Anchor Text Diversification

Anchor text diversification and good practise search engine optimisation go hand in hand. Any good SEO consultant will tell you so. The website having the most quality backlinks with keyword specific anchor text will show up first in Google for that particular keyword. Unfortunately, you will be penalised by Google if you don't do this correctly so this article demonstrates the correct approach.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text are the words of phrases that are clickable in a link. In the link SEO Consultant the words “SEO Consultant” are the anchor text, while the entire link is structured as follows in HTML code:

<a href=”https://gazhall.com”>SEO Consultant</a>.

If all the links back to my website were like this then I would be penalised by Google. So to avoide this, I would diversify the anchor text.

How to achieve anchor text diversification

So lets look at a practical example of how to do this. Say for example, I wanted to link to my site using the phrase "blog building". I simply look for variations on the main keywords to replace my keywords. For example:

"building blogs"
"blog building example"
"define blog building"
"what is blog building"

As you can see, I am building keywords using variations of my main keywords. This is known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). To find variations of your keywords you can either use Google's suggest options in the search bar or use the “Searches related to ___” at the bottom of the search results.

You should try to use only a few exact keyword anchor texts to your site and a lot of LSI anchor text that contains synonyms of your targetted keyword.

Next steps

Now you understand what anchor text diversification is, what next? I'd suggest looking at how diverse your anchor text is by using tools such as Majestic SEO, SEOMoz PRO and Cognitive SEO to get a list of all your website’s inbound links, along with their associated anchor texts. After you've done this, have a look at your competitors backlinks and what anchor text they have used to link to them. Next do a comparison between the two lists and work out what you need to change.

If you're new to SEO or need clarification on any of the above points, then feel free to ask me.

Author

This article was written by Gaz Hall, a UK based SEO Consultant on 14th October 2019. Gaz has over 25 years experience working on SEO projects large and small, locally and globally across a range of sectors. If you need any SEO advice or would like him to look at your next project then get in touch to arrange a free consultation.

Contact Details

Gaz Hall, 27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX | +44 203 095 6006 | +44 7477 628843 | gaz@gazhall.com

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