We’ve got a million, if not a billion, of competitors on landing in the top spot of the SERP and everyone is climbing the ladder in such an aggressive fashion. As the saying goes, “keyword is the king”, and yes it is and they are in the form of anchor text where the success of your SEO campaign hitches too.
Today, we are going to look at how to make very effective use of anchor texts in building your PBN to establish your website as the king of the hill in the SERP of your keyword niche.
Anchor Texts and Its Effective Usage for PBN
Table of Contents
One of the major techniques used in SEO campaigns is building your private blog network. To some, it’s considered as black hat technique, it’s a grey hat, and to some, it can be considered as a white hat technique. How they differ is by what techniques does the PBN was built upon.
Doing SEO campaign has tons of available techniques that you can employ and the combinations of all the available techniques can steer the direction to whether you’ll make it to the top rank or you’ll break your whole PBN due to getting penalized.
One of the very essential and the very foundational element in PBN building and website ranking it the search query or also known as the keyword. Of course, I bet you know that keywords are what we are typing when we search for something on the web. Although it sounds very simple, these keywords are the very beginning of every SEO campaign.
On building your website ranking, keywords are vital in choosing the perfect anchor text where you’ll hook the links of your main money site as you build the links of your PBN.
Quick Run: All About the Basics
Looking over the websites that you visit, there are certain words where they are colored blue and these words or phrases are clickable. Those words with hyperlinks were there in purpose and in this guide, we are going to talk about the nitty-gritty of those, its effect on website rankings and, how to choose those words.
Understanding how the search engines work and learning important technical terms are the key to a better understanding of selecting the best anchor text for your PBN units.
Search Engine Algorithm
When searching, the Spiders, as we know it, crawl the web to find the best answer to the search query that we have. These spiders are responsible for giving us the results on SERP, having considered all the millions of sites and pages in the index of which is the most reliable, credible, authoritative, and the best answer for the keyword that we’ve typed in.
As the technology advanced and with many SEO hackers found a loophole with the algorithm that will benefit their site ranks tremendously, search engines started to have these Penguins and Panda who does the check and balance on which websites are not credible, spammy, and penalized or get removed from the index, thus, reducing the time of the spiders on finding the best results for the query.
Keywords
In the context, The words that we enter on the search bar are grouped into several classifications. These classifications are:
- Short-Tail
- Long-Tail
- Trending Keywords
- Generic Keywords
- Latent Semantic Index (LSI)
- Niche Keywords
- Geo-targetting Keywords
- Branded Keywords
Backlinks
These links act as a citation. From the word itself, it links back to a reference page or site establishing that the source page is a reliable one and can be trusted. The aim of building a PBN unit is to a source of backlinks for the money site.
Anchor Texts
These are the word, ap air of words, or a phrase on which a website link is hooked upon. In building a PBN, the anchor texts are playing a vital role in the success of the whole link-building process. Spiders, Penguins, and Pandas have their way here to check if the link trail is reliable and trustworthy or spammy and suspicious.
Let’s say you have your main money site “https://wwww.guitarguitar.com” as an example. Your main money site talks about guitars and everything about it. Now on your PBN unit, you made an article and you have an anchor text with the target link as you can see in the image below.
On Choosing the Right Anchor Text
With us learning some of the technical jargon from the previous section, we can now dig in on the process of how to pick the right anchor text that you will use on your PBN unit contents. These aren’t just based on gut feelings, or “it looks great if it has a hyperlink on it” thing. This is based on analytical data science. Don’t get overwhelmed with the term data science as we can fully understand these things as we go along with this guide.
SEO Standards
It’s a clear goal that we want our website to be search engine optimized and thus there are SEO standards that we have to follow that’s why we don’t just call it the best anchor text, rather, it should be the right ones.
Relevance
Anchor texts must be relevant to the target page. In our example above, you’ve got a website about guitars. However, you’ve decided that you just want to make an article about chickens and for the sake of the goal of having a lot of backlinks pointing to your money site, you just hooked the link anyways like in the example below.
You don’t want to do that as it is plain and simple irrelevant and the search engine algorithm would also notice that. In choosing the right anchor text, the words, pair of words, or the phrase that you are to hook the link unto should be relevant to the target site.
Succint
Whilst the algorithm does not define any length of anchor text, it is the best SEO practice to keep your articles concise. The length of an article, its grammar, its content-wise relevance has an effect on the CF/TF, SA/PA of the site in the long run.
Minimal Keyword Density
Since Google is the widely used search engine, SEO standards are based on Google algorithm, and in 2012, they’ve launched the Penguin Update. It penalized those sites and pages who abused keywords stuffing as there are lots of SEO hackers who took advantage of the loophole.
