Strategy 1: Vary the hell out of your anchor text links to your sites

Strategy 1: Vary the hell out of your anchor text links to your sites

This should be quite obvious to you by now, but if you are slamming links with the same anchor text over and over to your site, you are going to end up on the wrong site of the penguin updates. SEO’s often are faced with choosing a keyword they want to rank for or a keyword they don’t want to rank for when selecting the anchor text for a link. It goes without saying that most choose the later. You should really now be ensuring MOST of your anchor text is for keywords you are not directly trying to rank for.

I’ve given a basic breakdown. This is not necessary scientific or anything, but rather a safer rule of thumb to follow when building anchor text. The basic idea is to keep your exact keyword anchors (especially the main keywords you want to rank) well under 50% of the anchor links you get. I’d say between 10-20 percent of the links should have your exact anchor text. The other 20-50 percent of the time, you vary the exact keyword with other words included, as part of a sentance, or just use semantically related keywords instead part of the time). The other 30% – 40% of the links should straight out just be your domain name exactly with or without http:// (vary it) or without the domain extension and some spaces between each word. The rest of the time, use CLICK HERE, HERE, WEBSITE or some bunk word you absolutely don’t want to rank for.

The whole goal here is to simulate natural link anchor text patters. MOST real natural links won’t have your exact anchor text. This is where having an exact keyword domain comes in really handy for natural link building — many of the links (which are usually your domain name or some variation of the keyword in the domain) will contain the exact anchors you want to rank for. More general sites that don’t have the keyword in the domain will find it much harder to rank for that term.

THE 60%

(40%)

yourdomainname.com

yourdomainname

your domain name

http://yourdomainname.com

(30%)

CLICK HERE

HERE

website

THE 40%

(50%)

(Title of Website)

(related keywords to the main keyword, i.e. “pet clothing” instead of “dog clothing” or “short term loans” instead of “payday loans”)

(50%)

(main keyword you want to rank for)

(main keyword + extra stuff/sentence)

(h2 title of a page on your site)