Building "keyword" backlinks
-
Looking for some opinions here please. Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth. I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing.
These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable...
myblogguest
bloggerlinkup
postjoint
Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy
I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth.
Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed.
The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site.
My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days? The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!!
Thanks
Carl
-
if you come up with a big idea, and link the page in the idea, you will get tons of links
-
I'd be really careful when it comes to keyword anchor text links. I find that 99% of them are either unnatural (ie in author bios) or paid for which is even worse (unless you no-follow it!). Ensure that your onpage SEO areas are perfected and make sure that there are no other issues onsite that could be hindering your rankings and then concentrate on producing high quality content.
Have a look at your backlink profile and see what percentage of branded links to keyword anchor text links you have because you should have a higher percentage of branded links. Those who concentrate on including too many anchor text links will (if they haven't been already) be penalised.
-
thanks for the reply, you make a good point about not overdoing the anchor text and using generic anchors to increase a page authority, that is a good strategy in the ideal world where you can optimise one landing page for one keyword. The trouble occurs when a client wants to rank one page for several different keywords. You may be able to rank for one or maybe two on the strength of good page authority and good onpage seo, but what about the other x keywords they want to rank for? Too few clients think about seo when building their site, in my opinion
-
Hello.
Thus anchor in backlinks is very important, I will not only worry about that. With this I mean you can have anchor as "read more" from a very valuable and authoritative website, which will be very important anyway. I will, in this case, not being able to decide anchors, improve my keyword (and similar) mostly ONPAGE, trying also to increment external forward links with the preferred anchor (which I can now choose) and internal linking from / to that page, still using the preferred anchor.
Otherwise, to get anchor you may want also try to ask the webmaster of the site you want the backlink from, to add your preferred anchor. If this is not possible, also try maybe including the whole code in a message to webmaster. You may be able to receive your wanted anchor. But as well, as far as I know, even anchor is very important, to have "read more" anchors may be useful as well, avoiding keyword stuffing in anchor.
Hope my thoughts are right, and may help you a little
Eugenio
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword research and relevancy
Hello, I am wondering if it is ok to use a keyword that is in 950 position in the keyword list with a relevancy of 1 or it if it better to only use keywords with relevancy of 5 or 6 which are at the top of list ? By the way there are some keyword that I found 3 weeks ago doing my keyword research that i don't find anymore in the list doing my keyword research, is it possible to that the list varies week after week ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How would you build links to this page?
Hi i have ecommerce store and currently we are looking to build links to category pages like: http://www.theiconic.com.au/womens-clothing-dresses-party-dresses/ What are some natural ways to build links to a page like this? Our SEO agency has done guest posting and forums but these are not natural link building methods and against Google policy. Any suggestions on how to build natural links to these pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
List of SEO "to do's" to increase organic rankings
We are looking for a complete list of all white hat SEO "to do's" that an SEO firm should do in order to help increase Google/Bing/Yahoo organic rankings. We would like to use this list to be sure that the SEO company/individual we choose uses all these white hat items as part of an overall SEO strategy to increase organic rankings. Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to where we can obtain this complete list? If this is not the best approach, please let me know what is, as I am not an SEO person. Thank you kindly in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetractableAwnings.com0 -
Breadcrumb wording and keywords
This is real estate website related. For every neighborhood I have a "condos" and "houses" page. In the breadcrumb structure I may have: "home > island condos > city condos > region condos > neighborhood condos". Questions: Some breadrumb structures have 5-6 different breadcrumb link and repeating the word "condos" in each link seems redundant. Would it be better just to list "island", "city", "region", "neighborhood" and never use the word "condos" or "houses" in the breadcrumbs? For users this would be better. If I implement what I suggest in 1) - deleting "condos" or "houses" wording from breadcrumb links, then on a condos page the word "region" (as an example) will lead to the "region condos" page whereas the exact same word "region" on a house page will lead to the "region houses" page. This means I will have a situation where the anchor text in breadcrumbs become 100% identical for my "condos" and "houses" pages, however, the they lead to different pages. Is this OK? I have in past been told that when I use internal anchor text, that the link should always leads to the same page. Having same anchor leading to different pages would not be good….is that so? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Difference in Number of URLS in "Crawl, Sitemaps" & "Index Status" in Webmaster Tools, NORMAL?
Greetings MOZ Community: Webmaster Tools under "Index Status" shows 850 URLs indexed for our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). The number of URLs indexed jumped by around 175 around June 10th, shortly after we launched a new version of our website. No new URLs were added to the site upgrade. Under Webmaster Tools under "Crawl, Site maps", it shows 637 pages submitted and 599 indexed. Prior to June 6th there was not a significant difference in the number of pages shown between the "Index Status" and "Crawl. Site Maps". Now there is a differential of 175. The 850 URLs in "Index Status" is equal to the number of URLs in the MOZ domain crawl report I ran yesterday. Since this differential developed, ranking has declined sharply. Perhaps I am hit by the new version of Panda, but Google indexing junk pages (if that is in fact happening) could have something to do with it. Is this differential between the number of URLs shown in "Index Status" and "Crawl, Sitemaps" normal? I am attaching Images of the two screens from Webmaster Tools as well as the MOZ crawl to illustrate what has occurred. My developer seems stumped by this. He has submitted a removal request for the 175 URLs to Google, but they remain in the index. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Hreflang="x-default"
Hello all This is my first question in the Moz Forum, hope I will get some concrete answers 🙂 I am looking for some suggestions on implementing the hreflang="x-default" properly in our site. Any previous experience or a link to a specific resource/ example will be very helpful. I have found many examples on implementing the homepage hreflang, however nothing on non-homepage urls within your site. The below will be the code for the "Homepage" for /uk/. Here /en-INT/ is a Global English site not targeted for any country unlike en-MY, en-SG, en-AU etc. Is this the correct approach? Now, in case of non homepage urls, should the respective en-INT url be "x-default" or the "x-default" shouldn't exist altogether? For example, will the below be the correct coding? Many thanks Avi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Delonghi_Group0 -
Fluctuating Rankings on "difficult" keywords
Hi guys, I have a client who wants to rank well for two very "difficult" keywords and eight easier ones. The easy ones are "treadmills + city" and the difficult ones are "treadmills" and "treadmill". We have got great traction on the "+city" keywords and he now ranks on page one for all those. However, we have noticed that although he ranks on page 2-3 for "treadmill" treadmills", those rankings fluctuate widely day to day. Rankings for the "+city" versions are stable, a rising slowly as I would expect. Rankings for the difficult keywords can be 235 one day, 32 the next week, 218 the day after that, then stable at 30ish for a week, then fluctuation again. I know Google update every day, but what are the likely causes of the easier keywords being stable, while the harder ones fluctuate? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevedeane0 -
How permanent is a rel="canonical"?
We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point? In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b? I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoreyTisdale0