Newbie Affiliate Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘Anchor Text’

There are two general groupings of SEO techniques, on-page factors and off-page factors. In this article we are going to be talking about the off-page factors, which relate to building backlinks to your site.

Getting a lot of quality backlinks should be a consistent part of your SEO efforts. As long as you build your links in a way that looks natural, the more links you build the better off you will be. It looks a lot more natural if you work on getting a handful of backlinks every week than if you suddenly got 10,000 backlinks overnight because you bought them from a link farm. Unnatural patterns are noticed by the search engines and they can penalize your website if they associate it with these practices.

There are many ways to get backlinks. You can develop relationships with other webmasters to exchange links from other related sites. Participate in forums related to your website and be sure to have a link to your site as part of your ‘signature’. Write articles for article directories which include a link back to your site in the ‘bio box’. Add links in Squidoo lenses or HubPages that you create about your topic. If you have a blog submit your RSS feed to RSS Aggregator sites, and add it to your Squidoo lens or HubPage. Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark your pages and encourage your visitors to do the same. Use Twitter to send out a ‘tweet’ when you post a new article. These are just a few ideas to get you started. There are many web 2.0 properties and social networks to use in your link building campaign.

Now that you know where to get backlinks, the other important aspect is that, when possible, you use good anchor text for the backlnks you create. The anchor text is the text that turns into the hyperlink (it’s often blue, sometimes underlined). The search engines also use this text to figure out what your site, or page, is about. So where you can, specify what the anchor text will be. You want to use your main keywords, and variations on your main keywords. Try to vary it a little (that looks natural), while still keeping it relevant of course. Keep in mind that the keywords you use when you are linking to a specific page are not necessarily going to be the same as when you are linking to your homepage.

Sometimes it is not an option for you to specify the anchor text. But it is important to take advantage of the opportunity to when you can specify it. If you exchange links with another site, specify what you want your anchor text to be. The other webmaster will probably appreciate it because it saves them time having to decide what it should be. You will have total control over the anchor text when you create Squidoo lenses, HubPages, in article bio sections, and your forum signatures. Use it wisely.

We’ve covered the basics of getting backlinks in this article. Keep applying these techniques until it becomes second nature and you will see an improvement in both your search engine rankings and an increase in the traffic to your site.

Getting higher search engine rankings is often not an easy job. If there is strong competition, it requires a fair amount of time and a substantial effort to get that coveted top 3 position.There are two main aspects to improving your rankings with SEO – onsite and offsite.

Onsite SEO means everything which is literally within your site. This can be your meta tags (Title, Description, Keywords) to the way your content is written e.g. keyword density. It also includes your internal linking structure. Getting this right should be considered as the first and most important step, but should not take you all that long once the research is done.

Offsite SEO on the other hand is where the time really needs to be spent. There are a number of ways of increasing your search rankings, the best of which are largely though to involve link building – or backlinks. However, when looking to get these backlinks, you should always bear in mind that the qualities which really lift your site are:

* Dofollow links
* One way links
* Links from high PR sites
* The link needs to have your anchor text for best results

There are a number of places and ways to get links – the most frequently used are social bookmarks, article directories (such as ezines), web directories and profile backlinks. Remember it’s not necessarily how many you have, but how good they are too!

Lastly, combining these methods is your best bet for achieving higher search engine rankings.