Link building strategies have had a real overhaul in the wake of the Google Penguin update and content marketers and SEOs need to think about anchor text diversity for success.
Keywords can be very similar to teenagers. Where once they started off full of promise, enthusing you with energy and optimism about what the future will hold; after a while they can become something of a letdown. Suddenly - despite doing everything to make them do what you want them to do - your keywords rebel and start acting in very strange ways.
But fear not with a little bit of help you should be able to steer your keywords through this turbulent teenage period and get back on track with your SEO.
Website suddenly lost ranking
There are many reasons why a website can suddenly fall in the rankings and it is something that many a website owner and their SEO agencies have experienced over the last couple of years in wake of the Panda and Penguin updates. In the post-Penguin world it is all too easy to feel a sense of despair as you read countless blogs and forum posts about how to get more out of your keyword strategy.
Google Penguin update latest
The seismic changes of the Google updates are still coming to fruition; the rules of the SEO game have been changed forever and many sites, as Google updates and tweaks it’s algorithm, are constantly being rocked.
One of the major reasons why a site can face a knock down effect on their keywords is down to anchor text.
Link Building after Penguin
Anchor text, as anyone who has even spent a millisecond looking in to SEO will be able to tell you, is the process of linking your keywords back to your website. It looks a bit like this ‘keyword anchor text.’
In the good old days when search engines acted like we knew they would, SEO was simply (despite what all the SEO agencies and ‘seo experts’ told you); the process of generating lots of links to your website, from pretty much any source, with the right keyword in place. It worked very well and generated results; pretty much everyone did it.
Today though, Google and the other search engines have discounted a lot of these anchor text links and they look increasingly at your ‘anchor text footprint’.
How to Build a Good SEO Footprint
What the hell does an SEO footprint mean we here you cry? Well it means that the search engines look at the variety of anchor text links to your website.
Most websites should, unless they have pursued an aggressive anchor text linking strategy, have the majority of their links to their site coming through on brand anchor text terms, such as www.contentamp.com, Search News Media or contentamp.com.
You should also have a smattering of anchor text links such as ‘click here’ and ‘more information’.
In addition to this you should also have your targeted anchor text keywords included too.
This will leave you with a good SEO footprint….
But if you have say 90% of all the links to your website coming through on your chosen anchor text keyword(s) and none or very few brand links to your website, Google’s sophisticated algorithm now means that your site is not likely to rank for those keywords – in short, your anchor text strategy has failed. Why? It looks unnatural and is a sure-fire sign to Google and the other search engines that you are doing something to try and manipulate your inbound links. It will ultimately see you facing a penalisation and a downgrading of your keywords.
How Can I Improve my SEO Footprint?
The solution to improve your SEO footprint is to generate more brand term links to your website. You also need to Build Quality Links to your Website. You can increase your natural SEO footprint by:
Sending out an SEO press release with brand terms only (eg only linking to your website name/address)
- Do guest posts on websites with just your brand or a click here as the anchor text
- Create and publish a video on youTube, adding a link back to your brand website
- Create social media accounts on the likes of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and more, linking back organically via your brand terms or generic ‘click here’ phrases.
- Publish content on your website, launch a blog. Then link to the content via social media, encouraging followers to do the same – quality content will attract lots of links, naturally
Do anything and everything to increase your brand term anchor text ratio, oh, and you may want to lay off promoting your targeted keyword anchor text for a while. But that doesn’t mean you should stop online marketing activity – that can look suspicious too!
Vary your keyword strategy, produce good content for onsite, promote it via social media and start to think like a content marketer operating in the post-penguin world. Don’t get hung up on your main keyword.
It’s a strategy we follow with our content marketing and guest blogging activity to really generate strong results for leading brands and their agencies.
Dale Lovell
