Don’t Forget to Vary Your Anchor Text!

This week I’ve been talking about some link building strategies, especially directory submissions. So today I just wanted to take a minute and do another quick reminder about building links. This reminder is very simple:

Vary your anchor text!

Here’s the thing. You may have one phrase that is your ultimate, absolute best keyword phrase that you’re focused on in your overall strategy for building links. Well…. the problem is that if you only ever build links with one phrase (one anchor), then in the long run you’re going to cause yourself some problems. Yes, you’ll get good rankings for a while but eventually the search engines may catch on to what you’re doing and drop your ranking considerably.

So how do we avoid this problem? Vary the anchor text! In other words, use other keyword phrases as well. In fact, for variety’s sake its not a bad idea to use phrases like ‘click here’ and your actual website name as the anchor. The focus will always be the keyword phrases, but doing things like this from time to time help to increase the variety of your anchors. Make sure you’re doing this in your link building activities!

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Related Posts

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A Small Reminder on Directory Submissions
Researching Good Keyword Phrases
How to Use Directory Submissions Effectively



9 Comments

KerssonAugust 7th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

It is a very informative post. Thanks. I will take into account your suggestions about anchor text.

[Reply]

DanAugust 7th, 2007 at 2:19 pm

Kersson,
I’m glad the post was helpful!

[Reply]

AaronAugust 10th, 2007 at 6:34 am

Thanks for the tip! I’ve added a tag to your blog on del.icio.us to show my gratitude… hope that helps. Keep up the great work, I’ll be back for sure!

[Reply]

DanAugust 10th, 2007 at 10:48 am

Hey Aaron,
I’m glad you found the tip helpful, and thanks for the link!

[Reply]

localcitymortgageAugust 16th, 2007 at 3:15 pm

Great tip, I was not aware of that. Thanks

[Reply]

SEO in Quad CitiesAugust 24th, 2007 at 9:46 am

Well put. A variety of anchor text of your incoming links is the key for long term ranking.

[Reply]

Cliff PoseyJune 15th, 2008 at 1:39 pm

Thanks for explaining this. I have a blog on wordpress.com but until now did not understand about wordpress.org.

[Reply]

KishorJanuary 30th, 2009 at 4:41 am

Great idea! I think along with varying anchor text we should vary links also. I would suggest, try to take backlinks for various pages of your website. By doing this you can get benefit by two ways, your link building will look more natural and other pages of website will also get value in search engines

[Reply]

used forkliftsNovember 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 am

great post. it’s always a good idea to use related terms to the primary keyword you are targeting so that it appears more natural and potentially helps you rank on multiple terms.

[Reply]

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