It’s very easily done. You’re finally getting the opportunity to get some high-quality backlinks to your site and you need to decide what anchor text to use.
Instinctively you’ll want to go for your ‘money’ keywords. For example, in my case, that might be ‘SEO services’. But that’s a big mistake. Over optimised keywords and unnatural anchor text is the number one reason for Google penalties.
Think about when you’ve ever naturally linked out to a reputable site. You often use much more natural anchor text like ‘here’. Google is smart and will realise if all your nice high-quality backlinks are too salesy and unnatural. Don’t believe me? Here’s a screenshot of Amazon’s backlinks from Semrush…
So what does natual anchor text look like?
Here’s an example…
- https://jameslazar.co.uk
- www.jameslazar.co.uk
- jameslazar.co.uk
- click here
- learn more
- here
Ensuring the vast majority of your backlinks follow this pattern will keep the Google police at arms reach. Every once in a while you can slip in some marginally more useful anchor text, but still, be careful about how it’s done. For example, ‘Buy Brand X at great prices’ is super unnatural and therefore more likely to flag up than the still powerful but more natural ‘Brand X’.
