For the past few years, many people have made big bucks by “gaming” Google. SEO professionals would seek out particular keywords and search terms, and use them in their links as a powerful strategy to improve their search engine ranking position. Using the same search phrases led to some pretty silly looking sentences as people tried to stuff their keywords into their sentences everywhere they could. Unfortunately for a lot of people’s SEO strategies, Google caught up with this trend and implemented penalties for content that overused certain search terms and keywords. When linking, it’s much better to make sure your content looks natural.
So what does this mean? In short, it means that it isn’t the best idea to use the same keywords over and over when linking to your site. Overuse of the search term in content can actually result in negative consequences or even a penalty from Google if it’s really overboard. A much better strategy is to still occasionally link with keywords, but more often use stop words like “click here, learn more, for more information”, and “visit my website at”.
This is particularly important if you’re linking to your content from another website, perhaps via a guest blog or article or comment on another person’s article. However, if you don’t link to your website too often, it’s still okay to use keywords. You just don’t want to overdo it, so if you link a lot, make sure to link with stop words. Essentially, you need to have a diverse link portfolio. That means having lots of different types of links, from a diverse selection of websites with different types of anchor text.
Source: Social Media Today