Include keywords in incoming links

June 12th, 2009

Incoming links with relevant “anchor text” yield the best results in terms of delivering quality “link juice” to your web site. What is anchor text? It is the text that you click on to follow a link on a web site. Here is an example:

Click Me (but don’t really). The text “Click Me” is the anchor text in this case.

When asking for links to your web site, choose relevant keyword phrases for the anchor text. I’m going to *shamelessly use my own business as an example:

Visit MightyMerchant for great eCommerce Websites

Notice that the part of the phrase that is clickable are the words “eCommerce Websites”. I didn’t make the whole sentence clickable, and I didn’t make the phrase “Visit MightyMerchant” clickable as that is not a phrase anyone is likely to search for.

The HTML for the above link looks like this:

Visit MightyMerchant for great <a href="http://www.mightymerchant.com">eCommerce Websites</a>

If you request a link via email or a contact form, send the exact HTML you would like for your link with your request.

When you are looking to add your link to a directory, look at the existing listings. Many times they will ask for your business name and web address. Your business name often be used for the anchor text and will link to the web address you provide. Instead of just entering your business name, use your best keyword phrase with your business name. Like this:

eCommerce Websites from MightyMerchant
or
MightyMerchant eCommerce Websites

To squeeze even more juice out of the link, link to a specific page on your web site with a web address that also includes the keyword phrase you are targeting, like this:

http://www.mightymerchant.com/ecommerce_websites.html

(If you don’t have such a page, consider creating one! See tips for web site content under the “On your web site” section of this blog.)

*Why do I say “shamelessly”? Because I’ve just created several incoming links to the MightyMerchant web site with keywords in the url as this article suggests that you do. You should be shameless, too - add a keyword rich link to your web site in the comments. As long as I don’t judge it to be spam, I’ll post your comment and you’ll get a keyword rich link to your web site!

Filed under Link Building, MightyMerchant Blog | Tags: , , , | Comment (0)

Incoming links - why bother?

June 8th, 2009

Seeking out other web sites that will link to your web site, referred to as incoming links or inbound links, is time consuming and staying with it can be hard if your requests for links are ignored. But getting other web sites to link to your web site is the MOST RELIABLE way to help your web site to move up in the search engines.

Aimclear blog recently recounted a presentation at the 2009 SMX conference in Seattle:

“…When Rand [Fishkin, of SEOMOZ] was initially looking for an absolute among metrics, he found only 1 metric that has any ability to predict rankings and that is the number of different domains linking to a URL.”

It’s worth your time to seek out and get incoming links. See my other posts under link building for tips on how to get inbound links.

Filed under Link Building | Tags: , , | Comment (0)

A quick way to identify sites for incoming links

June 6th, 2009

Here’s a quick way to find web sites that might link to you:

#1. Search google for a phrase that is relevant to your web site. In my example, I’ll use “vintage clothing”.

#2. Identify one the sites with a top listing, and search google again like this:

link:www.rustyzipper.com “vintage clothing”

That search will show you sites linking to www.rustyzipper.com that include the phrase “vintage clothing”.

#3. Scan the listings and identify good possibilities. I’ve shown a few promising listings below that were in my results:

#4. Visit the web sites that may link to you and find out how to request a link to your site.

A few more tips:

- View several pages of search results, not just the first page

- Try different keyword phrases

- Set a goal to request one, or two or ten incomings links per week and then do it!

Filed under Link Building, MightyMerchant Blog | Tags: , | Comment (0)