Using Anchor Text in Online Audience Optimization (OAO)

Since my blog post “On Beyond SEO” (to OAO—Online Audience Optimization), publishers have been asking me to be specific about how OAO might be applied. I promised some examples in upcoming posts, and since I’m currently working with a publisher on a related project, I’ll begin by talking about anchor text.

The savvy publisher with whom I’m working wants to get her message out across the Internet and bring increased audience to her site through SEO. But she’s concerned about what she sees as the random nature of the messaging associated with SEO.

This publisher doesn’t want to simply generate targeted words and phrases to bring her organic audience to her site. She wants to create an overarching strategy in which her message, mission and branding resonate throughout the Internet. She wants every single action she takes to fit in with her publication’s brand and voice, so that her social media presence, her content sharing, and the very phrases she uses in her anchor text reflect her publication’s wholeness.

In short, she wants to create a publication strategy that includes her entire online presence.

SEO in and of itself can’t do the job for her—but OAO can.

Optimizing anchor text under the old rules of SEO requires keyword research that indicates who is searching for what words and phrases. It was (and is) necessary to identify what specific terms generate the right traffic—not necessarily in terms of sheer numbers but in terms of audience intention. If you have a harmonica performance site, for example, you might find that although many people search the term “music,” few of them are looking for what you specifically offer. You might find that people searching for “blues harmonica” might be looking for a product to buy, or for certain riffs best found on YouTube; but people searching for “how to play blues harmonica,” a phrase that also contains the more general term, are precisely those people who are looking for the kind of content your site offers.

Those are the phrases you use in your content optimization, in your social media, and in the clickable text of your links, or anchor text. And that summarizes the long tail of search. It is an extremely effective strategy within the context of SEO.

OAO takes it a step further.

OAO mandates that the terms used in search reflect not only the content the publisher curates but the editorial voice. To whom is the content addressed? Is it whimsical or serious, playful or hard-hitting? Is the site geared toward the publication’s audience, its advertisers, or the trade? Is it consumer or B2B?

And what do you want the person coming to the site to do? What action do you need for that person to take?

OAO may sound difficult, but for content publishers it really isn’t. It actually provides a solution that publishers have long been looking for—how to write for SEO and still deliver the quality content that the audience demands. This solution is supported by Google, and especially some recent Google updates that reward the natural use of keywords in site content.

It’s a win for everyone.