Why Is Anchor Text So Important When..

Perhaps your links look un-natural, would 60 links all have the same anchor text if they were natural?

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The often quoted example of why you should do this is the term "Click Here". If you do a Google search for this (with quotes) you get the Adobe site because so many sites link to that site with the anchor text "Click Here". "Click Here" does not appear anywhere on the Adobe home page; indeed the words "click" and "here" do not appear either - there is one instance of the word "clicking" though.

So anchor text is very important.

My advice is to stick to the exact keyword(s) that you want. Top sites often have just been around longer, and really had no clue as to ideal SEO strategies. IMHO.

Anchor text is important because search engines use algorithms to determine ranking. Here's how it works. Search engine keep checking anchor text of your site. Whenever you have a link to other sites, search engines will note the anchor text of that site. With each instance a word or phrase shows up in your anchor text, your chances improve for increasing your ranking for that word or phrase.

Say you have a blog movie review. If you have a lot of links with the word movie reviews, and build your anchor text with its, you can increase your ranking for movie reviews.

-Malik

It's all about relevance. Just because you don't consider their anchor text relevant, does not mean Google or search stats don't.

When you type in your keyterm into google, what suggestions does it also ive you in the dropdown? And also at the bottom of a search page does it give you alternate suggestions? These can sometimes be very helpful to spot what Google is seeing a relevant, even if your gut feeling is that it isn't.

Hi all, been it the warrior forums for a few week now and i must say the info in here is amazing to say the least.This is my first time so be gentle with me!

Have i got this right, when I'm looking at my competitions back links what i should be mostly concerned with is the back links to the page im competing with and not the whole domain? I have come across some keywords that get 5600 exact match searched in my local search and the top ten pages only have 20-30 back links to that page but 100k+ for their domain.If i purchase Angela's back links do what are my chances to break into that top ten?

There is a free version of traffic travis that will do just about everything you want including strength of competition. Like all tools, the results are sometimes questionable but it does a lot for free.

They should get you into the game... somewhere in the top 3 pages. Beyond that it's really tough to say without knowing more about the competing sites.

In some cases, backlinks like these work wonders but in others they fail to deliver. It also seems that since these are lower value backlinks you need quantity to make up for quality.

It's really a case by case issue and so much depends on your competition it's hard to give straight answers.

Typically, I'll drop a hundred or so of these types of backlinks along with backlinks from my own feeder blogs to see where a site lands. At this point I can figure out what I need to do next.

There is no magic formula for anchor text keyword inclusion. If there were everyone would exploit it.

Search Engines determine what is "natural' and what is not. What is important to remember is your anchor text should tell people what your site is about.

I just ran some more keyword research today on printer ink.

And there were about 25 keyword variations that essentially said the same thing.

People will search for your site using all kinds of similar phrases... so you should vary your incoming keyword phrases as well. Afterall when people link to you "naturally" they will use a slight variation of whatever they think your site is about.

Are you only submitting to Ezine? Ten articles a day? You need to submit one article a day to ten directories. What will happen is that the article will get picked up elsewhere and THOSE links help you out.

Don't worry about the exact wording of the anchor text. I would say vary it so you can grab lots of combinations. Also spin your articles to grab other search terms. Of course you should make sure you're submitting your articles to the right categories in the directories, too.

Also submit your rss feeds everywhere. When people start putting those in their readers and aggregators, it gets you a ton of backlinks.

and another follow up...

what if you were to write a short article for your bio including your links and then used that for a couple hundred profile pages... do you think this would lead to a duplicate content or spam flagging issue?

I was trying this and I gave up due to my fear of raising red flags and it's not practical to keep spinning the bio content when your dealing with hundreds of profiles.

I agree with the everything else you said.. it's a balancing act keeping under the radar and trying to manipulate a page to your needs. Member: Ugg Boots <-- not hard to miss for webmasters weeding out spammers.

If you are only going to do 60 articles then you may be ok.

However, one thing that has not been mentioned in detail, is just because you want to rank for that keyword, have you in fact done research to see if your prospects, are using that same keyword.

Or are they using some variation.

dog training
puppy training
paper train your dog
house train your dog
house train your puppy

What is it that those looking for your products or services are likely to type in?

So, if you are going to do more, I suggest you vary your keywords ( anchor text ), as noted before, it also looks more natural to verify the keywords through-out the page or document, ie. title, body, signature, etc.

Kelvin

You will eventually outrank that website if you build anchor text backlinks for that keyword. If the site does not have links with the keyword, then they are ranking in that spot based on authority. The problem is that if you just started optimizing for that keyword recently, you are still going to have to wait about 6 months for the work to show.

It would make sense that your website should be first if you are getting all of the relevant backlinks, but Google avoids giving them any value for a while. They want to avoid manipulation of the SERPs so they purposely make sure that you will have to wait before the links gain value.

In about 6-7 months, if you continue working on building for that term and others, your links will eventually give off the value. Most people kill themselves before they get to 6-7 months which is why you constantly see bad advice on the internet about SEO.

By the way, people who think relevance of the link doesn't matter are clueless about SEO. If you want to be successful online, then you are going to have to think about how you would run a search engine yourself. Relevance may not have been a big deal in the past, but it is now. Search engines have evolved.

If you were running a search engine, you would want it to be as relevant as possible. Therefore, your backlinks should be as relevant as possible.

If you had a search engine, you would come up with a method that helped avoid link manipulation as well. You wouldn't want spammy webmasters gaining thousands of backlinks to manipulate the SERPs everyday.

Your search engine would also have a timeframe before links are actually counted for ranking. It would make a lot of sense to have this because most spammy links disappear before they reach a certain age. If you are spamming on blogs, most of these links will be gone in 2-3 months.