Recently, the Internet giant Google made some few tweaks and changes to the Google Maps and Places interface.

As part of a series of more changes to come, Google featured a new layout of Place Pages which put a stronger emphasis on content from Google users, and less review content from third party sites (other web pages that referenced the business).

This emphasis on Google user reviews shows the recent push by Google, and the rest of the web, to increase personalized contents and give users more ways to rate, comment, share… Information from people that are already customers or that a user can relate to is the most meaningful.

To incorporate these changes, Google added two red large and easily accessible “Write a review” buttons. The reviews now have their own single section on the page and push down links to third party sites and external reviews.

Removing these citations or references from third party websites will have a strong impact on local SEO, as these citations are the local version of links. The same way link builders’ look for competitor’s links, local SEO’s use citations from competitors.

Google announced more changes to come as well. Some of the company’s long-term vision for local search includes the increased personalization of local search results and making these upgrades available on other Google platforms and across different devices.

Link Building is a big part of SEO, which you already know. So how do you get the most from your link building efforts without getting lost in the wild wild west, er web?  Well, focus on anchor text. Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink.

Not only is anchor text important to search engines, but it’s also helpful to your website visitors. It helps them know the topic of what they are about to see. You want to make sure to choose effective anchor text for the incoming and outgoing links to your website.  This will greatly increase the value of the link and boost your search engine rankings.

To get started, during your link building acquisition, seek out links where you can determine the anchor text that another website uses for your website link.  This is an important part of the search engine ranking algorithms.  Aim for websites that not only have a link to your website, but also the words around the link that include the keywords you want to rank for. For example, in the descriptions of directory listings, blogs, and press releases you should be able to include the text you want to hyperlink.

To illustrate, instead of saying, “Click Here” as your anchor text, use the keywords that you are targeting. If the search engine bots see that the text around the link includes the keywords related to the website that the web link is pointing to, that will help you gain authority and increase the value of that link.

As an example, if we want to direct web visitors to a web page about internet marketing, we could write Internet Marketing and hyperlink that to an external website about internet marketing, or even a page on our website about it. You should also add variety to your anchor strategy to increase the value of the links. Don’t just have the same anchor text over and over.  Let’s look at some examples of this below:

• Internet Marketing Company
• Internet Marketing Firm
• Web Advertising Agency
• Website Optimization and Promotion
• Search Engine Marketing Solution

Notice how some of these have 3-4 words in them. This incorporates the long tail keywords that help us show up for many keyword terms and they typically have a high search volume.  Every day, about 25% of searches are keyword terms that never been searched before, so having variety in your anchor text is a very important way to get new visitors!   Notice that those links aren’t all going to the same page, this is termed “link diversity”.  The same would be true for inbound links, it would be better to have less links  from different sources, then many links from the same source. Keep in mind the anchor text should be different for those inbound links.  This falls in line with Google’s methodology- keep everything natural and relevant for your users!  Now, start getting creative with your anchor text- you’ll be happy that you did!