What is anchor text over optimization?
For many people in the internet marketing business, this is probably the first time you’ve actually heard about. In the post Panda and Penguin world of SEO though, it’s a problem that needs to be rectified and rectified quickly!
Now to get a good grasp on this particular problem, we need to better understand what anchor text is. Anchor text is basically words that you’ll often find highlighted and underscored within a particular web content that when clicked, takes users to a certain web page. Search engines use it to determine what they are likely to see as they follow and crawl over the set web page and the kind of content it offers.
Let’s say you’ve published a blog that talks about the significance of SEO or search engine optimisation. You got “SEO” highlighted and when clicked, it takes you to a business website offering professional SEO services – that is your anchor text.
So what is anchor text over optimisation then? Now it’s an emerging problem found to have been brought about by recent updates in search engine algorithms particularly the infamous Penguin update. The new algorithm essentially zeroes in on the presence of unusually large numbers of anchor text linking to a certain website – exact anchor text to be precise.
Let’s say your targeted anchor text for your link building strategy is “web design” and the term web design isn’t actually found on the domain name, brand or content on the web page that it points to then that’s anchor text over optimisation right there!
It’s much more so if you have hundreds of such links with the same “anchor text” pointing to the same page. Google has a birds eye view of all the websites on the internet and knows what is natural and what isn’t and if they find that the links pointing to your site look too unnatural then it can lead to harsh penalties and your rankings will drop.
Anchor text over optimisation – how do you fix it?
Now the question remains; how do you check on and rectify such a problem?
Well your first step is to have a through back link building analysis done. Start by checking on a couple of your closets competitors that are ahead of you in search engine rankings. What SEO keywords are they using in their online marketing strategy and how does their anchor text profile appear in comparison to yours? Think that you can do a better job or at least match their internet marketing strategies up to par?
The ultimate goal here is to of course completely get rid of any troublesome backlinks on your website that may be read by current search engine algorithms as an offense towards anchor text over optimisation. Work towards achieving an even mix of anchor text that points to your website. Out in the wild (of the internet) not every website is linked back using the exact keywords you want to rank for.
They linked using all types of things like; website, click here, visit site, along with a rang of long words (possibly the name of the page or blog post).
You also need to check on and remove any spam backlinks.
Once you’ve got all those problematic links out of the way, you can then start creating more natural links back to your website (we’ll get to that soon).
Generating a link profile that appears natural with excellent use of mixed anchor text and its seamless integration in to your web content is certainly important. Ensure that your keywords are in that content which will certainly help boost the effectiveness of your SEO and link building strategies.
Last but not least is that you need to pay attention towards creating high quality and interesting content. Remember that content is king and it will certainly go a long way towards attracting high quality and natural links as you seek to develop more authority towards your business website.
