Looking Natural: 9 Ways to Add Variety to Your Anchor Text
This is the first part of a multi-part series that looks closely at developing organic-looking external links. As the search engines’ crawl intervals increase and their algorithms become more sophisticated, it is going to become more and more important to start making your link building profile appear organic.
Why should you care? Because search engines have developed a healthy disdain for aggressive marketers / SEOs and have improved their ability to recognize and penalize them.
So if you don’t want your link-building efforts to be a waste of time, you need to know how you can effectively fly under the spam-dar. Because everyone is expected to build links–that’s what makes the Internet go around. But create too many links, and suddenly you are transformed from mild-mannered website promoter into the rampaging spamanator—and all your linking efforts will suffer for it.
It is a grey area at best, but you can minimize your chances of tripping any kind of link filter by approaching link building with an understanding of what a search engine is looking for and what it is not.
NOTE: This article is not intended to suggest how you can spam search engines and fill the Internet with worthless garbage. There is a fine line between more aggressive marketing tactics and truly black-hat tricks. Be responsible and keep the Internet green.
Anchor Text
Part I focuses on anchor text. In case you weren’t sure, anchor text is the text used to create a hyperlink. For example, in the sentence below:
My mother makes the best homemade ice cream in the world.
the text “homemade ice cream”, which is the clickable link, is the anchor text.
Search engines place a great value on a link because they consider each link to be a vote for a particular webpage and website. Furthermore, they look at the text within the link—the anchor text—to determine what keyword/s are being used as an indication of the subject matter for the targeted webpage.
The more “votes” that a website and webpage receives for a certain keyword/s, the higher that webpage ranks for those particular keyword/s. This is all fairly academic.
As soon as most website owners hear that much, they start creating links, hundreds or even thousands of links that target a specific keyword and webpage. And once upon a time, that worked great. But the search engines are getting smarter.
Today, search engines are not only trying to determine which websites and webpages should rank for specific keyword/s, but they are also trying to figure out which websites are attempting to manipulate the SERPs with questionable link-building practices.
How to Avoid Spammy Links
There are a lot of methods that search engines can use to figure out if someone is aggressively building links and analyzing anchor text is just one of them. But how can search engines determine if a link is a good link or spam? Because search engines have perspective.
Search engine companies aren’t looking at single links, but hundreds of millions of links at a time, and they can see link-building patterns. Patterns that appear to be natural—such as the wave of links that were created with Michael Jackson passed—and patterns that are not natural.
The search engines can use this data to make certain assumptions about what natural versus unnatural link-building patterns should look like—or in this particular case, what natural vs. unnatural anchor text should look like. And if there is one word to describe natural link building, it’s diversity.
Anchor Text Diversity is Key
Applying the principle of natural diversity to anchor text means that every link that you build should not use the same keyword/s. If one thousand people each built one link, there would be diversity with regard to the anchor text used. And that type of diversity is what you have to achieve.
Lets assume the keyword is “used cars”. Here are some ideas for variations that you should use as the anchor text while building links:
- Keyword: “used cars”
- Keyword Singular or Plural: “used car” or “used cars”
- Keyword + Text: “low-cost used cars”, “used cars in California”, “used cars in great shape”, or “used car lot”
- Synonyms: “previously owned”, “previously leased”, or “off Lease”
- Proximity Keyword: “great used cars for sale”
- Generic Text: “click here” or “this website”
- Completely Unrelated: “cool website” or “check this out”
- Foreign Language: All the same links, but translated into a foreign language and on an appropriate website.
If you need more ideas for anchor text, search for your targeted keyword and see what people are using to create links.
How Much and When
The exact balance of which types of anchor text solutions to use and when is unknown. It is part of the secret sauce that search engines use to determine a webpage’s position within its results. But I would guess something like 60% keyword specific (1, 2 and 3), 30% keyword offset (4, 5 & 6), and 10% unrelated (7, 8 & 9) should be safe.
Keep your anchor text diversified and the links you build today will remain valuable tomorrow and for years to come.
Similar Posts:
- Keywords 101, Anchor Text and Link Building
- Natural vs. Unnatural Link Building Video
- 11 Ways to Camouflage Your SEO and Link Building Efforts
- How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties While Link Building
- Offsite SEO Comes Into Focus
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