Mix Up Your Anchor Text

Ensure you mix up your anchor text.

When you get new links into your site you will probably be either asking people to link to you or adding your site into a directory or even getting paid links on other sites to boost your visitor numbers, your trust and your search engine position.

One thing you must absolutely do is to mix up the text of your anchor descriptions you have on other sites.

Way back before everyone knew that inbound links to your pages (whether external or internal) google said that this was effectively a vote for your website by others.

Now when someone links to your site naturally they use all sorts of words. Maybe it’s your domain name or maybe it’s a description those people made up but it probably is never your actual keywords that you want to rank for !

Of course Google is a little more complex these days but even so, if all the links into your pages have the same text then as sure as eggs are eggs, you’ll know about it. This will likely trigger over optimization penalties. No one is sure of what this is all about and it may have something to do with the sandbox - certainly some of the patents filed talk about trust rank, and once you have been penalised it really is extremely difficult to get out of the rut.

The harder you work on building your backlinks the deeper you fall into the mire.

So just ensure that the text is mixed. Not just your keywords round the other way but have a look at your KW research you undertook when you first launched the site. Have every top 20 KW suggestion as your back links. Have your domain name pointing as a backlink. Have anything - but just don’t always have your target keywords.

MSN and Yahoo don’t seem to work this way. Certainly for MSN, the more you throw at it the better it responds. But the big daddy of them all google, is more complex. So think natural. Think how websites evolved before everyone knew about links.