Web Marketing Strategy Update

Most webmasters know that the backlinks which point to their website are used by Google to help determine how trustworthy it thinks the site is and how high it should rank in search results.

But it’s not just the number of links, or where they come from that counts. Almost as important is the anatomy of the link itself and the type of anchor text it uses. If you don’t know what anchor text is, here’s a good primer.

While its tempting for webmasters who know a little bit about anchor text & SEO to just go after the anchor text links which most closely match the keywords they’re trying to rank for, this might not always be the best strategy.

Most SEO experts now acknowledge the existence of penalties and filters designed to devalue sites which try to overly manipulate their link anchor text. So whether you’re getting lots of natural links, or your links are mostly built through pro-active link building work, you want to get a balanced backlink profile with the different types of anchor text links listed below:

1. Brand Anchor Text

Brand anchors are by far the most common type of anchor text you find naturally on the web, and should therefore make up a significant part of your link profile. For example if I was to link to Google like this, the anchor text is the sites brand name, so that’s a branded anchor text link. With any link building campaign I aim to ensure at least 50% of my backlinks use brand anchor text – if you get lots of links naturally you probably don’t need to worry about this as many of those will likely use your brand to link to you but where you’re going out and building links manually (for example via guest blogging ) you should bear this in mind.

As Google works harder to identify known brand sites being seen as a brand is going to become more and more important and anchor text is definitely one way Google could ascertain if you’re a well know brand – for example you can bet the Nike website has plenty of anchor text with the keyword “Nike”, a strong signal that Nike is a brand, and that nike.com is their official website. By contrast a site which doesn’t have a strong brand like johnscheaptrainers.com probably won’t get a lot of branded anchor text because nobody knows about my brand of trainers L.

2. URL Anchor Text

Plenty of sites also choose to link out using raw urls rather than anchor text. So that would look like http://www.google.com. Again raw URL anchors play a part in a natural link profile. If your site gets discussed a lot in forums you tend to see a lot of URL anchor text links in your backlink profile because forum contributors just drop in the URL and the forum software converts it to a link. Again because these links should happen naturally you may not need to worry too much about building them manually, but if you don’t get much discussion around your site you might want to look at including a few branded URL links into your anchor text profile.

The other thing to bear in mind about URL anchor text is that if you have keywords in either your domain name or your page names a URL anchor will act in a similar way to a keyword anchor (discussed below) and will help you rank for that keyword. For example a link like http://www.searchengine.com would help that site rank for “search engine” or a link to a page like http://www.google.com/search-engine.html might also help Google to rank for “search engine” because the keyword is contained in the filename of the page which is being linked to.

3. Keyword Anchor Text

These are the anchor text links which use your money keywords for example if Google wanted to rank for the keyword “search engine” a keyword anchor text link for them would look like this… search engine.

As you’d expect many SEO’s spend a lot of time (and sometimes money) on building anchor text links to help them rank for specific keywords. That’s fine and it still works but don’t go overboard. I always aim to make sure no more than 10% of my keyword anchor text uses the same keyword and introduce as many variations as possible, even small variations will help you rank for more keywords so not just search engine but search engines, best search engine, web search etc.

4. Compound Anchor Text

Compound anchor text links are links which combine your keywords and either your brand or some other text. Examples may be Google search engine (branded compound) or use this search engine to find a website (non-branded compound).

The benefit of compounding your anchor text is you can target money keywords, without triggering filters for anchor text over-optimisation. As long as your money keyword is somewhere in the anchor text of the link, that links going to help you rank regardless of the other keywords which surround it so this can be a really natural looking way to build powerful links. I’m increasingly mixing up my keyword anchor text with compound variations and right now it seems to work very well.

5. Miscellaneous Anchor Text

Of course not every webmaster follows the same linking patterns and plenty of times you’ll find websites will link to you with anchor text like click here or visit website. While these types of links are unlikely to help you rank for a particular keyword remember any direct link to your site (from a good website) is going to benefit your site as a whole and increase the trust which Google has in your domain so if you can only get a link with an anchor text like this that’s all good. Also as with the other types of anchor text we’ve talked about here variety is natural so if you’re not getting at least 10-15% of your links with anchor text like this you might want to think about building some.

6. Image Anchor Text

Often overlooked, but in my opinion almost as powerful as text links with keyword rich anchor text, links on images, which have keywords in the alternate text of the image can also help you rank for those keywords.

So for example a link on an image like:

With a link on the image could also help you rank for a keyword if it was included in the anchor text so:

<a href=http://www.google.com><img src=’google.png’ alt=’search engine’ /></a>

Is probably going to be almost as powerful as a normal search engine text link. Just remember alternate text on images is their primarily to aid visually impaired internet users so don’t go overboard stuffing keywords into image alt text.

So there’s a run down of the 6 types of anchor text you’ll find most commonly on the internet and how to use them. If you’re starting a link building campaign its always worth starting by analyzing the anchor text used by your competitors who are ranking for the keywords which you’re going after. I start by building up a graph like the one below (using the excellent competitive landscape analyzer tool in Link Research Tools) which gives me a steer on how my own anchor text profile matches up to the competition.

While you can never just copy your competitors backlink profile and hope to outrank them, this kind of analysis does give some indication of the types of links which are working in your market.

John wrote this guest post for Basekit, a website builder tool with a focus on usability and search engine optimisation.