The Importance of Varying Anchor Text
Once you have your site up and ready to go, it’s time to start marketing your site. One of the key strategies that you’ll be doing to increase your search engine rankings is link building. In this post I’m not going to cover all of the different ways that you can build links in detail, but instead I’ll focus on the importance of adding variety to the anchor text that you use for your links.
What is Anchor Text?
So to start off, what do I mean when I say anchor text? Anchor text is basically the words that a link is tied to. For example, if I create a link to the Prosper website, I don’t just want to have the link be www.prosperlearning.com. Instead, I want to use one of my main keyword phrases. For example, this would be a better way to link to my site: internet coaching. So in this example, the anchor text is ‘internet coaching’ even though the link goes to the Prosper website.
Now that we know what anchor text is, let’s look at a few guidelines and examples of how and where to vary the anchor text
Focus On More Than One Phrase
Some of you may be tempted to just pick one good phrase and build a ton of links only using that one phrase. This is not the best idea because over time it will appear to a search engine like you have spammed that word. And as we all know, spam is bad! Pick around 2-3 phrases to work on at a time.
Use General Phrases Sometimes
In an effort to avoid any appearance of spamming keyword phrases, you should also use some generic phrases from time to time for variety. In other words, having links out there that use something like ‘click here’ as the anchor text is totally fine. It should never be a majority of what you do, but it’s good to have some of these. You should also use your domain name and site name from time to time as well, for variety’s sake.