Inadvertent Case Study Anchor text

[Getwhatchuwant]

I will keep this short and to the point.

Sunday I did some back-linking for some people who have websites that are on my Facebook page. For the most part the sites were not very well optimized but I targeted 2 keywords per site regardless of how optimized the sites were.

Example 1:
Martial Arts School in small town. The town is small so targeting the exact martial art and the small town would not have gotten them much traffic.
I targeted "specific style" and "big city" as well as "small town" and Martial Arts since there was a decent # of searches for generic martial arts in the small town.
Result- Not ranking in the top 100 for either targeted term yet BUT now they are #8 in google and top 5 in Yahoo/Bing for their specific style/small town.

Example 2:
Again, customer offers service but the services that have the better # of searches are not optimized in the site. He had a rank of #97 for a keyword I did NOT target.
Result- the 2 keywords targeted not in top 100 yet, the keyword that was 97 moved to 75.

I guess we can take away 2 things from this, if your onsite sucks you will not get the best results just by back-links.

However, by back-linking to your site you can and will move keywords even if you do not target that particular term.

For those that are afraid of using terms like "Click here", "Visit Us", "This Site" and so on dont be. You are not wasting anchor text, having links back to your site helps all your keywords, not just the ones that were targeted.

 

[Bongo14]

Thanks for your analysis

 

[mark27]

That's good to know, I'm always worried about choosing the best keywords possible. Now I can relax knowing that even if I screwed up choosing keywords the site will still improve from t.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Thanks for your analysis

My pleasure

That's good to know, I'm always worried about choosing the best keywords possible. Now I can relax knowing that even if I screwed up choosing keywords the site will still improve from t.

Yep and also eases our minds, we know we should target diversity to mimic natural link growth but also diversify our anchors to appear natural to the SE's. But I am sure we all wanted to balance the natural look with aggressive improvement of ranking for our main KW's now we know we can do both. The key is how well your pages are optimized for those KW's.

 

[WizIMS]

Yeah I totally agree with the 2 points.

I wrote some post about the importance of the on-site SEO. The on-site SEO work is x10 easier than the off-site SEO, yet the importance of each is ~50%.

About the anchor texts, I believe it's a must to use some natural keywords like "click here" or "yourwebsite.com" or "read more"..etc

 

[davids355]

Yep onsite seo is most definitely important.
So is anchor variation- I have been targeting some very high competition single word keywords recently and using MS I found that the anchor text of top 5-10 sites only have the keyword in about 5% of their backlinks...

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Yep onsite seo is most definitely important.
So is anchor variation- I have been targeting some very high competition single word keywords recently and using MS I found that the anchor text of top 5-10 sites only have the keyword in about 5% of their backlinks...

Yep, thats why it is good to track and learn. It really helps us all out when we share info like this. I know 6 months ago, I would only try to target the KW I wanted to rank. Obviously this looks very unnatural and we still get the benefit anyway, as long as we are tight with our on page.

 

[davids355]

Yep, thats why it is good to track and learn. It really helps us all out when we share info like this. I know 6 months ago, I would only try to target the KW I wanted to rank. Obviously this looks very unnatural and we still get the benefit anyway, as long as we are tight with our on page.

Exactly. I am trying to track everything I do now so I can learn from it - that's why I'm posting case studies all the time

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Exactly. I am trying to track everything I do now so I can learn from it - that's why I'm posting case studies all the time

And I'm following all of them!

 

[jascoken]

Excellent feedback G!

As you know i've been preaching multi anchored variation for 5 years now, and it's the main reason I've never been slapped by a single Google update. Anchor diversity is as important as link, domain and content diversity.

The days of being able to slap tons of links at your exact keyword and not be penalised are long gone, unless you've got an aged domain with plenty of link velocity Pre established.

The most important SEO technique for a newbie in IM to understand is that linking DEEP to all pages and using massively varied anchors (with a bunch of different long tail phrase match anchors, URL anchors, and generic phrase anchors) is the ONLY way to achieve lasting and sticking results going forward after Panda.

It pains me to hear senior members advocating major blasts with just the main keyword as anchor. There are circumstances when this works, like when they've already established major link velocity and breadth of terms etc, but I think it shows a lack of real understanding of the changing SEO landscape.

Newbies (and everyone else really)... Take heed of this thread for 2012!

+rep'd