On-Page SEO: Backlinks: Steps to understand it! Part 1

In 2021 backlinks are attracting more and more attention from website users. What do these mysterious backlinks represent? What does it take to build a backlink page that Google will love? If done correctly, it helps to get your website to the top of Google at a much faster speed. So let's begin…

​​The Ratios of Anchor Text

An anchor text ratio is the distribution of all the anchor texts on your page.

Ratios are important because you need to have a natural-looking mix of anchor text in all of your backlinks.

What will qualify as natural?

There are three main categories to group all anchor texts fit into:

Natural Anchors - “this article”, or "learn more"; In other words, something that contains no reference to any key phrase. Your brand name or full URL as the anchor fits here as well. The anchor text is ‘natural’ if it isn’t a commercial keyword phrase. For example, we would class these anchor texts as natural:

• "click here"

• "click here for more info"

• "more info"

• "visit this website"

• "see more"

• "read more"

• "this page has more information" etc.

Let’s split anchor texts into only 2 categories, natural and unnatural, then you can consider brand anchor texts as a natural anchor text for link building. Check out these examples below:

• "brandname.com"

• "www.brandname.com"

• "brand-name"

• "http://www.brandname.com"

• "visit brandname.com"

• "visit brand name"

Exact Match Anchors - these anchor texts are exactly the key phrase you are trying to rank for and nothing else. Exact match keyword anchor texts should Exactonly make up a very small percentage of your entire anchor text distribution profile. If it’s anything more than 10-20% you should be very wary.

• "red cars"

• "buy red cars"

• "cheap red cars"

• "red cars sale"

• "red cars discount"

• "red cars los angeles"

Exact Keywords can be risky, and here is why:

Obviously, exact match keyword anchors always are an easy target for link building because they are known as the keyword research stage; this is where you will find out what keywords users type into a search engine that generates traffic, in other words, they show users search intent.

If you find out that the keyword "red cars los angeles" develops a large amount of search traffic this doesn’t mean you should be doing link building like it’s 1999 and building out links with the anchor text ‘red cars los angeles’.

There are a few problems with this.

1. ‘red cars los angeles’ doesn’t make sense within the flow of content. The first thing to fix would be to add the word ‘in’ e.g ‘red cars in los angeles’.

2. You need to capitalize some words such as city names – ‘red cars in Los Angeles’.

3. If you were getting links naturally (which is what you should imitate) then how does the website you’re getting a link from know to link to you using your keywords? They don’t… Therefore think about the words they might use to link to you.

It’s important to note that the most powerful and high-ranking websites in the world don’t have high exact match keyword anchor text distribution in their link profile. In fact, it makes up less than 10%, as you can confirm reading this article.

Blended Anchors - is a combination of the Natural and Exact keywords. It contains all or part of a key phrase in the anchor, mixed in with other words.

(If my key phrase was “backlink software”, a blended anchor might be something like, “There are companies that have the best backlink software in the world” or it could be “try this software”.)

The right combination of these three categories dictates what looks most natural to Google.

I’m starting with anchor text ratios because not only are they the most commonly misunderstood principle in SEO, but getting this wrong can derail any SEO campaign.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when building links:

1. How many natural or branded anchors does each page of your website has?

2. How many exact match anchors does the page have?

3. How many anchors are blended phrases?

I know this sounds like tedious work, but there is a really easy way to automate this. And if you were to go through each backlink profile of the top-ranked competitors, you can begin to sort their backlinks into one of these three categories all the same. Once you have the profiles for your competitors in the top ten, you know exactly what you need to do is to match and beat them. (Don't worry, you can automate that too.) This is how you create a link-building strategy.

​There is even more in-depth information about the topic in this blog post if you are interested.

​Tomorrow, we are going to discuss building brand trust and how doing it wrong is the reason most SEO campaigns fail.

Until then!

Tatiana and Team BeWIXed