Anchor text... How hard should one try?

[ZakGottlieb71]

I'm looking at a lot of competitor's sites, and they only seem to have gone after root domain anchor text in their link-building campaigns. Since I am just launching and am essentially a one-man band (with some hired help), is it worth my while to attempt to optimize individual keywords or pages at this point, or should I just do as they have done, and try to get domain-name links wherever I can?

For that matter, should I spend more time going for the low-hanging fruit of followed blog comments, forum posts etc, or emailing influencers to try and get editorial links?

Sorry if that last one is a bit broad, and thanks very much in advance for any and all help.

[ZakGottlieb71]

OK. So My takeaway from this is that it's probably best (since it's so much easier) to go mostly for brand-related anchor text, other perhaps than in cases where I'm really trying to make a push on a particular page? If that's correct, then my last question is: Are brand anchor text links to a particular page thought to be weighted considerably less by Google than page title anchor text for that particular page?

[AlanBleiweiss]

too many people assume that Google penalizes a site for same-word anchor text as a single criteria. They don't penalize for brand related phrases as much as for non-brand keyword over-use, because it's "natural" that a site or company would be referred to by it's brand name by most people. It's much less likely that a site or company would be referred to by an over-abundance of a non-brand phrase, unless that company was so well known by that phrase or those phrases as to be unique enough that those phrases were synonymous with that brand. The overwhelming majority of sites and companies in existence do not enjoy such a luxury.

[ZakGottlieb71]

This seems to make a lot of sense, but then I look at the link profile with OSE of a site like Askmen - in the top 500 of the most-trafficked sites in the U.S - and over 95% of their 10,000 or so backlinks are brand name... There are very few that appear to be targeting specific keywords at all. I know one counterexample isn't much, but this was literally the first site of that size that I looked at. If Google had changed its criteria to those you suggest, could one not expect a site like this to be massively penalized?

[AlanBleiweiss]

To add to Banar's recommendation, I'll offer that Google has been focused more on quality of trust signals in the past year and change than ever - a big part of that is "how natural does the link profile look?"   Too much emphasis on brand only, or only one or two phrases across all or even most of your anchor text is an unnatural pattern.  So too is obtaining links purely or mostly from the "low hanging fruit" you describe.  You need variety of anchor text, variety of pages links point to, and variety of sources links come from.

[Banar]

Hi Zachary,

DO NOT ever target one page only. If you are really very very busy, please, optimize at least couple of pages. There has to be a diversity in links as well as anchor text. Of course, you will concentrate a little more at home page and main keywords but please remember about link and anchor text diversity.

As of the low-hanging fruit - absolutely NO. It's much better to build 10 good links than 1,000 spammy links. Google is smarter than this. Trust me, Google's thousands of engineers are working every day to improve search algorithm. You don't want to take that chance and compete with them.

Good luck & see you at the top