Linking Strategies For The Panda and Penguin Age

Starting out, I want to make it clear that search engine optimization, search engine marketing, seo or what have you is nothing more than marketing. Period.

Things to focus on:

- Vary anchor text and aim for less than 50% of anchor text to be optimized
- Keep quality as high as possible
- Get a good mix of no follow and do follow links
- Get a wide variety of links - don't just focus on one type
- Avoid blog networks, various schemes and anything that may look unnatural

Vary Anchor Text

Simple, when creating links, create them like users would. Be overly specific or over simplified won't work. You need to include your 'money keywords', yes, but you also have to consider the subject of the links and what users would be including in a link.

High Quality - Get As Many As Possible

Start a good link building campaign. Submit quality articles to sites such as this one. Get a social presence. Link to your articles and site often. Vary the links, anchor text and frequency.

Mix It Up!

Get No Follow, Do Follow links. Get them from blogs, directories, article sites, social and Web 2.0 sites and keep it up!

Be advised: One site that I know of had a reasonable amount of text links and diversity and their domain name happened to be the exact thing they did and people would be searching for. They had very little seo work done and what backlinks they did have were greater than the competition. They were de-ranked anyways. What worked? The classified ads they had, which of course had content and pointer to their main site. So it isn't always about linking your url.

So remember....

It's all about focusing on quality these days. Ranking is very easy when you use quality link building. Spammy link building has been great for years but it is slowly coming to an end. Get high PR links through guest posting or a private blog source. Create quality web 2.0's that link to your website. Quality, reputable sources are key. Build quality links to your site from quality sources. And build a quality site while you're at it.

Try to get a piece of content on your site to go viral, the point of this is to build links, not get traffic through the links. The traffic will come through the other pages on the site due to your site's authority built through the 100% legit links that will come when your content goes viral.

There are a lot of ways to build links, but the only ways that really work are the ones that are quality, natural and come from reputable sources. Failure to link properly wastes time, money, and energy and really doesn't even get a good search engines attention, it will leave you at the bottom. So start your quality linking strategy today.

Quality link building is not easy. But if you want to be successful at link building you'll need to include a diverse set of quality articles posted around the internet and article directories are a great place to do just that.

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Anchor Text: Beating The Panda and The Penguin

Anchor text is nothing more than the text you click on in a link. It has great SEO value. It IS your keyword. So those of you trying to rank for specific keywords in SEO, remember, DON'T' OVER USE A KEYWORD IN YOUR ANCHOR TEXT.

Please understand that most links to content online don't have to be "keyword perfect".

On that subject, I'd like to mention that I tend to optimize on a ten to one ratio. Meaning any keyword I want to anchor for I am going to find ten (or more) long tail keywords for my SEO efforts and content. NEVER will I use keyword1 over and over again and again. In fact I actually like to 'water down' my SEO to hide it from Google, say with article marketing.

Then, I am going to switch gears, use a different SEO tactic and use the same keywords all over again.

The reason why I like to water down my SEO: A lot of SEO experts are hypothesizing that exact match anchor text might have been a big flag for the Penguin update. It's important to diversify your anchor text so the search engines don't have any reason to suspect that you might be trying to manipulate the SERPs.

Further, for those of us that are risk takers: Branded keywords are probably going to make up a large percentage of your link portfolio, but you don't want to rely too heavily on a short list of targeted keywords (and please don't use CLÍCK HERE as anchor text; it has no SEO value) for your links. Much like with optimizing your content, there is no "right" number of times to use a particular keyword or keyword phrase as your anchor text.

So when you start thinking about keywords for your anchor text, start with the money keywords and throw in a lot of long tail and English keywords as well, the stuff a human might use, but unfortunately it cannot be misspelled nor can it make nonsense. Sadly, that is not how people search but if you're going to be embedding the text as links in your content, this is what you must do.

At some point I know you're going to start saying $#!@#$%! Google. Just like me. But you'll have to get used to working your SEO better and smarter. They know that Google is a machine. They know humans manipulate machines. But the level of manipulation? It got a little out of hand. Hence we have to be very wise and very natural when it comes to creating words for anchor text links in our content.

If we have too many backlinks with the same keyword in ratio to other keywords and text we have pointing to our site, what is it called? It's called spamming.

Right now, as of this writing, Google HAS NOT gotten it right with their anti-spam update. The only thing they've gone after are small sites relevant to the subject that they are relevant for. And every time they do an update this happens. They key to survive here is basic marketing. You're trying to drive visitors to your site. Period. So repurpose your content in many ways, increase your keyword list and focus on a pattern and style of keyword anchor text linking that fits well into the human eye and average reader. This may very well be the only way to survive the Google "update."

SEO has changed but it is changing for the better. Google does need to get their search updates in line, however, not just with article marketing anchor text. So do be disappointed with the battle you may now be facing, just increase the quality of your anchor text backlinks and the quality of your articles for your SEO efforts.

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