Using SEO is something you must do if you ever hope to be on the top of the search engine rankings for your industry. However, SEO is about more than keyword optimization and on page tactics. You have to think about off-page efforts as well. One way to accomplish this is through backlinking.
Backlinks are essentially any link to your site from another site. However, implementing a poor backlinking strategy can severely hurt your overall SEO efforts and may even see your site punished by major search engines like Google. To avoid this, you need to backlink smart.
Anchor Text is Key
The words that are hyperlinked to your website are called the anchor text. Sometimes they read something like “click here,” which isn’t optimized at all. However, having anchor text that’s too optimized can be just as bad. Especially when you use the same anchor text for every single backlink to your site. This raises numerous red flags in the search engines and can make your backlinks look like spam. Essentially, these links are discredited and won’t count toward building your site’s reputation. Most often, it’ll cause your site to slip down in the rankings.
So what’s the solution? Use a variety of different phrases as the anchor text to your site. This is how people would naturally link anyway, so mimicking natural habits is best. You’ll still want to have some anchor text to match your main keywords. This will create a link between the keywords you’ve optimized on-site with off-site links. Only do this for about one out of five links, however.
Don’t be afraid to mix it up as well. Instead of just using your keywords as anchor text or completely unrelated phrases, mix the two together. Add additional words to the anchor text besides your main keyword phrase to show the search engines people are finding your site in a variety of ways.
Don’t Be Afraid to Build a Brand
In backlinking, you need to establish your website as a brand. This way, the anchor text of your links will be intuitive and it’ll be harder for search engines to flag them as spam. This may take some planning. As you know, it’s best that your domain name is made up of your main keyword phrase. If you’ve been able to secure this, it makes sense to use that as your primary choice for anchor text. And it’s likely to prevent search engines from flagging it as spam because it’s included right there in your domain name. It’s automatically relevant.
With this advantage, you can use anchor text to establish your brand. So, if your domain is “STATE financial services,” that’s the obvious choice for the majority of your anchor text. You can easily add a note of, “check out more information at STATE Financial Services,” as your off-site SEO and it’ll service as a strategic backlinking choice.
Backlinking doesn’t have to be complicated. Just take a few precautions to prevent search engine punishments and you’ll be well on your way toward increased optimization.
Matthew Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur, and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Adam. Matthew is co-author of the newly released book: Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs.
“Small Business, Big Vision provides a framework for you to unleash your driven and relentless passion to achieve unprecedented growth.”
Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia’s homepage might take this form:
Wikipedia
One mistake I was making is always linking to my homepage, but I’ve been working to diversify my links.
Excellent, simple summary! Of all the parts of backlinks to describe, your focus on the “language” that accompanies with the keyword links and your suggestion of branding gets across the importance of the content and the link secondary. Following just these two areas, alone, should keep both the searchers and search engine spiders very happy!
Would love to see you write about other link building topics as you break down the issue so well. THANKS.
This is just what I am looking for. SEO matters is somehow difficult to understand for me, but have made an easy to read post about it.
Thanks for the post
Backlinking through anchor text can be a good use of links, as long as the anchor text makes sense in the overall content.
I have been trying to teach myself what to do to get traffic to my site and this article was very helpful. I have read tons of posts and this was one of the easiest to understand. Thank you for the info.
I understand the importance of seo much better after reading your article. Thanks