Include keywords in incoming links
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!
Leave a Reply