Rank using an anchor text keyword matrix

Ten years ago, you used to be able to get 100 backlinks with and anchor text of “dedicated server” and you’d rank in the top 10 for that search phrase. Those days are over.

With anti-google-bombing filters and other spam filters, sites that use the same anchor for their backlinks are not ranking well, or are being filtered out completely.

The search engines are looking for unique backlinks from trusted authority sites.

Anchor text matrix

If you want to rank quickly and stay ranked, you need to use a variety of anchor texts. Here’s how to do it, and get ranked for your main keywords at the same time.

The idea here is to write down all the keyword phrases that best describe your site. You should be able to come up with 100 phrases. Single words should not be included in the matrix. Two, three and four word phrases work best.

I used the phrases: offshore hosting, offshore web hosting, hosting offshore, offshore server hosting and web hosting offshore.

NOTE: It might seem logical that offshore hosting and hosting offshore are the same phrase, but in fact, they are treated as completely different phrases by the search engines.

I listed five keyword phrases so I used a 5 by 5 matrix. But you can use any number you want. More is better, actually.

In this example, our most frequent overlap is “offshore hosting”. As you can imagine, that is the phrase that we want to rank for!

For a typical site, you would build a matrix for each niche on your site. For example, we would build a separate matrix for our “virtual private server” product, another matrix for our “dual homed hosting” product etc.

Get backlinks using your keyword matrix

Once you have created and fine tuned your keyword matrix, take your list of keyword phrases and get backlinks with them.

The first place to get backlinks is on the internal linking structure of your own web site. So every time we referred to “offshore hosting” in the content of our site, we would change this phrase to one from our keyword matrix, such as “hosting offshore” or “offshore web hosting”.

Once you have perfected your internal linking structure, build backlinks with external sites in similar niches to yours. And use your keyword phrases from your matrix, of course!

Enjoy!