Anchor Text in Backlinks

You are no doubt familiar with the holy grail of SEO, the search for backlinks with relevant anchor text since they are the key to successful off-site optimization of your website or blog. Let me give you a specific example of how this works, here is a Google SERP for the keyword Carl, notice this very blog appears on the first page. I'm sure you could easily find a keyword or phrase that places your blog or site in the first page of the SERPs as well so you might wonder what the point is.

Great question, and I've struggled to answer it myself, but ultimately it comes down to this. If anyone in the world was search for "Carl" they would surely find my blog yet hardly anyone ever does, in fact it only produces one or two visitors per day, so you should assume this isn't a relevant keyword. By contrast, search engine optimization tips, which is more relevant to at least one of my chosen categories sees me in the top 10 SERP for some of Google's datacenters. On others my blog appears on the second page.

I could keep linking to other Google search results pages where my blog appears in the top ten but you might think I was showing off, so let's get down to the nitty gritty of why relevance is important and how to do something about getting more backlinks with relevant anchor text. To do this I'll explain why it is that my blog appears in the top ten for "Carl". You see when I comment on other people's blogs I use my name, and similarly when I first released templates I used the anchor text "Carl Galloway". This was back in the day when I thought any link was a good link.

The SEO ranking I have is the result of hard work, not all of it mine, and for this I really need to thank the guys who do so much hard work for me, and if you have a site you'd like to rank for certain keywords be sure to get your SEO from Paul at CR Solutions. By being more aware of anchor text I've been able to push other keyphrases into the top ten, although I've yet to have much success with single word keywords but I'm sure this is only a matter of time.

If you haven't thought too much about relevant backlinks in the past I'm sure you now feel as if you've experienced a light bulb moment, and I've got some more wonderful news. By using keywords as part of your name when you comment on another persons blog you can artificially increase the number of backlinks with relevant anchor text, for example I could use "Carl in Spain" or "Carl does SEO" when I comment on your blog and this will give me more relevant backlinks. Hope this helps, Carl the awesome Spanish SEO dude!