Thread: Anchor Words for backlinks

Hi,

Here is a question? How many different keywords should someone use as an anchor text when promoting your site.

Just one or two keywords or the more the merrier?

Thanks in Advance

Butterflies Forever

Sami

It depends on what you want to do.

If you want to rank highly for a specific keyword, I recommend getting as many backlinks as you can with that keyword as the anchor text. If you're just trying to get ranked for multiple keywords, then spread it out and use them. Personally, my goal is to rank on the first page for make money online, so I'm getting all of my backlinks to use that anchor text.

It's also beneficial to link to your pages on your site using your keywords as anchor text. In other words, place links on your site to internal pages with the desired keywords, and I've heard that helps.

Hi,

I guess I asked the question wrong. I apologize for that. What I really wanted to know is if you try to be #1 in an obscure long search strings, will they help your short keywords.

Example using your keywords.

How to make money online in a depressed economy.

How to make money online for the future.

How to make money online today

How to make money online

Make money online

Make money

Money

Would I be better off with a mixture of them to drive more UV to the site. Or would placing just the word anchor word money be the best way to go.

Thanks Again

Butterflies Forever

Sami

It's good to vary the anchor text; so that, it appears natural. It's also nice to rank for other keywords besides you main ones. Shake it up a bit.

Originally Posted by bogart

It's good to vary the anchor text; so that, it appears natural. It's also nice to rank for other keywords besides you main ones. Shake it up a bit.

I agree with bogart. It is always a good idea to vay the anchor text. Several studies have indicated that excessive use of the same keyword theme in the anchor text of inbound links appears to negatively impact rankings with Google, presumably because the links look artificial.

I think you do want to use the long anchor text a few times in natural links. The quality of the inbound links that you use can make a huge difference with rankings. 10 high quality links outperforms 200 crappy links every day.

In general, every page on your site should be targeting a single keyword phrase (possibly 2-3 IF they are VERY similar to one another). So when trying to determine what anchor/link text to use when linking to a page, look at that page's <title>.

If the page targets a single keyword phrase in its title, I try to use that EXACT phrase 40-50% of the time. The other 50-60% of the time I use slight variations of that targeted phrase (plural if the targeted phrase is singular, different tenses or conjugations for verbs in the phrase, adding single word modifiers to the targeted phrase, etc.)

If the page targets 2-3 phrases in it's title, then I try to use the primary keyword phrase in about 30% of the links, the secondary in about 20%, and the tertiary phrase in about 10% of the links. The remaining 40% of the time, I use slight variations of the targeted keyword phrases (again, plural if the targeted phrase is singular, different tenses or conjugations for verbs in the phrase, adding single word modifiers to the targeted phrase, etc.)