Is Keyword Rich Anchor Text No Longer Useful In SEO Content?
Like Scrooge’s ghost of Christmas past, the keyword rich anchor text, once a very much alive and powerful way to get backlinks, has completely gone out of style. It’s no longer a useful tactic for SEO web content. Whether in your blogs, guest blog content, web content or any content published online, it’s good sense to avoid exact match keyword anchor texts. Let’s explore just why this good old precept is now an outdated no-no. There was a recent fiasco with Google approaching one of SEO’s biggest blogs in the community, Moz.com. One of the red-flagged items they sent to Moz in a warning email was about spammy anchor text. Oops—to one of the biggest SEO agencies on the web! We are going to take a look at how you can link in your content without doing too much, if any, keyword anchor texts, as well as just what keyword rich anchor text is. What Is Keyword Rich Anchor Text? It is very simple and something we are sure you have done at some point in your content writing. Let’s say you are writing a blog about vegetable hair dye and you link to your product page that is specifically vegetable hair dye; if you link the page to an anchor text of “vegetable hair dye” then you are utilizing keyword rich anchor text in your SEO web content. Easy, right? Well, know that we have cleared that up, you are probably wondering just how you can link people to your website without doing too much keyword linking. Let’s take a look at a few steps that can help you out significantly when you are either writing anchor text or not. How Do You Write With or Without Anchor Text? The good news is it is not very difficult to utilize anchor text in your SEO content. We are going to give you some help when it comes to how to write without keyword anchor text. The steps are as follows: 1. When Using Anchor Text, Use It Once. You can still use anchor text in SEO web content, but it is important that you use it sparingly and do not focus on keyword heavy text. Many websites were going about utilizing keyword anchor text and linking to multiple pages all over their site; this caused problems with Google and was considered to be quite spammy. If the websites happened to use their keyword anchor text only once, linking to the most important page for that particular piece of content, they would have been fine. Because of their mistakes, exact keyword-matching anchor text is something to avoid. When using anchor text in your SEO content, you should always make sure you are making variations because if you use the same anchor text all the time, you will find that things will not really go your way. If you use keyword texts, consider making sure that you only use anchors about use anchors about thirty percent of the time. 2. When Linking Anchor Text, Link to the Proper Landing Page. Linking to a relevant landing page is important for any linking in any post, especially when utilizing anchor text. If you write something about vegetable hair dye, make sure you link people to vegetable hair dye, not brushes or hair dyeing utensils. This will not only look like spam, but will create some upset clients. If they believe you are linking to some spiffy vegetable hair dye, and you don’t, they will leave quickly. Customers never want to feel like they are being scammed into buying something they are not looking for. If you are not linking to a specific landing page, but just want to get people into a general area, then do not use keyword anchor text. Either way is a great recipe for proper linking to make sure you avoid upsetting the Google gods. This makes sure that you use the right amount of links and make sure you stay relevant to your audience. You will find that the more you follow this step, the happier your clients, and potential clients, will be. 3. Never Over-Saturate With Links. It wise to always avoid saturating your website and SEO content with too many anchor texts, especially if these links are not relevant to your SEO web content. This is considered black hat SEO; avoid it. This is similar to keyword stuffing – the more you utilize the links, the more likely Google can think you are spamming readers. It will also read as if you are writing predominately to rank and not for the human clientele you hope to reach. You may feel that it will come across natural, but if you are solely thinking about how to write specifically to rank, you will always forget how to write for humans. Write for a human audience and come up with an anchor text that will be perfectly natural in your sentences. (Just an extra tip: You will find that the most natural sounding anchor texts might be ones that are in the middle of a paragraph instead of at the beginning or end.) 4. Write As Naturally As Possible. As mentioned above, writing naturally is a perfect way to incorporate your anchor text without over-saturating or sounding like you are trying to sell something. This is something that is highly important in content writing whether it is simply writing up web content or if you are writing an anchor text within the SEO content. You do not want to incorporate the anchor text in your writing where it sounds stilted and forced; this is a red flag to readers and Google. Do you remember reading all of those blogs about writing naturally? Have you started to forget them? Well, you should begin to refresh your mind and make sure you incorporate natural writing at all times. This will help your link strategy and will ensure that readers will enjoy reading your material and will eventually become part of … Read more
