Directing Traffic: SEO Backlinking the Smart Way

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.