How Much Anchor Text Do You Need?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

When it comes to link anchor text it is best to use it in moderation. One of the corollaries of link building is what we call link diversity. It’s the idea that you want your links coming from a variety of sources, but also you want them to use a variety of anchor text. The search engines, particularly Google, call it natural link building.

The idea is to produce an effect that looks natural. In other words, if you left the link building to its own devices, would people you have no control or sway over link to you naturally the way that you are trying to do it, using the same kind of anchor text and the same page sources?

It is really difficult to “look natural”, but rather easy to be natural. If you just do it without trying anything fancy then it can seem as natural as gravity. But some people try too hard.

Make a list of your most important key phrases. Those phrases can be your anchor text.But you don’t want the same anchor text from every source you link from. You want to vary it. So divide up the sources that you are targeting for links and assign an anchor text to each one. Write your content for that anchor text and send it out. The site owner will either reject it or accept it. If they reject it, it’s no big deal. You do have other sites to target. But if your content is accepted then go with that.

It’s really that simple. Over time, targeting a variety of anchor texts will cause your pages to rise in rankings for those phrases. You have to be patient.