Off Page SEO - Mix Up the Anchor Text

I've seen many examples now, of off page SEO gone wrong, by over concentrating on the same anchor text in backlinks.

For the uninitiated, the anchor text is the link text, so if your keyword is "Search engine optimization" then instead of having "click here" as the link text, you would have "Search engine optimization" as the link text, which is known as anchor text.

The problem though, comes from over concentrating on the same anchor text. As I say in a lot of my articles, search engines look for natural use of keywords, in content, in tags & also in backlinks. Naturally, a quality website will not just be about one keyword, naturally good websites have a number of important keywords & phrases which relate to the main keywords, and search engines will expect to see more than one version of your anchor text, otherwise it will look unnatural to them, and may trip spam filters - which will result in less link popularity, rather than the increase you were hoping for.

I often get asked about how many backlinks it's safe to get in a short period of time - the answer is that it's not really about the number, but the variation of anchor text. If you get a large number of backlinks in a 30 day period that all have the exact same anchor text, for example "search engine optimization" or whatever your main keyword phrase may be, then yes you may well trip spam filters, however if you get a number of backlinks but for a small number of varied keyword phrases, for example "SEO consultant, "Search Engine Marketing" "SEO Services" and so on, rather than just using the same keyword phrase in all backlinks, you're a lot less likely to trip any spam filters.