How to us anchor text in your backlink building

While it’s important to invest in SEO and properly optimize a website and build legitimate inbound links, the Google Penguin update served as a not so subtle reminder that there is a difference between optimizing your website and web content and “over-optimizing” it. One recommendation that SEOs have long been making is to include keyword anchor text links within content. The search engines crawl links to determine website relevancy, and what better way to tell the search engine spiders what a page is about than to use a keyword as anchor text?

In recent months, website owners that over-used this tactic have been penalized. Does that mean that you should no longer include keyword anchor text links within your content? No, the strategy doesn’t need to be ditched completely. It’s just important to take a look at the anchor text that you’ve been using and going forward, diversify it.

The first step to avoid a penalty is to take a look at what you’ve been doing so far. Using SEO software, run an anchor text report that will show you all of the anchor text that you’ve been using that links to all of the pages of your website. How many are there? If you notice that there are only a few or that one accounts for more than 60% of anchor text inbound links, that could cause problems.

With this information, you can go back to old content and vary the anchor text links. A good way to do this is to expand beyond the keyword in the link. For example, if you were using “red dress shoes” as keyword anchor text link, expand it to the following variations:

Find red dress shirt
Where do I find a Red dress shirt
Buy red shirt dress shirt online
[insert brand name] red dress shirt
Red dress shirts for sale
New red dress shirt
Etc.

This helps to keep things natural, and improves content from a usability perspective as well. If you wrote a blog post and linked to “red dress shoes” 3 times, wouldn’t that seem a little bit spammy and obvious?

Another suggestion among SEO circles is to bring back the “click here” and “read more” anchor text links assuming that the search engine spiders will notice the words surrounding the link to establish relevance. It certainly can’t hurt to use this strategy sporadically.

Keyword anchor text linking still has its place in SEO, it’s just important to use many variations of the keyword and not go overboard. If a piece of content is full of blue links, it’s doubtful that they are all necessary. Scale back and focus on the quality of the link instead of the quantity.

Doug Thaler is an online marketing guru and an expert in customer acquisition and business development.  Contact Doug at 888.410.9690.

ActiveDevelopment.com