Offsite SEO should play an important role in your overall SEO strategy. On-page SEO is important, but without maximizing the power of backlinking you are losing out.
The search engines, and we will focus on Google, have always used backlinks to determine the popularity and importance of a website. However, gone are the days when you could use automated tools to create thousands of spammy links and totally dominate the first pages of the search results using black hat tactics.
Today, it’s all about authority and relevance. As a results, link building has become either more time consuming or more expensive. The good news is that if you know how to do this the right way, you are already ahead of the game.
In this article we will focus on one specific part of the link building equation; namely the anchor text part.
But first… some basics.
What is an Anchor Text?
Basically, an anchor text is a clickable, hyperlinked, word, phrase or sentence which appears on a website.
Example:
“Martin Sand’s SEO Agency is an international SEO agency working out of Norway, UK and the US”
In this case “SEO Agency” is the anchor text.
If you peel off the user interface of your website and check out the html code, you will see it looks like this:
Martin Sand’s <a href="https://www.mywebtrafficshop.com/seo">SEO Agency</a> is an international SEO agency working out of Norway, UK and the US
Not too difficult to understand and since we’re mostly using publishing platforms like WordPress we rarely have to dabble with html code anyways.
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Why is Anchor Text important?
Anchor text helps Google figure out the topical relevance of your page. In other words: What is your page about. This is knowledge which is crucial for Google to understand how to index and rank your page according to their ranking system.
So, let’s say you have a website like this dog page…
The New York Dog Shop
If you were trying to rank this website for the term “Dog Toys” which would be a perfect fit for their page https://thenewyorkdogshop.com/toys/, then you could get links from various websites and the hyper linked anchor text would look something like this:
So, with all these articles on the internet linking to this web page with the anchor text “dog toys,” Google will over time start to think that this web page is about dog toys.
But unfortunately it’s not that easy as we cannot link to the same page over and over again using the same anchor text without getting banned by Google.
There used to be a time many moons ago, when this would work, but the artificial intelligence powering the search engines are getting smarter every day and with link building it is crucial to keep it on the safe side as it is against google’s webmaster guidelines to build links. It doesn’t matter how you build links, it is per definition against their TOS. However, since every SEO knows how important links actually are, everyone builds links anyway and you have to do it in order to be able to compete.
White hat, grey hat, black hat, top hat…. Doesn’t matter.
Link building is always frowned upon by Big G.
With that outta the way, let’s move on shall we? 🙂
A powerful link with a targeted anchor text is still one of the most important ranking signals you can get, so it’s a necessary evil to send links with less optimized anchor text to your site.
The most powerful anchor text is the exact match anchor text.
From the dog toys example above, the exact match anchor text would be “Dog Toys.”
When to use exact-match targeted anchor text?
If you have a page ranking somewhere at the mid-to-bottom of the first page in Google and you still haven’t made any targeted exact-match anchor texts for that page, then now is the time to do it. If you send a link from a clean, powerful domain with great authority, you will see ranking increases in 9 out of 10 cases according to our in-house stats.
We typically only use targeted exact match anchor texts one, or maximum two, times per page.
They’re powerful, but overdo it and you set yourself up for trouble.
Use Anchor Texts the wrong way…
...and you’ll be bummed out and broke.
Here is why:
Use Anchor Texts the RIGHT way…
......and you’ll be dancing all the way to the bank!
Here is why:
Like you can see from the bullet points above, building links the wrong way will hurt the page you are linking to and it may as well hurt your whole site.
Even if you don’t get a penalty, but only see flat results as a result of your link building, you are wasting link equity. Building links is not cheap these days and you are either spending time reaching out to site owners pitching your article to them or you pay someone like us to handle the link building for you. Either way