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We're all pretty aware these days that having links from quality sites pointing into your own site is a very important factor in gaining good rankings on some of the major engines. The other point that has become increasingly important is that relevant anchor text should be used in links. This applies not just to external links pointing into your site, but internal linkages throughout your web site.
What is anchor text?Anchor text is the text that is visible in a link to a web page e.g.: Search engine optimization tutorials The text above is linked to a page named: optimization-tutorials.htm .. which (of course) contains information about optimizing web sites for search engines. Relevancy is the keyThe whole issue of successful search engine optimization can really be summed up in this statement: Relevant quality site using It's as simple as that. Where it becomes a little more challenging is when your domain name, such as ours, is totally non-relevant to your web site theme. If you haven't purchased a domain name for your new project yet, it's well worthwhile giving your name careful consideration purely for this reason: people will tend to link to your site using the name of your web site as the anchor text. If you are selling Flombles, then you are better off purchasing a domain name that contains the word Flombles. It should be something like cool-flombles.com or even coolflombles.com; as most of the major engines are now able to recognise a term within a non-hyphenated block these days. The issue of hyphens is something else that you'll need to consider as a domain name without a hyphen is easier for people to remember. Your folders should have flomble related names, as should your individual pages; e.g: cool-flombles.com/buy/white-flomble.htm. This way, you'll not only benefit straight off on any relevancy points that may be applied for your naming structure, but each time someone links to you, the chances are that they'll use beneficial anchor text! Reciprocal link requestsWhen approaching other webmasters to link to your site; it's really important to "suggest" suitable text for them to use; i.e link code that will have the most suitable link text for your site. For further information about link requests, see the added resources at the end of this article. It's also a good strategy to approach everyone who may be linking to you 'naturally' if they aren't using suitable link text. It's very important to be ultra-polite in these requests as these webmasters have linked to you of their own accord. They are under no obligation whatsoever to you - bear in mind that a link that isn't quite what you wanted is better than none at all.
Don't "over-optimize"No doubt over recent months, you would have noticed in SERP's (search engine results pages) that many spammers have been exploiting this with 50+ character hyphenated domain names, followed by file paths a mile long. I'm definitely not suggesting emulating this strategy.. all things in moderation. Mix up your anchor textA popular ploy has been to get inbound links using the same anchor text. This used to work, but search engines are getting better at recognizing attempts to manipulate rankings; so mix up your anchor text a little if you can by using different, but related terms on internal links and links from other sites if possible. This will also have a positive effect in terms of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Don't just link to the home pageIf you have the opportunity to have some control over inbound links from other sites, not only should you use anchor text variations, but also the target page. Rather than just have people link to your home page; try to get some deep links pointing to other sections or pages on your site. Here's some other updated articles on search engine optimization that you may find of benefit: Title tags tutorial - making the most of your page title tag Meta-tags tutorial - meta tags are still an important part of overall search engine strategy. Reciprocal linking - good manners can get you valuable links! Michael Bloch Click here to view article index
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