Here's a quick question. Say I have a great opportunity for a link on a website for SEO purposes. Now, should I take every opportunity like this to make the links' anchor text my main keyword, or should I attempt to make the linking more realistic by using other anchor text words, or just using the plain URL on occasions?
What's the context?
How much do you care about being seen as an SEO spammer? - dropping your keyword rich links all over the place.
Can you legitimately work in a keyword?
Personally, I go for trying to get links that include a keyword in a way that is natural. Since I have a keyword in the name of my site, this is pretty easy.
If you are doing a guest post, you could do something like:
[Scott Chapman] is an expert copywriter providing [conversion sales copy] for small businesses.
It's quite common to do have a keyword rich link to a sub-page.
Alternatively, you could do:
Scott Chapman is an [expert copywriter] providing sales copy for small-large businesses.
- I would argue that the above example is too SEO-centric and a bit spammy because the term [expert copywriter] is not specific to you. The natural link text would be 'Scott Chapman'.
You could also do:
Scott Chapman is owner of [Chapman Copy & Design] providing [sales copy] for small-large businesses.
- I'd say this is the best.
IMO, if you are dropping links somewhere where people are going to see your links, like guest posts, journals, comments, client footers etc., that you want to make the links as natural as possible, while still getting your keywords in. If you want more specific link text, you can always use places where people are never going to see your links like article sites and for-links-directories.
It seems like I'll get more relevant link juice by using keyword anchortext, but I'm afraid Google might see the backlinks to my site as unrealistic and devalue them, especially if they're all using the same one-word anchortext.
I don't think Google can really tell if you are using unrealistic link text. Take a look at the links poining to these high flyers:
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=hp&q=car+insurance
You will find paid link after paid link all saying thing like [life insurance] and [life insurance quote]. You will even find the links blocked together like that from multiple companies. If Google could tell the links were SEO, those companies wouldn't still be doing it.