How to spread out anchor texts when building backlinks

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Welcome to the newsletter that wants you to know how to diversify your anchor texts when building backlinks so that your link profile looks as natural as possible.

Over the last one month, we have built 420 niche edit backlinks for our clients and we noticed something.

Our clients were kind of lost when deciding how to spread out their anchor texts. Here are some questions that we had to answer:

1. Do you use the exact keyword you want to rank for?

2. Do I just tweak the keyword and use that as the anchor text?

3. Should I use the same anchor text for all the backlinks?

4. Is it okay if we just use the brand name as the anchor text?

5. Is it necessary for the anchor text to match the content on the page or relate to it in a way?

6. And many more.

So we figured, it is best to educate our audience about how to use anchor texts when building backlinks for your business.

But in order to understand it properly, you need to think about it in a natural way.

Some important questions to ask if you are thinking like this:

1. If another website was linking to this page, what anchor text would they use?

2. If 10 more websites were sending links to this page without my facilitation in any way, would they all use the same anchor text?

3. If 10 websites built backlinks to my website organically for 6 months, how will my backlink profile look like?

4. If this continued for a year, what pages would be linked to the most?

To answer this questions, I am going to use a popular website as an example:

The website is InVideo - a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company for creating videos that gets nearly 2million organic visits per month.

This below is the anchor text spread for their backlink profile:

What can we learn from this anchor text spread:

• The brand name - InVideo - is the most used anchor text.

• Their most valuable keyword - online video editor - is the second most used anchor text.

• Based on the number of referring domains, the brand name has been used 77% more than the primary keyword. Which means the primary keyword is only used 23% of the time as compared to the “InVideo” brand name in every link building campaign.

• The brand name use is varied - sometimes InVideo, sometimes invideo.io, InVideo AI, or the naked URL (https://invideo.io/)

• The keywords use is also varied - sometimes online video editor, video editor, or video maker.

In terms of the most linked to pages of InVideo:

You can see that the homepage is the most linked to page. And that agrees with the brand name being the most used anchor text. This means that:

• The brand name anchor texts and their variations almost always link to the homepage.

In addition, the second most linked page is online video editor page. This also agrees with the primary keyword being the second most used anchor text. This means that:

• The primary keyword anchor text and all its variations almost always link to the online video editor page.

No matter the website you will look at, this patterns tend to repeat themselves in most top ranking sites whether the website is big or small. Once you understand this pattern, you can play around with your anchor texts to make them as organic looking as possible.

In summary, for a totally new website or an old website with very few backlinks;

1. When you use the exact keyword you want to rank for, don’t over use it. If you are building 10 backlinks, we recommend using the exact keyword a maximum of 2 times.

2. Play around with your exact keyword and find its related keywords. We recommend using 2 different related keywords a maximum of 2 times if you are building 10 backlinks.

3. Use the brand name and its variations like we saw with InVideo 6 times if you are building 10 backlinks.

4. This means that in a package of 10 backlinks, 6 backlinks are going to your home page with varied brand name anchor texts.

5. Consequently, the page you want to really rank for gets 4 backlinks with 4 primary keyword variations.

6. If you have built a lot of backlinks for your homepage in the past and it has good diversity, you can increase the number of backlinks going to your primary keyword page and also increase the variations in anchor text as needed.

I hope you learnt something from this example. If you are building more backlinks than 10, you would probably link to more pages besides just the homepage and the primary keyword page. So the more links you build, the more pages you need to use to make it appear organic.

Next week, I’ll share how to build a lot of foundational links for your homepage, so that every time you buy backlinks, you can point them to the most important pages which in this case are your primary keyword pages without worrying about the link profile.

Until next time,
Have a good one!