13 Ways To Randomize Your Anchor Text

13 Ways To Randomize Your Anchor Text

If you are reading this article, you must understand that you need to have proper anchor text as you actively build your backlinks. But maybe you aren’t getting the results you are expecting or you have been hit hard by the recent Google algorithm updates…even though you have a legitimate website. While we can’t pinpoint the exact cause in one article, have you taken a serious look at your anchor text profile?

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Most people with a limited amount of time and a limited budget will often use a limited set of keyword phrases (such as their most important keywords) as their anchor text. In the short term this might work just fine, but in the long run it could hurt you as the search engines algorithms get better.

Even though you have a limited amount of time and a limited budget, below are 13 ways to easily and efficiently to diversify your anchor text. In essence, every extra little bit of work we do now, can have great results in the future. We have no idea what the future of search engine algorithms will be, but having diversity in your anchor text will probably be an important factor.

The Bakers Dozen List Of Ways To Diversify Your Anchor

Company Name

It is only natural that you would use your companies name as anchor text for the home page and internal pages. This is an easy place to mix things up. Build some links with spaces in the company name, some without spaces, some with the company name plus an important keyword or even with the company name plus the city, state or country. And for the internal pages, you can use the company name plus the keyword for that specific page.

URL

Similar to company name, you should just use your URL sometimes. Easy ways to mix this up include varying it up with both http://www.companyname.com and CompanyName.com as well as www and non-www variations is recommended.

Mix of Homepage URL and Internal Page URL

This is a common over site of many people. They will only be using the homepage URL in their anchor text. But variety is your friend. You want to be mixing up the anchor text AND the URL’s. The homepage anchor text should be somewhat targeted, but with the internal URL’s you should definitely try to focus on variety.

Synonyms and Antonyms

The simple thesaurus should become a good friend of yours. We all think we know exactly how all our visitors think, but really we have no idea. Surely your keyword research tells you a lot, but not everything. Simply using a thesaurus will give you lots of ideas for other keywords to use.  In certain situations, you might even want to throw in an antonym…and synonyms of those antonyms.

Social Bookmarks

You can use websites like quintura.com, soovle.com, UberSuggest.com, and even Delicious to see how users are currently bookmarking sites similar to yours and the phrases they are using to describe them.

Phrase Match

Most likely you are using exact match keyword phrases to build your anchor text. You can mix things up by using phrase match keyword phrases. For example, for the keyword ‘debt consolidation’ try out: consolidating your debt, one payment for credit cards, consolidation of debt, debt consolidated, money consolidation, credit card debt consolidation, etc. You can get phrase match keyword phrases through any of the popular keyword tools, such as Google’s keyword tool.

Long Tail

Adding the simple words ‘in’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘of‘, in addition to plurals, and modifiers like ‘best’, ‘cheap’, ‘buy’, ‘online’, are all ways to vary your anchor text to make things look more natural. Keep this list handy because you can also use these phrases as part of your long tail keyword list.

“Click Now” “Read More Here”

Naturally, you receive more clicks when you give the reader an exact action to take. Thus it is important to have anchor text such as “Click Now”, “Download Here”, “Visit Here” and “Read More Here”. Using phrases such as these not only helps with anchor text variety, but also gets your reader to click…and remember you always want clicks!

Irrelevant Things

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and link somewhat irrelevant or long phrases to your website. If you ever inspect the backlinks of a website with a large number of natural backlinks, you will often see this. Linking a whole sentence, a quote, or just a long phrase that might not have much to do about your site is yet another way to vary anchor text.

Images

If you are not already doing it, you should be building backlinks with images. One, images with backlinks add variety and two, many people look at the image page on search engines, thus this is an easy way to drive extra traffic. To build backlinks with images, simply host a few quality and relevant images on your site, and insert them into your regular guest blog posts, articles, banner advertising, and press releases. Or use user-domain (free to use) images linked back to your site as well. When possible, add descriptive text to the image alt tag as well. Try for both optimized and non-optimized images image alt tags.

Misspellings

Can everyone in the world spell perfectly? Nope! So be sure to spice things up with some common misspellings to your company name and anchor text. Misspelling a company name or keyword is very common when viewing the backlink profile of any naturally linked to site.

Hyphens in Anchor Text

The same thing goes for hyphens in your anchor text. Hyphens are seen as spaces to search engines, so vary it up a bit and add some hyphens.

Upper and Lowercase
The search engine algorithms really do pay attention to every little detail, so every little detail makes a difference. You want to vary your anchor text with both upper and lower case letters. It would seem unnatural to always link using lower case anchor text to your site, right?

To wrap things up, basically having a “perfect” backlink profile will probably get you penalized. You need variety. It is that simple. Using the methods above to add variety adds virtually no more work to your to-do list and only takes a miniscule amount of thinking as you are creating your backlinks.