Building "keyword" backlinks

[GrumpyCarl]

Looking for some opinions here please.  Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth.  I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing.

These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable...

myblogguest

bloggerlinkup

postjoint

Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy

I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth.

Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed.

The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site.

My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days?  The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!!

Thanks

Carl

[socialengaged]

if you come up with a big idea, and link the page in the idea, you will get tons of links

[KarlBantleman]

I'd be really careful when it comes to keyword anchor text links. I find that 99% of them are either unnatural (ie in author bios) or paid for which is even worse (unless you no-follow it!). Ensure that your onpage SEO areas are perfected and make sure that there are no other issues onsite that could be hindering your rankings and then concentrate on producing high quality content.

Have a look at your backlink profile and see what percentage of branded links to keyword anchor text links you have because you should have a higher percentage of branded links. Those who concentrate on including too many anchor text links will (if they haven't been already) be penalised.

[GrumpyCarl]

thanks for the reply, you make a good point about not overdoing the anchor text and using generic anchors to increase a page authority, that is a good strategy in the ideal world where you can optimise one landing page for one keyword. The trouble occurs when a client wants to rank one page for several different keywords. You may be able to rank for one or maybe two on the strength of good page authority and good onpage seo, but what about the other x keywords they want to rank for? Too few clients think about seo when building their site, in my opinion

[socialengaged]

Hello.

Thus anchor in backlinks is very important, I will not only worry about that. With this I mean you can have anchor as "read more" from a very valuable and authoritative website, which will be very important anyway. I will, in this case, not being able to decide anchors, improve my keyword (and similar) mostly ONPAGE, trying also to increment external forward links with the preferred anchor (which I can now choose) and internal linking from / to that page, still using the preferred anchor.

Otherwise, to get anchor you may want also try to ask the webmaster of the site you want the backlink from, to add your preferred anchor. If this is not possible, also try maybe including the whole code in a message to webmaster. You may be able to receive your wanted anchor. But as well, as far as I know, even anchor is very important, to have "read more" anchors may be useful as well, avoiding keyword stuffing in anchor.

Hope my thoughts are right, and may help you a little

Eugenio