Change your look for search engines
When building links, how much should you vary the anchor text?
First things first, it is important to bear in mind that no matter what you’re doing online, you should try to replicate, as much as possible, what happens in nature. That is to say, would it be natural, when linking to your home page, to have all the inbound links saying the same thing? Of course not!
Surely, if you think about it, if you had them all the same this would be a red flag to Google that you were trying to do something underhanded. So, here are some rules of thumb. About fifty percent of the links you build to your home page should be the actual URL. So for example, if we were building links to our website, Melbourne SEO Services, we would use www.melbourneseoservices.com.
About thirty percent of these links I would suggest you use the actual keyword phrase in the anchor text. This would be the words “Melbourne SEO Services”, the main key phrase we’re trying to rank for.
The remaining ten to twenty percent of links linking to the home page should be variations on the keyword. In this example, “SEO Services”, “search engine optimisation services” and other variations along that line would be a great start. I like to have these variations include some of the words used in the primary key phrase.
When you work on a link building strategy for internal pages, using the URL is not as important as it is when linking to the home page. I like to use the exact phrase you are optimizing for about seventy percent o f the time and the remaining thirty percent can be variations.
With all that said and done, these numbers are not hard and fast, and just some guide posts to keep you on track.
If you want more tips on effective ranking and other such subjects, subscribe to our RSS feed, friend us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. We can help you get started with your own SEO education.