[Video] How to get anchor text distribution from Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is a powerful tool for analyzing backlinks, both your own and your competitors'. One of the great features it allows you to do is find out the anchor text distribution for all the backlinks to a given site. In this video, I show you how to do that.

Video transcript:

Hi, I'm John Crenshaw, founder of Razorlight Media. We're a search engine marketing company based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. In this video, we're going to cover how to get anchor text distribution from Majestic SEO. Majestic SEO is a great alternative to Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo Site Explorer was free. We all loved that, but now it's all gone. The days of that are over. So, we've got to use something else. Majestic SEO is fantastic. It also gives you way more data than Yahoo Site Explorer would give you. You have to pay for it. It's about $50 a month, but indispensable if you're doing SEO on a regular basis.

Why do we need anchor text distribution? Well, there's two reasons. First of all, is competitive analysis. Take a look at the top ranked competitors in your niche, and find out what their anchor text distribution is. That will give you an idea of what Google looks for when ranking sites in that niche. Every niche is going to be slightly different as far as what Google accepts for anchor text distribution. How many links can you have with one particular set of anchor text versus another phrase in the anchor text? By examining your competition, the top ranked competition in your niche, you can get a good baseline to work off of.

Now, I've found this isn't totally accurate, primarily because depending on your niche, your competitors could have terrible anchor text distribution. It could not be the ideal that Google's looking for. So, if you follow what they're doing it may be an uphill battle to try to get in front of them. Whereas you may have been better off if you distributed your anchor text a little more naturally, or didn't really follow the competitors that closely at all. But it's a good place to start. The other thing you can do is quickly determine your competitors linking strategy. You can pretty quickly determine, are these guys pumping out tons of spammy links with the same anchor text? That will give you good ideas of where you stand compared to them.

You could also use it for your own adjustments on your own sites. Obviously you don't want to get slapped. This Penguin Update made it so that if you had too much of the same anchor text, you'll get nailed for that. So, you don't want that obviously. You want a good variation of anchor text, a good distribution. Obviously you want to get as close to what Google thinks is perfect in your niche as possible. Analyzing your anchor text distribution will kind of keep you on track to do that. In addition, it will give you some ideas for better anchor text distribution. When you're building links to your site, and you're thinking what anchor texts do I want in this link, knowing what you already have, knowing what your anchor text distribution is already, you can better plan out your strategy.

Let's have a look at it. First of all, we're going to enter a domain in Site Explorer. Obviously you've got to log into Majestic SEO if you haven't done that already. You're going to enter a domain. We're just going to use Majestic SEO for this example. The first thing you see up here is summary root domain. Next to that, there is a button that says "Create Report", so we're going to hit that. Create a report, and we want a standard report.

It tells us our report has been created, click here to go back to your reports page. Now, back at the reports page, we're going to select our report that we just created. This is actually pretty simple. All you have to do is go up to the domain drop down. Select "anchor text," and there you have it, the anchor text distribution for majesticseo.com. What's cool about this is you can really quickly see the most used anchor text.

We can see here "Majestic SEO" with a space, without a space, is by far their most used anchor text. In addition to that, you can export this to excel if you want to analyze this data a little bit further. You can create charts, graphs, whatever you want to do. Analyze that data as much as you want, and really dig into it and get some great insight from it. So that's it. It's actually really simple getting the anchor text distribution from Majestic SEO. It's obviously a pretty killer tool. You can find a ton of insight from the data you examine here. Thanks for watching. I hope you guys get some use out of this.