Link Building and Backlink Anchor Text - Internet Marketing Tips

Building Page Importance

A good way to build up the importance of your website is to get other websites to link to you.  In doing so, here’s some tips:

Finding Quality One-Way Links is Best

Do something on your website that people will want to link to.  Create a compeling article, a glossary, top ten list, faq or make a free tool to help your customer base.  Spend a little time getting the word out on your new content.  Contact blog owners that discus similar stuff, post comments, talk in relevant forums.

Find High PageRank Websites That You Can Write On

Look for websites like blogs where you can post comments to someone’s article.  There’s tons of those sites but you want the 1 out of a hundred where the links back to your website are not marked as “nofollow”.

To help you see the nofollow links easily first get the GreaseMonkey Add-On for Firefox, then the nofollow display greasemonkey script. With this script enabled, all nofollow links in a page show up on a pink background.  This makes it very easy to see good links on a page that you may be able to add to.  The pages with less “followed” links will be stronger pages.Page importance is passed from the link page to you but is divided amongst all the links on the page, both external and internal.

Be creative in finding websites.  You can easily find blogs on lists like the do follow directory but I’d be afraid about using that too much.  Search engines already have the published lists of do follow sites.   They could at their discretion give less importance to these links across the board.  It’s a good idea to just put in the time to search for websites that may want to link to you or offer somewhere for you to put a link.

Don’t Overlook Backlink Anchor Text

I asked marketing expert and Mothers Jewlery specialist, Jeff Moriarty about the importance of backlink text.

If I’m going after the term Chicago Web Design, I assume the best thing to have in the link text is the term I’m going after.  But if I get a link that passes rank from a blog or profile, does that still have some importance?

<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Chicago Web Design</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Web Designer Guy</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Aslan Interactive</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Matt MacDougall</a>
<a href="http://www.aslaninteractive.com">
http://www.aslaninteractive.com</a>

Jeff replies …

Off topic anchor text can still help build up PR, but won’t help as much as having the keyword in the link text…but it does still help.

If my main term was “Chicago Web Design”, I would go after the following terms and this is why.

The following keywords were found using the ‘~’ tool. Put a ‘~’ in front a phrase and do a search in Google. Google will bold everything in the serps it thinks is a synonym of that word. Part of Latent Semantic Indexing. Because these are synonyms, you want to try to rank for them as well.

Chicago Web Designer
Chicago Web Designers
Chicago Website Design
Chicago Web Site Design

The next list of keywords are longer tail keywords that have your main phrase in them. This was found through the Google Sandbox Tool or any other keyword tool. This will still help you rank for your main term, but longer tail terms as well.

Web design in Chicago
Web design Chicago IL
Chicago Website Design

I would never created back links from your company name, it’s just not competitive enough to get a backlink for. Same for the exact URL. You should be able to rank for both of those without any links.

Tags: Internet Marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.