The first question which you must ask yourself in order to become an effective link builder is actually quite simple.
“Is my website national or local?”
National websites are typically informational blogs, location independent service providers (e.g. SEO agencies, freelance writers, design firms, etc.), software companies, and ecommerce sites.
Local websites are tied to businesses that serve a specific geological region, for example, a real estate agency in Phoenix, Arizona or a landscaping company in Memphis, Tennessee.
If your local brand is large enough and has multiple locations spread across a larger region, then your website would be considered a national or hybrid site and you will want to use your homepage as a branding page before creating more targeted internal pages for each of your company’s locations.
Is your root domain an EMD, PMD, or NMD?
The next order of business is to determine the domain type associated with your website since the keywords in your URL will impact your personal definition of a “natural” anchor text profile.
If your root domain contains the exact keyword associated with your site, you have an EMD or ”Exact Match Domain”.
For example, if my main keyword is “seo tools”, the exact match domain is seotools[dot]com.
I’d even categorize theseotools[dot].com as an EMD.
You have a Partial Match Domain (PMD) if your root domain contains all of keyword along with other words, part of the keyword and nothing else, or part of the keyword and other words.
For example, if my main keyword is still “seo tools”, a PMD would be besttools[dot]com, tools[dot]com, or myfavoriteseotools[dot]com.
And you have a Non-Match domain (NMD) if the root domain is does not contain any part of the keyword.
For example, if my main keyword is “seo tools” an NMD is linkio[dot]com.
Many people mistakenly assume that this simple categorization has no bearing on their anchor text profiles… But nothing could be further from the truth.
For example, the ideal anchor text percentage for the homepage of an EMD is VASTLY different than that of a homepage of a NMD, so be sure that you’re certain of your website’s domain type before moving forward.
With that out of the way, there’s one last factor to consider before we start to take a deep dive into the specific anchor text percentages.