Anchor 223x400 Creating Anchor Text Wisely and EffectivelyGoogle’s Panda update has been in affect for North American countries for over eight months now and the importance of quality backlinks (with the emphasis on quality) has never been clearer. Smart marketers are now striking deals with savvy webmasters to provide free content in exchange for one or two backlinks pointing at their site. Most often these links are in the form of anchor text.

Some folks are confused as to just what an anchor text is and how it works. If you’re asking yourself what the role of a anchor text is in SEO then bear with me because I’ll spell it out in just a bit.

But first let me share a little story.

Not everybody got the memo

I had an SEO professional call me asking if I had any ideas that would help solve a dilemma that one of his clients was experiencing. You see his client’s page had fallen from page 1 through 3 to page 30.

He couldn’t understand what was going wrong. His strategy was to create an article and then use software to submit it to 200 article directories. In theory he was creating 200 backlinks. When I asked him what anchor texts he was using he responded by saying they used the same exact anchor text in all 200 articles.

Well this one was pretty easy to explain. For starters Google looks at the quality of the site giving the backlink and if those links were all coming from obscure, low value directories they won’t be worth much.

But the bigger issue is the fact that the anchor text from all of those sites is identical. Let’s say for a moment that the text they used was “Genesis WordPress themes”. When Google sees that 200 sites linked back to the same page using the exact same anchor text they are going to smell a rat.

What are the odds that 200 webmasters all decided to link back at the site using the exact same keyword phrase? The answer is zero meaning the site is simply a source of links and not expressing a vote of confidence or referral. In short, the links coming from these farms have no value to Google and that’s what caused the huge drop in ranking.

Anchor text explained

So what is anchor text? It’s simply a keyword phrase that is hyperlinked back to a page on your site. And the keyword phrases you select to link back to a page on your site has a direct relationship to where that page ranks in the search results.

As an example…

…if you have a page that promotes premium WordPress themes and you would like to see that page ranked highly in the search results (for many keyword phrases) you will want to have many different keyword phrases linking to your page.

  1. free premium WordPress themes
  2. buy premium WordPress themes
  3. premium WordPress themes free
  4. best premium WordPress theme
  5. best premium WordPress themes
  6. premium WordPress themes business
  7. top premium WordPress theme
  8. top premium WordPress themes
  9. new premium WordPress theme
  10. new premium WordPress themes
  11. premium WordPress themes for free
  12. premium WordPress themes for business
  13. premium WordPress themes business
  14. WordPress themes framework
  15. WordPress theme framework
  16. WordPress child themes
  17. premium WordPress template
  18. premium WordPress templates
  19. free premium WordPress templates
  20. best premium WordPress templates

So back to the example…

…you have a page on your site promoting premium WordPress themes. You have a backlink from 20 quality websites each using only one of the keyword phrases above for the anchor text — and Google would look to each of those backlinks a vote of confidence from twenty webmasters.

It gets much better. Why? Because Google will look at the individual words that were used as anchor text to determine not only what your page is about, and where it should be listed in the search results.

How many backlinks does it take to get ranked?

It’s a great question. …and there are a number of variables to take into consideration such as backlink quality and competition levels.

I can say though that I do have a basic rule of thumb that works well for mid-range competition levels which is it typically takes between 20-30 *quality* backlinks before you will see a page in the the top 10 rankings.

How long does it take?

It’s been my experience that you’re probably looking at 4 to 8 weeks before you see significant movement in the rankings. And that’s 4 to 8 weeks after the 20-30 backlinks have been established. The key here is not to wait until you see the results, keep plugging building links. If you run out of ideas on variants, use the Google keyword tool to see similar phrases to your targeted keyword and start doing variants on one or two of those.

Getting anchor text on quality sites takes some work and is much more time consuming than submitting links by software but the rewards are well worth the investment in time.

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Article Written by  (3 Articles Published)

Jason Monroe is one of the young guns in affiliate marketing loving life in his mid-twenties with all the luxuries that come from being single. Being an avid football player through college gave birth to his love for the NFL as he continues to fuel his football passion watching weekend games with his friends. When football isn't on you can often find Jason researching classic cars, preferably the Camaro SS, in car magazines and online. But even this young gun knows how to get serious when it comes to affiliate marketing, a career that was born from his innate tendency to be a research hound, a knowledge that shows through his success online.

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