Should I Always Build Links Using Keyword Anchor Text?

If you take a look at any of the many webmaster forums online, you will see that there are many struggling Internet Marketers who are after mass quantities of links to their websites that are keyword based, and are crawlable. So, the question here that I want to answer for you is the one involving whether or not this is good practice or not. Let's dive in...

First, lets identify the role that the search engines play in this scenario. Google, being the primary search engine of choice for the majority of the world, will always act in a way that makes sure that they give preference to the website that appears to have ranked naturally over time, and has a steady backlink indexing rate. In their eyes, a website that must manipulate the search engine results page in order to rank well means that there is going to be a lower grade of quality on page.

Due to this, Google likes to give preference to pages that have a much more diverse and naturally grown backlink structure. I'm talking about a variety of link types from a variety of different types of websites. Blogs, forums, social media, directories, and more. If a website is in a competitive niche, with only links coming from high authority blogs, then it is obvious that this will not appear as being natural to Google, and the other search engines for that matter.

So, by now, you would get the idea that it is absolutely unwise to focus 100% of your link building efforts on keyword anchor text based links, but what is also extremely important here is to not focus only on specific links from specific websites. For example, if you only try to generate high pagerank links, or links from only government and education domains, chances are it will not work in your favor. You need to be more diverse than that.

So, if you are not going to be building only keyword based anchor text links, what should you be focusing on instead? I could make a million and one suggestions here, each would work fine, however what has worked great for me is to build a combination of keyword based anchor texts that all use different modifiers before the main keyword. Not only that, but even linking out using the URL as anchor text works extremely well.

The key above all else is to just look natural. If your link structure looks as though it was made to help you rank better, then chances are that the search engines are going to notice this. Build naturally, focus on natural backlink indexing, and hopefully you and I can meet some day at the top of the search engines!