Why Being a Snob Can Hurt Your Rankings – Part 2

Welcome back everyone. I hope you all had a fantastic new year celebration and are ready to hit 2010 with all you’ve got!

Towards the end of the year, I posted about Why Being a Snob Can Hurt Your Rankings with regards to the use of nofollow links. If you missed it, I suggest you check it out, as you may be one of those snobs

This time I want to focus on another snobby behaviour with regards to linking, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore – especially with how the search engines are starting to shape up with how they look at links.

One of the most important SEO factors at the moment (and has been for a looooong time) is the quality and quantity of links pointing to your pages. This really helps when it comes to ranking, but how/why? Well the search engines see links pointing to your pages as “votes” or “approval”.

So how does it help you rank for specific keywords? Well – to keep it very quick and simple (for this post) – you link to your pages with keywords in the anchor text (the text that is clickable). So rather than using “click here”, or “more info” – you would use anchor text such as “Blue Widgets”, or “Dog Training” – whatever keywords you want to rank for.

So – it stands to reason to get as many links as possible using those keywords and yes it does work! So that’s great stuff – all you need to do now is blast a load of links with perfect anchor text at the pages and you’re cooking on gas! No. Not true.

Whilst the search engines aren’t fool proof – they do have means to be able to detect an un-natural quantity of links being built to any one particular page/site so this isn’t something to take lightly.

Also – think about it, how did the web work before search engines started to come about? You relied on links to be found at all not to even rank but just to allow your site to be found by surfers.

So, people would link to you with “click here”, “more info” or even just your URL as a link. The average webmaster is not going to link to you with perfectly crafter anchor text, it’s just not a common way of doing things.

Finally it seems the search engines are taking this into consideration enough for you to think differently and this year you could very well start to see a big shift with how linking works.

Don’t be a Snob – A Link is a Link

OK – not 100% strict, but pretty much. Just like nofollow links provide some value and help mix up your linking portfolio, non crafted anchor text can do the same. It mixes it up – it looks natural and non crafted. It’s something you really need to factor in, otherwise I don’t hold much hope for you in the future.

So, what exactly am I on about? What ratio of good anchor text to “not so good” anchor text do I need? If I knew that, I would be a gazzilionaire But this what is I mean…

There will be plenty of times when you cannot get the anchor text you like from your link targets, so rather than turn your nose up – take them, it’s not a waste – trust me.

How else can you vary it? How about in your anchor text that you can control, you put something like “click here for more info on blue widgets“, “blue widgets here“, “the best blue widget resource” – whatever, don’t be too fussy for longer anchor text – it helps

This will help make your whole linking portfolio look a lot more natural and will stop it looking for too “perfect” or “sculptured” – it’s well worth it in the end.

So there you go – get mixing it up!

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