Anchor Text Variation: My Dirty Little Secrets

Alright,

After talking with a bunch of guys into seo consulting, I wanted to out this one because not only because varying anchor text when you build links makes the whole thing look a hell lot more natural but mostly because here is an incredible opportunity to build traffic!

Think about it, 70% of the queries typed in Google have never been typed before (not sure how true that stat is anymore but certainly a lot is) So for those who believe SEO is a game played on the big keywords, honestly, you’re just not doing it right. Sure, you should aim for those big keywords but the main reason why is because if you do it correctly you will also rank for hundreds of long tail variations of it that (often) convert more.

Here is what it looks like when I chase a big keyword and select my long tail variations on the way :

This is the path I follow when I try to rank for a big competitive keyword

Now let’s bring some method to the madness, how do you make sure you diversify your anchor text for optimal traffic? Here is how I do it.

First, I will determine the role of branding in that specific SERP by looking at the top 3′s % of branded anchor text variation. Does Google value brand a lot for that keyword ? Or do they value utility (exact and partial anchor text). to do this, I use Opensiteexplorer by SEOmoz. There I look at the anchor text variation of the top 3 results, this looks like this :

Clearly, brand on this SERP (logo design) is not very powerful, all 3 top results have a very low % of branded anchor text and I suspect most of them to have old redirects/rel canonicals pointing to them diluting this brand equity even more. Because my client is a very strong brand on the other hand I will go for a higher brand equity than these guys, simply to preserve their already positive brand signals. I will therefore setup for 20% (arbitrary number) brand anchor text.

So now I have 20% of my anchor text variation attributed, where do I find the remaining 80% ? That’s when long tail anchor comes into the equation. There are a few places where I will find these. First : Google suggest :

google suggest is a great way to find anchor text variations

In that case that didn’t help. My client charges for their logo and they’re not a software. Logo design studio being a logo design software, none of these suggestions are really helpful. But Google instant is a great place to get started, think about it, if I get these suggestions, most likely, others will get them too (google didn’t personalize these yet) so they will most likely be getting search volume just from being suggestions.

Anyway, our second stop is the Google adwords keywords tool. Type in your main keyword and tick the “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” and exact match. Here is how :

anchor text variation with keyword tool

So looking into this, I selected the keywords that were related to my client’s activity and could have a commercial value for them. Here are all my keyword centric anchor text variations with their volumes :

logo design – 49500
custom logo design – 2900
logo design contest – 1300
business logo design – 2400
logo design service – 390
website logo design – 320
company logo design – 1900
logo design services – 880
professional logo design – 880
corporate logo design – 720

When you put all of these in excel, the 80/20 rule is easily defined, 80% exact match, 20% long tail.

Now this is the % of my keyword rich anchor texts, I need to throw my branded links back in the mix, since I decided to go for 20% branded links here is the mathematical breakdown of my anchor text variations so far :

20% brand
64% exact match
13% long tail

This sounds about right. So in real life, if I get the opportunity to get 10 links through any way I’d break it down this way :

2 branded links
6 to 7 “logo design” links
1-2 long tail/partial anchor text variation links

A few tweaks to this method

Alright, I gave you the basic method up there to determine roughly what the structure of your anchor link building should look like, however there are a few things you can throw in to make it look even more natural/beneficial for yourself or your clients.

Brand Growth

It’s no secret, these days, Google LOVES brands. and one of the ways they can easily mesure it is by the mentions or branded links you get. Let’s put it that way. If people link to you with your name or systematically mention you when they talk about a specific topic, you reached a certain level of stickiness in their mind which means your brand equity is growing => Google likes.

So when you build links to your clients, when you plan on building these branded links what I do like to do is grow the % of branded links. Say I planed on having an average of 20% branded links over a 6 month campaign for that client. I’ll start with trying to get 10% only and ramp it up to 30%+ by the end of the campaign to average towards what we planned. Mentions are important too along with co-citations. Do not hesitate to link to wikipedia or industry specific authority sites next to your own links to give them more relevancy (even if you lose a bit of PR juice) making sure the anchor is NOT a keyword you target.

Existing link profile

This case study assumes the website has no existing link profile. Make sure you check the existing link profile of the website through tools like OSE/Majestic SEO to then adjust the anchor diversity for optimal results.

Real life link building

I know I know, especially when you build a brand, you’re not always in control of the anchor or who links to you, that’s actually a good thing, you get links purely on the power of your brand and content. In order to balance things out there are a few things you can do:

Scrape your link profile monthly using OSE and adjust your anchor %
Change your terminology – The way you refer to things is often times the way people will link to it. If you want a specific anchor to a specific page, start calling it that way.
Serve links form the cloud if you use widgets/badges/templates/plugins link building strategy, this way you can edit the links AFTER people download these embed able codes. See Martin Macdonald for this, he’s pretty good at it

Alright that’s all for now, I know this is not perfect but this is an attempt at being a bit more mathematical when it comes to anchor variation and getting the most of it :-) If you have any feedback or suggestion to improve the method, feel free to hit the comment box or on twitter : Gael Breton

If you enjoyed this article, please share it around .

Mark

Do you recommend changing out your long tail anchor text variants every month? biweekly? Would you recommend keeping a rotation to make it more natural and improve long tail rankings?