3-types-of-anchor-text-to-include-in-2014SEO should be part of your marketing system. Simply put, it’s one of the best ways to get targeted traffic. If you’re doing phone accessory product marketing can rank for a keyword like “cool iPhone cases”, you’ll be pulling in thousands off of that one keyword alone. First you need content related to the keyword, and then you need the backlinks.

You can’t just list your website URL with these backlinks, though – you need anchor text. Varying your anchor text is like shuffleboard. Too little variation and you won’t get high enough in the SERPs for the keywords that you want. That’s kind of like not pushing the puck far enough. Not enough variation – as in, making all of your anchors based around your keywords – will set off a red flag in Google’s algorithm and they’ll sandbox you. That’s kind of like pushing the puck too far.

The key is to vary your anchor text in a way that Google likes.

This post will be explaining how to vary your anchor text – if you have no idea what it is, please refer to What Is Anchor Text? By Gotch SEO for a full overview, then come back here.

The General Anchors

How many times do you see the text click here and check it out as a hyperlink? You see it all of the time, because it’s the natural way to link out to other sites. Even blatant corporate marketing channels (like company blogs and Facebook pages) will often do this because it looks natural.

You need these general anchors. If you don’t have them, it’s clear to Google that you’re not acquiring your links in a natural way. If you were, you’d have them – pretty simple stuff.

The Naked Anchors

While links are in the form of hyperlinks most of the time, there’s also a chance that someone will mention you with a URL. That’s like if I were to type http://google.com instead of typing Google and linking the text “Google” to the URL.

You want to have both hyperlinked naked URLs and plain-text naked URLs. (If you think Google won’t notice the plain text URLs, think again.)

The LSI Anchors

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. Basically, LSI keywords are keywords which are related to the keyword you’re going after. For example, if you’re trying to rank for “blue dogs”, then “dogs in the color blue”, “dogs”, and “blue colored puppies” would all be LSI keywords for your term. (You might even end up ranking for some of these LSI keywords, which opens up an entirely new marketing channel for you.)

Google has made some pretty drastic changes to how much it cares about LSI keywords… it now cares about them a whole damn lot. In fact, between your general anchors, naked anchors, and LSI anchors, the percentage of your exact match anchors is only going to be in the single digits. Of course, this varies based on your SEO marketing system, but most people in 2014 are straying from blasting their sites with exact match anchors. Google just doesn’t like it anymore.

In 2014, Google is trying to pinpoint which websites are building links unnaturally by analyzing anchor text. If you’re building them yourself, be careful, because Google has and will continue to deindex sites due to unnatural anchor text variation. Spamming exact match anchors just won’t cut it anymore. If you’re relying on natural backlinks for your marketing strategy, don’t sweat it – this variation will happen without any extra effort from you.