Summary of Anchor Text: How I Optimize it (Step-by-Step)

00:00:00 - 00:10:00

In this video about anchor text optimization, Matt Diggity explains the importance of creating a natural and diversified anchor text distribution to avoid penalties from Google. He advises against a cookie-cutter approach and instead suggests reverse engineering competitors' anchor text distributions to find a natural distribution for your niche. Diggity offers eight additional anchor optimization techniques, such as not using the same target anchor text more than once and diversifying your URL anchors. Additionally, he mentions the practice of surrounding non-target anchors with keywords to help Google better understand the page's content and recommends using synonyms for added relevancy without risking over-optimization.

• 00:00:00 In this section, Matt Diggity explains the importance of anchor text in SEO and how to optimize it for better rankings. Target anchor text, which includes at least one word of the target keyword, is crucial but should be used sparingly to avoid penalties from Google. This is where other types of anchor texts, such as branded, URL, topical, and miscellaneous anchors, come in to create a natural and diverse anchor text distribution. Diggity also introduces Otis, a premium age domain marketplace that can provide quality domains with high authority backlinks for improved SEO.
• 00:05:00 In this section, the speaker warns against the use of a cookie-cutter anchor distribution and instead advises finding a distribution that looks natural for your niche through reverse engineering. The speaker walks through how to use a tool like Ahrefs to spy on your competitors' anchor text distributions, categorize your own anchor text, and make a pivot table to count the number of referring domains for each anchor category. The speaker offers eight additional anchor optimization techniques, such as not using the same target anchor text more than once, leveraging the SEO title, matching the anchor with the link type, breaking up your keyword phrase, writing in proper English, diversifying your URL anchors, and adding keywords around non-target anchors to ensure a natural anchor text distribution and avoid being penalized by the Penguin algorithm.
• 00:10:00 In this section, the video discusses the common industry practice of surrounding non-target anchors with keywords to help Google better understand the page's content. The speaker mentions that although this is just an assumption and they have not personally tested it, they plan to do so and encourage viewers to subscribe to hear their findings. The video's speaker also recommends using synonyms to add more relevancy to anchors without risking over-optimization, as Google understands that synonyms have the same meaning.