In the last couple of articles, we’ve talked about why getting other websites to link to yours is a good thing, and we’ve looked at a couple of ways you can go about getting links without having to go beg other webmasters to link to our site.

Today, we’re going to talk about a way you can “juice up” the links you get from other sites, so that you achieve maximum benefit from those incoming links.

We’re going to be using something called anchor text to increase the value in the eyes of the search engines of the links we’re procuring. An example of this is the link above - see how I’ve made the link text (Anchor Text) the subject of the page that the link is pointing to? That’s what’s called using anchor text.

When a link which comes into your site uses anchor text relevant to the subject of the page it’s pointing to, the search engines give that link a little “boost” as far as ranking that page for the subject it’s about.

This is because the search engine realises that the link is relevant to the page it is linking to. A small part of me dies inside every time I see a link with the anchor text “Click Here”, all I see is a wasted opportunity to pass some valuable extra link juice to the site the person is linking to.

An example of the power of anchor text is in a practical joke carried out in 2003 by thousands of American University students. The students all linked to the Whitehouse web page of George W Bush, using the anchor text “Miserable Failure”, from their blogs and websites.

Even though the official Whitehouse Biography page of GWB did not contain the term “misarable failure”, that page shot to number one in the google rankings for that search term. This technique became known as Google Bombing, and was used to a lesser extent with other politicans and public figures.

Google has now fixed the problems in its algorythm which allowed this practical joke to take place, although it does underline the importance of anchor text in the Search Engines ranking arsenal.

So knowing that anchor text is important, how do we apply this to the last couple of articles we’ve read about link building?

Firstly, let’s look a how we can apply this to article submission. In the post about article submissions, I talked about the Resource Box which we are allowed to place at the bottom of our articles, which contains a quick Bio and a link to our website. in this case, we want to make sure we use anchor text in the Resource box when we link to our site. Take as an example the resource box I posted in the last article:

Stuart Drew is an Adelaide Based Search Engine Optimisation professional, with five years of industry experience helping clients improve their Search Engine Rankings. Stuart is the owner of ChilliCool Adelaide SEO and Website Design, an Australian firm which provides affordable premium internet services to small to medium  businesses.

Note the anchor text? I’m trying to get my website to rank highly for the terms “Adelaide SEO” and “Adelaide Website Design”, so my anchor text it perfect. (Well, nearly perfect - if it was perfect it would be something like “ChilliCool Adelaide SEO and Adelaide Website Design” - but from a readability point of view, that just looks ridiculous, and we should never sacrifice end-user usability for search engine optimisation.)

Now on to our other example - leaving comments on blogs.

This one’s a bit tricky, as we can fall foul of over-zealous blog owners if we don’t approach this the right way. If you read the article the other day about leaving comments on blogs, you would’ve seen that there are four sections we need to fill out when we leave a comment on a blog. They are:

  • Your Name
  • Your Email Address
  • Your website address (Sometimes called URI or URL)
  • Your Comment

We need to understand a little of how blogs work to get our comment link to use our preferred anchor text. The spot that you fill out with your name, will actually be the anchor text used once your comment is posted to the blog. So for example, if I were to use the name Stu, the anchor text for my link would be exactly that - Stu. Not great for search engine optimisation purposes (but far better than no link at all!)

What we don’t want to do when we leave a comment on a blog, is use a name like “Adelaide mortgage loans no doc low doc zero application fee loans“. That just looks spammy, and will more than likely get your comment deleted by the owner of the blog you’re commenting on.

We’re looking for something in the middle, we want our own name to appear, so that if we get into commenting conversations with other commenters on that blog, they know our name, but we want to get some anchor texty goodness in there as well.

So how do we do this? I’ve found the best way is to use something like this: Stu the Adelaide SEO. It says who I am, it says what I do, and I get my anchor text, all in four words. I’d suggest you try to keep to a five work maximum when using this method:

{Name} the {location} {keywords}

So you might be John the Noarlunga Brickie, Susan the Modbury Housing Conveyancer, etc etc

So there it is, a simple, yet extremely powerful way to juice up your incoming links. Remember though, a link with poor anchor text is still far better than no link at all. So if you have the opportunity to grab a link, but can’t get the anchor text you want, grab it anyway, they all count!


Return to Top

Juice up your incoming links to make the most of them

Posted on 09.17.08 to Link Building. Tags: , , , .