Why You Don’t Want All Your Links To Have The Same Anchor Text

Link Popularity Tips – Why You Should Vary Anchor Text

By Susanne Myers

One of the best strategies to gain good search engine rankings is to vary your anchor text. Let’s take a look at what that means and why it is part of my link popularity secrets that send me tons of free traffic.

What Is Anchor Text

Let’s start with the basics. Anchor text is the text we use to link to another page. If you take a look at the resource box at the bottom of my article, you’ll notice that the words “link building program” are underlined and clickable. In this case those three words are my anchor text.

The words that we use to link with play an important part in SEO rankings. In fact, you can get just about any page to rank well provided you include your keyword in the title and then just keep building links with your keyword in the anchor text until you start ranking on page one. The more competitive the keyword is, the more links you will have to build.

Why You Need To Vary Your Anchor Text

Let’s think about how links are build “naturally”. If I link to an article on another site that I enjoyed reading, I don’t really worry at all about including keywords. If they are part of the title, I might use them, but just as often I will use something like “click here” or “read the article here”, or the link text may be just the url of the page I’m linking to.

Using the exact same keywords in all incoming links on the other hand doesn’t look natural and the big search engine companies have caught on to that face and will not rank your page well.

How To Come Up With A Variety Of Anchor Text Ideas

Now you don’t need to go out and use a bunch of different link texts including “click here”. Instead you can add some little modifiers and occasionally use the page url as the anchor text and you will be fine. For example let’s say I’m trying to rank for “link building tips” some variations I may use could be “simple link building tips” or “tips for building incoming links”. Add a little variety to your anchor text while still including your key terms as much as possible.

An easy way to come up with these variations is to either rearrange your keywords where it makes sense or to simply add a word or two. Try including things like: simple, easy, tips, secrets, advice etc.

A good rule of thumb is to build the first 30 or so links with just your main key phrase and then throw in some variations every second link you build.