Article Submission Review

The Logic Behind Varying Your Anchor Text

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We talk a lot about keeping it natural when performing SEO for your site. Again, the very concept of natural SEO is an oxymoron because SEO by its nature is manipulation. Really what we’re talking about here is a natural appearance. We talk a lot about this for very good reason – it’s highly effective. But too many people have the wrong mindset towards this and are holding back the effectiveness of their campaigns.

First and foremost, whenever you consider any quote and quote “suggestion” for SEO from anyone – us included – you need to step back and think about it logically. What is Google’s goal? What is their intention? Does this idea dovetail with Google’s stated purpose of providing the most relevant and quality results to its users?

Some Background Facts

Before we get into the meat of our argument, let’s first look at some background information that supports what we’re saying. I did some analysis on our Google Analytics account looking at the keywords people find us for in research for this post and everything supported the conclusion I had already formed. Well, I’ve done this research before, but this time I applied it specifically to this site. Anyway, what I did was look at the total number of keywords that search on when they come to our site and analyzed how many of them had multiple searches and how many were single searches. I think you’ll be very surprised at the results.

No matter what period of time I selected the results were nearly identical. Whether I looked over just the past week or the past month or even the past year, the percentage didn’t vary by even a half of one percent. What I’m talking about is that only 21% of the searches that lead people to our site are “repeated”. If you look at every search that has led a visitor to our site in the past year, you’ll find that 79% of them were only ever searched on ONCE!

Now this is a human phenomenon that I am well acquainted with based on previous work in the Technology sector – more specifically with search and taxonomy research (taxonomy as related to search is the attempt to classify content into a specific category for direct navigation as opposed to search – think of the Yahoo Directory – a hierarchical classification). So I’ve seen numbers like this before but it is good to get a refresher because we tend to be laser focused in our SEO and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

This is why anchor text variation is so important. Think about the common scenario of someone doing SEO for their site and trying to keep it in a tight budget. The logical approach is to limit the keywords and focus on those with the most bang for the buck. The end result of this approach, however, is that you end up with a very lopsided anchor text diversification for your site. Instead of having 80% of your anchor text being “unique” and just 20% of it being targeted, you will likely end up just the opposite.

The Hypothesis…

Given the reality of the way people search, don’t you think it’s logical to conclude that linking patterns will exhibit just as much diversification as well? In other words, how natural do you think it looks to have 80% or 90% of the links to your site all with the exact same anchor text? It seems far more reasonable to conclude that there is probably just as much variation in people’s natural linking behaviors as there obviously is in their searching tendencies. That’s certainly our philosophy at least.

Our Recommendation

Pretty simply and should be pretty evident at this point – mix it up. Fortunately article spinning with tools like The Best Spinner can really make this a snap. Before you submit your article to Traffic Kaboom or Unique Article Wizard, spin the heck out of the anchor text on some of the links.

Let’s say you get three contextual links in the article as you would with My Article Network. Instead of inserting three links, you could use what we call a spin block and insert three blocks of spun anchor text and links. This way instead of just generating three unique anchor text combinations, your article might generate 20 or 30 different anchor text combinations. Now a good rule of thumb (remember guys, no rule is absolute in SEO – this is just a rough guideline) would be to do the following with the three links.

For these examples, let’s say your targeted keyword is “dog training schools” and your domain is http://MyDogGoesToSchool.com/schedule.html

• For the First Link – Target your primary keyword and just a couple of variations of it, but maintaining the main keyword phrase. So, using the keyword example above you’d get, “dog training schools”, “a dog training school”, “top dog training schools”, etc… When you spin these, you may want to repeat your primary keyword three or four times so that it gets selected more times when a unique combination is chosen by the spinning software. This is known as ‘weighted spinning’.
• For the Second Link – Now here is where you really mix it up and target some really long tail variations of main keyword phrase with all kinds of synonym variation. So in the first link above we were maintaining the main keyword phrase, here we’re not concerned with that. So instead of “schools” we might choose “courses” or “classes”, interject “obedience training” instead, maybe mix in some different breeds of dogs instead of the generic term dog, so “German Shepherd obedience training classes”, etc…
• For the Third Link – Now we take this to the next level and just insert a naked link – meaning that you just use the actual URL for the anchor text. But again, mix this up too – there are lots of ways you can change the look of the URL – lower case everything, add the trailing slash, use www, don’t use www, etc… So, like this: http://MyDogGoesToSchool.com/schedule.html, http://mydoggoestoschool.com/schedule.html, http://MyDogGoesToSchool.com/, http://www.mydoggoestoschool.com, http://www.mydoggoestoschool.com/schedule.html, etc… Now, notice that I even changed the destination URL but this is only the anchor text of the URL and not the actual href= attribute of the link – that we leave the same.

Now for many it’s hard to do this. You’re spending money on SEO, on the articles, on the submission software monthly subscription and darn it you want to get every last penny’s worth out of your links by making them all three optimized links. Trust me – I know the temptation. But our advice remains the same – resist temptation and mix it up. The fact is you’ll get better results in time.

As you continue this practice you will find that you start getting traffic on more and more keywords (adding SEO optimized keyword rich landing pages also helps this out a ton as well, but that’s another blog post for another day). Combining this anchor text variation along with fresh SEO sculpted content to your site can really make a difference in the number of keywords that you are found for and the overall growth of your authority within your niche. Give it a try and let me know your results!

 

Tags: anchor text variation, link building strategies, linkbuilding strategies, seo strategies that work, should i vary my anchor text, vary your anchor text