Summary: Gaining links with keyword rich anchor text can have a significant impact on your rankings. Whilst you shouldn’t focus on getting links to your URL or company name, a few of these can be beneficial.
When someone links to your website, the link will contain text. So it might be, for example:
‘Click here to find out more about racing cars’
In this case, ‘click here’ is the anchor text.
Anchor text is widely considered by leading SEO experts as one of the most influential factors in search engine rankings. This is supported by search engine representatives. Why? Because the anchor text shows the search engines what the page which is being linked to is about.
The above example of ‘click here’ isn’t, as you might guess, very good anchor text. Nobody’s site is about ‘click here’. What you likely want as anchor text in this example is ‘racing cars’. Search engines will look at this text in the same light as someone manually classifying the topic of the website.
So what anchor text should you ideally seek to secure?
Should I target my company name?
The answer to this is no, unless it’s also a description of your product or service too! The search engines are good at matching up websites to company names and unless you have a really generic company name (like ‘Cars’ for example), they’ll have no trouble working out that your website is your company website.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of the links you accumulate will indeed use your company name. These do have some value, but just not as much as keyword rich anchor text. It’s not surprising that website owners choose to buy links where they can choose the anchor text. But don’t be tempted – see our article on buying links for the reasons why not.
So links with my company name are bad?
Actually no – some links with your company name / brand name aren’t bad at all. In fact, they can be a positive thing. The reason for this is that search engines are ever on the look out for people trying to cheat the results by buying links. If all your links have perfect anchor text for exactly the keywords you’re after, they don’t ‘look natural’ to the search engines. They look artificially manipulated.
What sort of links ‘look natural’?
If you don’t try to manipulate the results you’ll end up with a bunch of links that likely include your site / company / brand name, your site URL and the inevitable ‘click here’ or ‘more’ links. Whilst this isn’t the most useful anchor text for your link building campaign, that’s exactly what a normal website that isn’t buying links would be expected to have – and the search engines know that. On the other hand, a sudden appearance of 25 links with the anchor text ‘racing cars’ is almost certainly the result of paid links – and the search engines know that too.
I’m not for a minute saying you should pay for links and try to disguise this by having less useful links. I’m simply saying that a few links with less useful anchor text helps your site appear natural in the eyes of the search engines. Your goal should always be to build your links legitimately anyway.
How can I legitimately get decent links with anchor text?
Aside from approaching relevant websites and asking them nicely for links, you can create relevant content for article websites and link through to your site that way (you’ll be able to add an ‘about the author’ type section which is where your link goes). You can also create content for social media and link through from there too. Have a look through our other articles for more details and ideas on getting good quality links.
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