From keyword anchors to naked links, Enfusen’s Roger Bryan explains how link-building SEO strategies can prevent your organization’s keywords from getting lost in the depths of the web, and among top-ranking search engine results.
0:37 Anchor Text style of link-building
3:19 Naked Text style of link-building
4:43 Why link-building SEO strategies matter
8:30 How to out-smart Google’s game
Hi this is Roger from Enfusen. This video is … I’m going to call link building 101. What we’re going to be talking about is some of the different link building strategies and different elements of link building diversity that will help you stay outside of the Google search engines grey area for what you’re doing.
So we’re going to start out with having the keyword as marketing automation. Our landing page is going to be domain.com/marketingautomation. So now that we know that let’s talk about some of the different link building styles.
First off we’re going to talk about anchor. There’s a lot of different anchor text styles.
So the first one is called exact match and really what that means is that we’re going to take the keyword, and you know what because it will look like this on a website and we’re gonna put marketing automation as that exact text and if somebody wants to click on that word they would go over to this landing page. That’s an exact match anchor text.
The next style of anchor is a Branded. A good example of that would be Hubspot marketing automation. Again, that is just text that is part of a larger piece of content that appears as a link and can be clicked and link back over to your landing page.
The next type that we’re going to talk about is what we call synonym anchor text. So that could be something like [00:02:04 writes on white board]. Now you notice that marketing and some semblance of automation is still in this, so we’re going to call that a synonym type. I’m going to explain to you in a minute once I’ve defined all the different types why there’s so many and why it’s important.
The next one is phrase match. Phrase could be for F, phrase could be something like [00:02:46 writes on white board]. So you can see that we’ve got marketing automation as part of this. We’ve used it with a combination of other words, either a prefix or a suffix to the overall term so that it is not the exact match that’s here.
Another style that we like to use is random. That could be something as simple as like here or learn more or visit. It’s just something to show that you can get from where you are in that copy over to this landing page.
Now a naked text is pretty straight forward. It is really just the landing page, the full URL, as a clickable link inside a piece of content. So it would appear like this [00:03:40 writes on white board]. Hopefully this stays in the frame. Really it’s just putting that actually in the copy so that somebody can see this link, it’s highlighted as a link, they know that they click it and they can get over to this landing page. Now with naked links it’s also a good idea in your content to also use multiple variances of this as long as the right canonical are setup on a website. If you don’t know what that means don’t really worry about it, I’m just going to show you couple of different ways that you can write this link. It can be something as simple as [00:04:18 writes on white board]. So notice that we just left out this piece. It can be [00:04:31 writes on white board]. So now we’ve left out this piece. If we keep going down …
Here’s why it’s important. The Google search engine along with all other search engine algorithms they’re not necessarily binary, but they are very systematic. They’re looking for trends that show that your manipulating the game. Which all search engine optimization when you’re talking about a link building strategy like this is in some sense manipulation unless you’re doing it with super high quality content and PR, but they’re looking for you to make a simple mistake. Simple mistakes that you can make is always using your exact match thinking that’s going to get you the best results or always using the exact same URL structure. Now I talked about this from a naked perspective, underneath an anchor text of course is a link. It’s a good idea that underneath your anchor text no matter what you’re using. When you link back to this landing page that you use some of this variance whether you’re using the full HTTP, just the www, the direct domain, and that also don’t forget that you also want to mix in home page links as well as links to other sections of your website such as maybe a landing page, pricing page, resource page, an about.
Now why does all of this matter? There’s a lot of different information out here and I can talk a little bit about where you can get these links from maybe in a different video. The reason this is important is because like I said Google has an algorithm. Let’s say that this is all the links that you have to a landing page. Now there’s a lot of questions about what are the right percentages of everything, I’m not going to go into exact numbers, but what I’m going to tell you is is that you do need variety.
So let’s say that exact is pink. So we’re trying to get this page to rank for that keyword. So we want to go in and we want this many of our links to be exact match. We’re then going to go in and say that we want branded. Now why is branded important beyond just the different link densities? Well you want the correlation between your brand and your keyword, that’s important. Google looks to see if you have a credible and authoritative brand. So let’s say we’re going to do this much branding. Now let’s go and look at synonyms and we’re going to say that we’re going to do this much synonyms and we’re going to do phrase. Maybe we’re going to do this much in phrase. I’m going to use this for random, and then last but not least we will go with this for naked and we’re going to finish this pie off with naked.
Some people say there’s exact statistics to this that you need to stay within to get this exactly right. I’m going to say that when you’re doing SEO for yourself or for clients have some variety. Switch up the URL structure that you’re using, switch where you’re driving the links to. Use exact, match, brand, synonym, phrase, and random. There may be some other styles that you can use in here but there are the primary ones that we use.
We always say that for every one primary key word you should have at least 5 synonyms that you’re using on a regular ongoing basis that have correlating value and can convert visitors to that page just as well as the primary. You should always have a landing page, home page, and at least one of these inside of your SEO strategy. If you’re not doing this it’s not that SEO’s not going to work, it’s just that you are opening yourself up to being discovered. Letting Google know that you are not playing their game and giving them a chance for their algorithm, which is kind of simplistic even though there’s hundreds of variables to it. That they’re just going out there looking for somebody who’s not taking the time to think this through.
So they’re always using the exact same exact match keyword in every link that they do and they’re always using the exact same URL structure. That’s like raising a red flag and saying the last 100 links that I built are all exactly the same. That’s how you get discovered, that’s how you run into problems. This kind of stuff has been around since early 2012 as a vital, critical, must have element. Between 2008 and 2012 you could really get away with not paying attention to this, but it’s 4 years later. If you’re not doing this and you’re not paying attention to it you’re gonna lose, and it’s that simple. So take advantage of this, work it into your system. If you have any questions about it leave a comment below the video or shoot us a message so we can help you out. This is Roger with Enfusen. Thanks.