One of the most important things to do when you want to build traffic for your site is link building.

OK, I know, everybody knows that, you’re probably asking yourself why am I writing old news?!!

Well, from my experience, I have observed that a lot of people when building links, miss a very important point: they build links either not  thinking too much about the anchor text, either overdoing it and frankly speaking, either way is wrong.

Shortly speaking, the first case would be when you don’t have a plan for the anchor text and you add links to your site either with the website address as the anchor text, like www.layoutgarden.com, either with not focused anchor text. A link is a link, so it won’t hurt you, that’s true and if the page you are linking from has a good PR, probably your PR will increase too. But that’s not the reason of this post, is it?

The second case is when you start building links using well targeted keywords. Let’s say you want to build links for “custom WordPress themes”. OK, you have the keywords, now you start building links with these keywords, and build, build, build hundreds of links with these keywords.

Will you get a positive answer?

The answer is no.

The rule you should follow should be that your links should feel natural to Google. Imagine how a process of natural link building would be:

  1. Slow. What kind of a website you could possibly have that people just start linking to you from moment 0 with hundreds and thousands links? Probably in a natural process it won’t happen. Instead, links will grow day by day, one at a time, when people discover something important on your site. That is slow. That is good.
  2. The anchor text on the links will not be the same. Naturally, when 100 people that don’t know each other will link to one single website, it will be impossible that all 100 of them link to the same page THE SAME WAY, WITH THE SAME ANCHOR TEXT. Logically, no? For the sake of the above example, let’s keep it and work around it, so, there is no way that 100 people link to the same page on the same site and all think on the anchor text as “custom WordPress themes”. Don’t you think? Some of them will probably say “custom blog themes”, others will say custom designed WordPress themes, etc. The point is that they won’t link the same way to your site. Then how can you possibly believe Google won’t see it also?
  3. The links will be distributed to more pages on your site. Having all the links to one single page, usually the homepage, won’t feel natural. Because of the same above reason, people won’t link all 100 of them to the same page. Beside the situation when your site provides a particular, service that will be represented by the site as a whole, people will probably link to whatever they find on your site that interests them. And they will probably find this particular information on particular pages, not necessarily on the home page.

So, naturally, you will start thinking how to avoid the above mistakes. Well, pretty easy, as when learning French in school, half of the answer in contained in the question:

  1. Don’t rush into building links. Build one-two today, 2-3 tomorrow, slowly. Even if you get the chance to build 100 links today, such an event won’t go unnoticed by Google, trust me. It will do you more harm than good.
  2. Change the anchor text here and there. The problem here is that you target some keywords, you want to rank well for them, you don’t want to dilute them isn’t it? You won’t, if you work smart. Start building links AROUND your keywords. Build let’s say somewhere around 50% of your links with the exact anchor text and the rest 50%, variate around the anchor text. Like “custom WordPress theme design”, “designing custom WordPress themes”, “how to design a custom WordPress blog theme”, etc. You get my point. All these will help you dilute a bit the links to your website while keeping the keywords focused.
  3. Link to more pages on your site. Homepage, inner pages, everything is good. Never link only to your homepage. Nothing more to say here, I guess.

Maybe this article will sound basic to you but you would be amazed of how many people make mistakes with building links with the exact same anchor text, getting the opposite result than they desired.

Actually, if I think about it, it is like with everything in life: extremes fall fast, too much is too much in every domain and link building is not different, isn’t it?