Link Building is a never-ending process, do it right and the search engines will love you, get it wrong and your website will be left to rot in a dark corner of the internet due to ranking penalties. When starting any new link building campaign the first thing you want to look at, no matter how old the website may be is the volume of branded anchor text vs targeted anchor text.
My suggested ratio is to have at least 40% of your anchor text branded, this makes you a recognised brand in the eyes of the search engine and improves your domain authority greatly, which in turn will help your rankings for targeted keywords. There are many ways to gain branded links, from creating widgets to submitting your website to directories, and you can even go for anchor text such as “Company Name – Keyword” to take advantage of the halo effect.
Ways to Get Branded Links
Gaining branded links should be the easiest task in your link building campaign, there are so many places where this type of link would look natural and there are also a few ways to automate this.
My techniques involve:
- Directory Submissions
- Widget Creation
- WordPress Theme Creation
- Blog and Forum Comments
- Banner Advertising
- Guest Blogging
- Social Media
Rotate Your Anchor Text
When building branded links make sure you use the full range of alternitive anchor text and dont just build them all to your homepage, spread them out through your entire website, remember every page warrants a branded link and it gives you a good natural link profile to build on.
Some examples of anchor text that can be used are:
- Company Name
- DomainName
- company name > Having a mixture of with and without capitals looks more natural
- Company Name – Keyword > Good for building to deep level pages
- DomainName – Keyword > Also good for deep level pages
Well that’s it for Part 1, just remember branded links are the key to success and watch out for Part 2 where I will discuss the importance of sourcing no-follow links so watch out for it.
