How Important Are Anchor Text Links?

Some webmasters optimize certain pages for different keywords, and once they’re done, they think that that’s all they can do to increase their rankings for those keywords. This is certainly not the case, as anchor text links are even more important than the page itself according to Google experts. You might ask just how important are anchor text links, and there are a few examples out there to show that they are more than vital to getting a high listing.


For those who don’t know, a Google bomb is a practice used to get a certain page listed very highly in the search engines for a particular keyword or phrase (most people give it a negative connotation even though it refers to both positive and negative practices). The way people do this is by linking that particular keyword or phrase to the intended page numerous times, and after a period of time (when done on a consistent basis), the keyword ranks highly in Google. The most famous example of a Google bomb is the “miserable failure” bomb, in which at one point almost all the search engines had the #1 result for “miserable failure” being a biography of George W. Bush, despite that page not containing the phrase “miserable failure” even once. Although this can be humorous to some, this shows the immense power in anchor text links, as they can lead to both positive and negative results in the search engines. The first recorded infamous Google bomb was recorded in 1999 when the #1 result for “more evil than Satan himself” was a link to the Microsoft homepage.

These are just a few examples of how truly important anchor text links are to any SEO campaign. The first place to start is within your website. By finding any keywords on your different pages, do yourself a favor and link some of these to the intended pages. Getting five to ten links in your articles or blog posts to different pages that are going after those individual keywords can add up after a while, and can do a majority of the work for you. For those who don’t have the luxury of large amounts of original content on their own websites, take advantage of article directories through syndication. By syndicating the articles you have to numerous article directories, you can insert anchor text links into the body or resource boxes. Other ways you can get anchor text links include comment posting, social media, and press releases. Just asking friends or family that have websites for a link or two with the desired keyword can make a difference.

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Link Building Techniques For Starters

As I said in my last post, more than half the battle for ranking high for certain terms is getting relevant links back to your site. Building links from places abroad the internet is probably the biggest problem you will come across when performing SEO, so having a short list of places to start off with can give you a great head start. The most common link building techniques are directory submission, article syndication, press release syndication, social bookmarking, creating a blog, and internal linking.

Directory Submission

Luckily there are directories all over the internet just begging for you to submit your website to them for absolutely no cost (some will cost $, but we’ll get into that later). There are loads of free directories that you can submit to in just a few minutes, and this is the best way to start off your link building campaign. The biggest and most effective free directory is Dmoz.org, but you will have trouble getting in, as they have allowed very few submissions in recent years, but nonetheless this is probably the best link you will get from a free directory (see my next post on Dmoz). There are numerous free directories submit to, over thousands, so if you are ever bored and have little to do, sit down and submit to a few of these low key directories (in late May, early June I should upload a comprehensible list with every free directory found on the web).  Just be sure to have a quick list ready of your URL, Title, Description, & Tags of your website, as this can make the process much quicker by simply copying & pasting.

Article Syndication

As you are now finding out, content creation is key, and you can never have enough articles, press releases, blog posts, and even forum posts. If you have content you don’t mind sharing with other sites, there are numerous article directories to submit to where you can put in a few of your links back to your site in either the article itself or the resource box (about the author). Like directories, there are numerous article directories to be found on the web. Here’s a few to get you started: ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, and ideamarketers.com. By writing 20 – 30 articles for syndication purposes, you can get more than 1,000 links back to your site if you play your cards right and submit to around 25 – 30 quality article directories. Note that article submission & article syndication are the same thing, but I will sometimes use one instead of the other.

Press Release syndication

While you might want to keep your best content exclusive to your own site, press releases aren’t one of them. By going to sites such as PRweb.com, you can syndicate your press releases all over the web and get your word out. I suggest spending a few bucks to get a few press releases syndicated on quality PR websites, but if you have a tight budget, you can get away with just submitting to the free ones.

Social Bookmarking

One way to build some half-decent links and get traffic at the same time is through social bookmarking & social news sites (they go hand & hand, and are basically the same thing). By submitting links of all the different pages on your site, and by having others vote for them (ex. On digg.com you can “digg” different links submitted by others), you can get search engines as well as real people to notice you and your site.

Creating a blog

Creating a blog is something that will take a little bit of time every day, but it’s worth it. By creating original content on a daily or every-other-day basis, search engines will take notice, because as said before – search engines love loads of quality unique content! The way link building ties into this is simple – link different keywords that come up in your blogs to your desired pages. Linking 2-3 links every day from your blog builds some high-quality links, more so than article syndication links, and they can add up over time.

Internal linking

Most people, including experts, forget about this part of link building. They’re so concerned with getting other sites to link to theirs, that they forget the gold mine waiting to be dug right at home. Make good use of the link juice you’ve built up in your own site – link different keywords in the content on your own site, and you will see some great results. Warning: do not overdo this to an extent, because when you are linking every third word on your page, both people and search engines don’t like this. For example, I was searching the web when I found an SEO site that linked the word “SEO” over 20 times on its home page alone! My suggestion: for a 500 word piece of content, have about 4-6 keyword-rich links.

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What Does Google Like To See?

The most basic question any website owner that focuses on SEO has one question: What does Google like to see on my website? If you don’t know what Google is looking for, everything you do will be a shot in the dark. Here is a quick overview of what Google and the other search engines want to see on your website.

