External Links / Anchor Text

Sully

Its been a good while since I personally updated my knowledge on SEO so I have been playing catch-up when I get some free time by reading articles and talking to people who work with me about the latest tips and tricks.

One area I thought was worthy of a chat here about that may benefit those starting out would be the importance in SEO for good external links. Factors including the anchor text, popularity of the website that the link is from and its trustworthiness being some examples. Anchor Text for Images are using the 'ALT' tags. Its one of the key areas to help sites rank well within search engines.

Some things that spring to mind for me are;

- Choosing the right anchor text. Usually we have it simple enough for internal links, describing the page. For external links, I find it more interesting to see the right choice. Using Boards.ie as an example. When linking on other sites, should you just use 'Boards.ie' as the anchor text or should it be 'Boards.ie - Popular Irish Discussion Forum'.

- Noting that Google, at least, will pick the first anchor text only for a link. If you have the same link more than once on a page, with different anchor texts, Google will only use the first one. This seems to now be bypassed using hashtags for the specific content, but I fear is this not being a bit cheaky and risky.

- Popular websites. People seem to pay various freelancer sites to get their sites linked on directories and specific sites to get strong external links quickly. The content on the site, I understand, should be similar to the linked site. Do we still look at PageRank these days to determine the right sites to put external links on, or the more the merrier (where appropriate) seeing as its a populist decision made by Google?

Any other tips/thoughts/advise?

Blindside87

You need as much variation as possible in your anchor texts after the recent updates. Back in the way you could have 500 links with the same anchor text but now google are penalising that sort of carry on.

You can still use keywords in anchor text but just make sure you are changing the anchor text and keyword.

Sully

Blindside87 wrote: »

You need as much variation as possible in your anchor texts after the recent updates. Back in the way you could have 500 links with the same anchor text but now google are penalising that sort of carry on.

You can still use keywords in anchor text but just make sure you are changing the anchor text and keyword.

But for most small businesses, they will just ask when doing a link swap that the anchor text be 'Business Name'.

Blindside87

Are you referring to reciprocal links? In this case yes they do a lot of the time but they will need to start varying this.

Also, I wouldn't have a large amount of reciprocal links to a site. A handful of relevant ones should be fine.

What I meant was don't have:

But this "keyword" it's the best ever x 500 times.

Mix it up

Blindside87

Oh and also have links linking to your tier 1 links to create a strong campaign!

Sully

That's interesting because I was always of the understanding that the more links you had on relevant sites the better. I was looking at SEOMoz the other day which seems to indicate this is a serious contender with SEO.

As for mixing it up. How? For my own businesses I have always just linked it as "Alpha Design" or "Discover Tramore" on other websites. Generally its a links page rather than in the middle of content.

Blindside87

Sorry I am confused as to whether you are talking about reciprocal links or general link building campaigns.

Yes relevant links are more important now than ever. Reciprocal links are fine but you want a balanced link campaign.

What I am trying to say is basically don't just have reciprocal links just like you don't just want one type of any other link.

You need to have a bit of everything..blog comments, articles, social media, social bookmarking and make it look natural.

Google likes natural backlinks so you have to make your link building look naturally, if all you have is reciprocal links then it might not look natural to google. But as part of a balanced campaign some of them should be fine.