Utilising Anchor Text To Make More From Your Search Engine Optimisation Campaign: Diversify!

If you read just about any SEO manual out there, you will notice a recurring theme – link building, link building, link building. It’s pretty much all anyone ever talks about with regards to SEO and for good reason – you could pretty much ignore all of the other chaff, focus exclusively on building links to your website, and gain a great deal of visibility (if you do it right).

However, one thing a lot of people consistently fail to pay attention to is anchor text – the vast majority of webmasters understand they need to theme anchor text to their main target search terms, but is that all there is to it?

Anchor Text Diversification:

One of the most important points you need to get to grips with is diversifying anchor text. For example, say if you wanted to rank your website for the term “link building”, common sense would suggest that you simply spend all of your time link building using the anchor text, yes you guessed it, “link building”.

However, does that look natural? It is widely believed that exact match anchor text is becoming devalued and in any case, even if it’s not, building the same anchor text links again and again are only going to send up red flags, so make sure you diversify as much as possible. For example, around the term “link building” you could use “link building company”, “link building service” or even “contact us for link building services”.

Keyword Research:

How much of your time has actually been spent doing keyword research? I’m willing to bet not a lot, mainly because you already know all of your target search terms, right? Well you are not the first person to think that, and you won’t be the last.

When it comes to ranking pages in search you are never just chasing one term, you are chasing, potentially, hundreds of thousands of terms (depending on the size of your niche, of course).

So, do you keyword research and find out what is being searched for in your niche – better yet, use your Analytics data, spot trends and patterns, and then integrate these into your anchor text.

David Miller is a Search Engine Optimisation Professional working at Clickwork Media – please visit ClickworkMedia.co.uk for more SEO tips.