The first thing Google wants to see is that your website is easy for their Bots to navigate through. Google Bots are software used by Google to collect information from websites and index them so they can be found in the search engines. If a website isn’t indexed, then it can’t be shown in their Search Engine results. Therefore, you want to do all you can to help the Google Bots maneuver through your site easily, so every page is found. Take for example Ezinearticles.com; it is not an overly complex site, and it’s search engine friendly. By limiting flash, video intros, and broken links on your home page and throughout your site, you can allow the Google bots to move through your site easily to find every page. The best thing you can do to help a search engine sift through your site is by adding a link to your Site Map on your home page; the Site Map is solely for the use of the Search Engine, as this tells the Bots where to look to find certain things. To create your own site Google Site map, go to xml-sitemaps.com. This is a great tool to use if you don’t already have a site map.

After you have made your site easy to navigate through, Google has to be able to find it in the first place so it can be indexed. The way to do this is by getting backlinks to your website. Backlinks are incoming links to a web page from any website to yours. There are many ways you can get backlinks to your site: Registering with search directories, submitting to web directories, ask friends, family and employees, asking websites you do business with for them, submitting Press Releases to PR sites, content syndication (submitting to article directories), submitting to social bookmarking sites, and many other ways. By getting multiple sites to link to yours, overtime Google and other search engines will find you and your site. After Google has found you website, it doesn’t want you to stop going after backlinks: the more backlinks a website has, and the higher quality the link is (i.e. is it the only link on the page, does the page have a high Page Rank, is it at the top of the page), the better Google will rank it and the higher Page Rank your page will receive. Page Rank is
Google’s system of rankings pages in organic searches, and can be calculated through an algorithm. Since your website wants traffic (people coming to your site), pursuing more backlinks causes your rankings to be higher, and the higher your rankings the more visitors you receive. This means that backlinks are essential for any SEO campaign.

Google absolutely loves original content. The slogan is as follows: “Content is King”. This is the reason you find so many blog sites, article directories, and libraries in all kinds of sites. Go to any website with a high Page Rank, like for example CNN.com. CNN has a page rank of 10 (Wow! That’s the highest a Page Rank as you can get, and is extremely rare), mostly because of the fact that there is an endless number of pages on their site. Every day they add news posts, blog posts, and so many other ways for original content, and Google sees this and rewards them. You can create original content by researching different topics about the category of your website.  By researching different topics, issues, and problems with the different categories, you can write about them and create articles and blog posts. Note that when you do this you have to make sure you don’t plagiarize, as this can cause legal problems. One way to check for plagiarism is by using the online tool at copyscape.com. When creating content, you want articles to have 500+ words, and blog posts to have 250+ words. Blog posts can be shorter because you want to update them with new posts frequently, so creating 800 word posts every other day can be time consuming, and you can run out of things to write about very quickly.

You can use content creation to get backlinks (two birds with one stone!) in the form of content syndication. By giving out your content (i.e. articles) to different content syndication sites such as submitting Press Releases with backlinks in them or submitting articles to article directories with backlinks in them, you can create a bulk of backlinks.

Google also wants to see quality. Search engines like quality content that has correct grammar, no spelling errors, and read by many visitors that leave comments. You need to be able to create content that offers something to the reader, whether its tips, general information, or news excerpts (Press Releases).

Search Engines want to see that you did everything manually, such as submitting to directories, submitting articles, and commenting on blogs. If Google finds that any of this is being done by automated systems, it can hurt your rankings or drop them altogether. Google hates to see things like Link Farms, which are groups of websites that all link to every other site in the group. Link farms are created solely for search engine optimization purposes, and can cause problems if Google identifies them.

Lastly I bring up Google most of the time instead of just “search engines”, because Google is by far the leading search engine, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. Google controls more than 2/3 of all searches, so by targeting Google and keeping them happy, you can help your website receive more visits from search engines.

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Welcome to the newest SEO blog in the World!

At the moment this is being posted, I can almost guarantee you are reading from the newest SEO blog on the World Wide Web. For those who don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a technique used to get your listings in Google as high up the search results as possible. SEO is used by almost all websites in the world looking to increase or maintain their web traffic, and it will remain the key technique used on the Web for the foreseeable future. Currently this blog has been made mostly as a hobby, so I can guarantee I will be writing these articles out of pure passion and desire. I have learned a great deal about SEO, and want to share the news with my visitors. Yes, I am not close to being anything like some of the top SEO blogs today, but everyone started somewhere, right? My goal is to see how optimized I can make this blog to demonstrate my skills, and to help fellow small business owners on any questions they might have about this growing skill.

This blog will offer mostly tips on how to get your website found and visited frequently after it is up and running. I am currently learning webmaster tools to create websites and to make them SEO friendly, so when all is said and down, this blog will be outputting frequent posts on keeping your website friendly to the search engines, as well as how to get the search engines to find you in the first place.

Every great blogger had to start at one point or another, and today is that day. Even though this is more of a hobby, I have great hunger for learning all things about Search Engine Optimization, and finding out what techniques work and which ones don’t. Fortunately for you, you don’t have to go through the trial and error I go through every day. I look to provide my readers with accuracy, clarity, and steps to effectiveness. I like to get interactive with my readers, so comment on any questions or arguments you have with each of my posts.
 
Currently I perform SEO for a small business website, so I have not only knowledge in this field but also experience. I will be able to provide feedback on what does and does not work, giving you the highest quality of information available. If you have run into the same things I have over the internet, it’s the lack of finding information that I can really apply to my own situation. Being able to relate to the specifics is what I will strive to do, and I encourage you to ask any questions, comment on any posts, or suggest help articles on topics you can’t find on the web. Feel free to contact me at jcooper@pointblankseo.com.

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