human beings. Secondly they were sending the articles out to low value directories in an effort to build high volume backlinks.
Now either of these two practices would have tipped off Google that the articles had little real value but thirdly, they used the exact same anchor text in all 200 postings. This was the last nail in the ranking coffin.
Remember, Google is relying on webmasters (humans) to “vote” for a page by providing a link back to the page. What are the odds that 200 webmasters decided to link back to a page using exactly the same anchor text? The answer is nada. Google sees this as an attempt to manipulate the system. This is why the SEO’s client dropped from page 3 to page 30.
Smart tips about anchor text
What I’m about to share with you applies to all sites regardless of the topic. You can be promoting auto insurance online, an e-book on healthy eating or the best premium WordPress themes. It is all the same.
Use these tips to get the best return out of your anchor text.
Anchor text is a word or series of words that form the keyword phrase. The phrase is included within the text of your article and is hyperlinked back to the page you want to rank on your website.
If you create 10 articles for placement on other *quality* sites, you want to ensure that the anchor text in all ten are different in some fashion. For example if the keyword phrase you are trying to rank for is “premium WordPress themes” then you want one article to contain that exact phrase and 9 variants (I.e. best premium WordPress themes, premium WordPress theme reviews, etc.) for the other articles.
The idea is for the link to appear natural. If you submitted the exact same article to 10 websites, you would wind up with 10 identical anchor text links…and that’s not natural. By submitting 10 unique “quality” articles to 10 unique “quality” websites, each with a variation of your selected anchor text, you end up with 10 “quality” backlinks.
So now you can start developing backlinks to your patio furniture or iPhone or Genesis WordPress themes web-page knowing the basics of smart anchor text use. If you have any other ideas or have any questions please share them with all of us by commenting below.
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