Another major consideration for your marketing success is the content of the
anchor text of the backlink (what the link actually says on your site) and how
it is using, or not using, the keywords relevant to your site.
For example, "Click Here" is totally generic and does not relate in anyway to
your website. But, "For a great recipe, visit our site," uses your keyword,
"recipe" in this example, in the hyperlinked anchor text. Search engines love this.
There's several easy ways to generate a set of quality links for your sites. Before
you do anything, though, you have to make sure you know whom your audience
is and who you want to attract to your site. Once you locate your target audience,
focus your link building efforts on sites within that audience.
Your major task when looking for link possibilities is to slowly build your own
directory of sites with themes that complement your site's focus. These sites do
not have to be exactly identical to yours, but they do have to be related in focus
and content. For example, if your site is all about collecting comic books, a site
that provides tips on pricing and/or preserving comic books would be a valuable
link for you. Your keywords would probably be somewhat the same.
One outstanding way to find possible websites for reciprocal linking is to use the
search engines to find the top sites with the same keywords you use. Use several
search engines...Google is not the only search engine on the Web...and search on
your keywords. The sites that come up in the first five or six places are websites
the search engines consider important and have ranked them accordingly.
Your next move is to visit those sites and contact the webmasters and ask for a
link.
Some will decline, if their site is in high competition with yours. Don't take it
personally. It is just business. But some will accept, especially if you offer a link
back to their site. When that happens, you just added a high quality backlink to
boost your value with the search engines.
From time to time, you will get offers for a link trade with sites that say they've
already placed your link on their links page. Check that out carefully. If they get a
link from you and do not have one back to your site on their links page, they are
only helping themselves to your traffic and not reciprocating.
Another thing to check out is whether or not they have a link on their home
page to their link pages. If they don't, decline the invitation. Google won't spider
the link page and the link would be totally worthless to you.
When you are looking at link pages on other sites, avoid linking to any that have
multiple link pages crammed full of links of all types. If you remember the
discussion above about Link Farms, you will recognize what you are looking at.
As discussed earlier, a simple but powerful way to get quality backlinks is to write
and submit articles on your niche to webmasters who publish newsletters focused
on your niche.
Not only will they appreciate new content for their readers, but also you will
provide yourself with a backlink that means something to Google. How? Your
author's box will have a link back to your site, along with a sentence or two about
you. Article marketing is viral and provides a necessary resource for other
marketers and publishers.
Smart marketing starts when you first think about your website. The first choice
you have to make is your list of keywords that govern how your site is perceived,
listed and ranked. You can use several free keyword tools to see how many
people are searching for information using your keywords.
A simple search for "keyword," (no quotes), or "keyword search tool," will return
Another caution: Do not link to pages with a zero page rank. That
link will do nothing for your own page rank and you might be linking in
a bad neighborhood or to a website that has been banned by Google.
several online keyword search tools you can use to analyze your keywords,
generate new keywords and compare keyword density on your websites.
Here are three FREE, good ones to start with:
• Google AdWords Keywords Tool Because this is a Google tool, you will
have the benefit of using the largest search user base in the universe.
You can view a 12-month historical trend or simply analyze a site or
page with keyword suggestions.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) This tool is
free, quick to set up and easy to use. This service offers general or
regional marketing.
• Overture Keyword Selector Tool With this free service, just go to the
site and enter in a search term. Overture automatically returns
related searches including your term and the estimated number of
times that term was searched for in the previous month.
When you've got your keywords selected to provide the most benefit to your
marketing plan, put them to work for you immediately:
• Use them in your website title
• Sprinkle them throughout your sales page text
• Definitely put them in the description of your page in your HTML code
• Make sure they are in the metatags of your source code
Everything about virtual marketing depends on the value of your keywords. The
search engines use them to index your site and evaluate your site contents.
Customers use them to find the information they need. Your competitors use
them to draw more traffic than you do.
Now that you've got your keywords in your source code's where they need to be,
let's move on to building your link pages with the intention of making the most
use of its subtle power for your marketing efforts.
The question now is "What Do You Put On Your Link Pages?"