Carefully Craft Your Backlink Anchor Text

Careful crafting of anchor text is one aspect of a linking strategy that is often missed. Backlinks can be highly effective in boosting your domain authority which may be considered in the search engine ranking algorithm.  One of the first steps in a link building campaign is to determine the appropriate keywords and phrases that will be used in the anchor text.  These should be words that drive the most desirable outcomes.

Using your company or website name as the link text may be important if you simply want to establish your brand.  Your brand name will quickly become prominent in the search engine results.  But using your brand name in link text should not be a tactic in a long-term strategy.  Your objective should be to improve your ranking in the search engines for what you are offering; products, services, expertise, or what you want your visitors to do.

The selection of anchor text should follow the same careful process used for your content development and paid search engine strategies.  High quality backlinks are found in-content and should use your exact or partial match anchor text to link to more high-value content.

Tools for DIY keyword research

UberSuggest is a free tool that will scrape the keywords suggested by Google Suggest.  When users search for a term or phrase, Google uses artificial intelligence to suggest additional variations to aid in your search. UrberSuggest pulls in these suggestions and finds additional related keywords as well. The results include keyword search volumes as well.

SEMRush is a great website research tool. You can check search engine or PPC stats
on any website, see your rankings or your competitors rankings.  Here are 2 ways you can use this tool in just a few min:

1. Self evaluation: Input in your website address. Onn the left under Organic Research,
   select positions. On page two, see what you’re ranking for on and re-optimize your pages or
   add test links (internal or external) to boost your rank.
2. Competitor evaluation: Input your competitors domains and run a keyword report.
   Sort the report by keyword volume, “borrow” their keywords and either add them to
   your existing relevant web pages or build out new pages.