So, in the present times, you have to make sure that your anchor texts are not keyword-stuff because consequences may come around anytime.
Diversify
Anything that is too repetitive can be considered a spammy behavior by the Penguin algorithm so it must be your SEO campaign standard to avoid over-repetition of the same techniques but rather, opt to go for a collection of various techniques. This will not only avoid being tagged as spammy but will also strengthen your website credibility as you are having different approaches to how backlinks are pointing to your money site.
Types of Anchor Texts
Like the keywords, anchor texts have different types. Knowing these will help you in your future SEO campaign as you build your new PBN units.
Naked Link Anchors
These are links that are plainly included in an article, clickable, looks like a website address in the search bar, complete with all the elements from protocol to domain. Works best on the Tier 2 link building.
Generic Anchort Texts
Building a Private Blog Network involves a lot of interlinking of pages and websites, and articles on your PBN unit can make a good these instructing, directional anchor texts such as “click here”, “go here”, “Follow the link here”, and such.
Brander Anchors
These anchors texts are those that use the brand name you carry which is great when you have your domain branded. Using our example above, since your domain name is called Guitarguitar.com, a branded anchor text can be seen like this:
Image Anchors
Using images to hook the links.
Keyword Variation
This kind of anchor text is great for diversification and avoiding keyword-overstuffing.
Partial Match Anchors
This is attaching links to a phrase of words that contain keywords and generics words.
Exact Match Anchors
These are the very king of all these anchor texts. Utilizing this correctly will hype up your website ranking and overdoing this can slide down at least your PBN unit.
Anchor Text Placement
One thing to bear in mind is that the goal of making a PBN for your money site is to boost its ranking through strengthening the site authority, domain authority, and boosting both your trust flow and citation flow.
With your PBN units or domains within the private blog network, you are helping your money site to be a trustworthy reference and thus, making it a top notcher in the search engine results page.
A very quick addition to this guide is learning about the tiers of link building.
Tier 1 are links that directly pointing back to your website. For example, you were able to do get a guest post and it directly links back to your website, or one of your pages in your main money site is used as a reference on external blogs.
Tier 2 links are backlinks that point to the domains and pages that have a Tier 1 link to your website.
Tier 3 are then backlinks that point to Tier 2 links.
This is like three-layered recommendations that must come from virtually different sites. Why is this important? From the above section, we know that the search engine algorithm has penguins that check for spammy behavior of sites.
One of the behaviors that are considered spammy and manipulative is that a webmaster or a single entity is having multiple domains of his own and backlinking to the money site.
As the saying goes, there is the right time and the right place for everything and thus, anchor texts always have the best places at the right time to use.
In building your PBN, making every domain look different from each other is a must given that they will be falling on the same niche since you are supporting your main money site. Correct Anchor text placement plays a vital role in making the link building process avoid being tagged as spammy behavior.
On your Tier 1, it would be best to use Branded anchor texts, Naked links, and Keyword Variations to establish the foundations of your backlink credibility and use very minimal Exact Match anchors. Remember that strengthening your PBN is not an overnight process and it takes days to see the movement of your rankings. Once you’ve laid the foundations, time to boost your Tier 2 and Tier 3 link layers.
Using Generic keyword anchor texts are great on your Tier 2 PBN units as it tends to point the spiders and even organic traffic to a content that refers directly to your main money site. This will boost the CF/TF score of your main site.
Partial Match and LSI Keywords has beneficial results on boosting your Tier 2 and results in further strengthening your main money site especially that the very foundation is built well. This, together with tier 1 and tier 2 link layers will soon reflect on SERP the moment the keywords are entered in the search bars.
Emphasis on Keyword Variations as Anchor Text Consideration
Topical, Niche and Geopositional relevance of your multi-tiered link building are of high importance as you start building your PBN units. Using keyword research tools, you can explore how much website backlinks you will need from a certain keyword. Utilizing this, it will be best to engage in the niche for your anchor texts that point back to your main money site.
Combining it with geo-positional relevant keywords, an example is what nationality or locality does your website targets will help you secure better organic traffic and thus increasing your CF/TF, SA/PA in the process. Topical relevant keywords as your anchor text will create quality backlinks, especially when used on Tiers 2 and 3 links.
Time to Grind
PBN building is not an easy task and requires a lot of analysis and study about keywords so fully maximize the power of anchor text. Nevertheless, doing the right way of anchor text selection will surely have a fruitful reward to your PBN and to the money site it supports.
