If you’re having some trouble ranking well in the search engines for certain keyword phrases, it might be that you need to look at the anchor text links that are pointing to your website. Those anchors might be old and the “chain” might be rusty. You might need to update them, and even vary them a bit.

When it comes to organic search engine rankings in Google, one of the many factors that they consider is the “link text” or “anchor text” that is pointing to a web page. Anchor text is the “link label or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.” Google has, for many years now, looked at what other people say about you, or, more specifically, what other web sites say about your web page. So, when you’re trying to “rank well” in the search engines for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, something you can do is to try to get links to your website with certain “anchor text”.

Over the years, we have seen an increase in people trying to buy links with specific anchor text in order to influence the search engine rankings. We’ve also seen a lot of people try Google bombing (also known as googlebombing), where pranksters try to get a certain web page to show up in the search results even though that phrase isn’t mentioned on the web page. Take a look at Google’s googlebombing blog post and you’ll see an example of it. In 2007, Search Engine Land reported that Google effectively “killed miserable failure” by making changes to the Google algorithm. So, since about 2007 or late 2006 (whenever they made the change to their algorithm), it has been important to note that when you are trying to get links to your web page for search engine optimization purposes, you need to “vary the anchor text” that is used. If you want to rank for “search engine optimization”, then you need to use different anchor text links to your website, like this:

Search Engine Optimization blog

Search Engine Optimization website

Search Engine Optimization services

Dallas Search Engine Optimization firm

Search Engine Optimization and PPC company

I know that the examples above don’t link to the same web page, but the anchor text shows the various versions of the anchor text. We know that Google is “looking for” anchor text that’s not natural, anchor text that appears to be “rigged” or “too exact”. Whatever the case, you need different versions of the anchor text. Different phrases. There are several ways to come up with different anchor text:

- Look at your keyword research and see what people are searching for

- Look at your web stats. Are there certain versions of the keyword phrase that you’re ranking for that you haven’t thought of yet? Perhaps you could use one of those.

- Look at your competitors’ websites. Are they using any keywords in their title tags that you aren’t using?

- Look at the Google Wonder Wheel.

The Google Wonder Wheel is a pretty new feature, which is “a graphical way to explore topics by clicking on related searches that go deeper into the subject of the main query.” In other words, it looks like this:

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