Last week I asked one of my staff to create a promotion plan that would make an existing site rank that already ranked for it’s main keyword phrase to also rank for a new keyword phrase, and then submit that plan to me for review. She created a great, comprehensive plan including varying sources of backlinks and social media promotion.

Unfortunately, for raking the site for a new keyword, it wasn’t the most effective plan.

Why?

Her plan was focusing on VOLUME of links. That is, getting tons of links from many sources such as:

• Blog commenting
• Forum posting
• Article submission
• Social media profiles
• Directory submission
• Social bookmarking
• RSS submission
• Blog carnivals

LINK BUILDING FOR VOLUME

Getting a bunch of links from all kinds of sources is an excellent strategy. It’s actually important for a site to have incoming links from several kinds of sites, a topic I wrote about in “Link Mixology – The 12 Kinds of Links Your Site Needs.”

However, this kind of link building is more appropriate for NEW sites.

New sites need some “street cred” in the eyes of the search engines. They need to both look natural and popular.

We create that natural and popular looking link profile by:

1. Building links from a variety of sources and…
2. Varying the anchor text that links back to our site

On a new site, while you might want to rank for the keyword phrase “blue widgets” you certainly wouldn’t want to use “blue widgets” every single time you get a link back to your site.  That’s unnatural and is called “over optimization.” It can lead to your site having less than stellar search engine rankings.

Fortunately, since we’re also building links from many sources, our anchor text will naturally vary.

For example, you usually control the anchor text your site gets when submitting to article directories. In these cases, you would use “blue widgets” as your anchor text.

But then you’ll also be incorporating social bookmarking or blog commenting, where your anchor text might be secondary “tags” (in the case of social bookmarking) or your name (in the case of blog commenting).

Aside: Yes, of course you can use your main keyword as anchor text when submitting blog comments, but they often are perceived as spammy and fake when you do so, and are approved less often and deleted more often. Skip the anchor text here, it’s not worth the hassle.

You can see that when you are building links for volume, you achieve variation in backlink sources as well as variation in anchor text.

LINK BUILDING FOR ANCHOR TEXT

Once your site has been established and a variety of backlink types and a variety of anchor texts have been built for it, you may need an extra boost in the search engines to rank for your main keyword phrase or in my case, an additional secondary keyword phrase.

For this, you need to target a specific anchor text. And as such, your link building should be focused primarily on getting links from sources that allow you to control your anchor text.

Article marketing is the most obvious solution and where you’ll likely spend most of your time, as you generally write your own “About The Author” box and include the exact anchor text you’d like.

Article marketing can include traditional article submission (like adding your piece to EzineArticles) as well as submitting your articles to places like Article Marketing Automation, which then distributes your content and chosen anchor text throughout their network of participating blogs.

Another strategy you’ll want to employ while building links for a specific anchor text is using social media sites likeHubpages & Squidoo to post articles and RSS feeds that link back to your site. With these services, you are often in control of your anchor text as well.

HOW TO DECIDE WHICH KIND OF LINK BUILDING YOU NEED

How do you decide if you’ve done “enough” of the “Volume” kind of link building and need to focus on anchor text link building?

Keep in mind this isn’t an exact science but rather a guideline, as on page optimization, domain name, domain age, where your & your competition’s backlinks are coming from, etc. all contribute to a site’s rank.

As a general blueprint, I look at the number of backlinks my competition has and how many of those links use the KW phrase I want to rank for as anchor text. Then I look at my own site’s backlink profile. If my overall number of links is still much lower than my competition, I want more links from varies sources.

If my total number of links is comparable but I’m lacking in links using my main KW phrase as anchor text, I’ll start the process of link building for specific anchor texts.

Which kind of links do you need to build for your site?