There is more to LINKING than just getting links from related websites. Not everyone realizes this, but the text that others use to link to your site is extremely important (especially to Google®). Let me explain…
The text that a person clicks on to get your site is called the “anchor textâ€. By default “anchor text†is blue text with an underline. Search Engines consider anchor text very important. In fact, the number of links to your site and the anchor text used to link to your site predominantly determine what keywords your site will rank highest for in Google®. If you don’t do any other SEO work on your website do this one thing:
Place the keywords your web page is targeting in the anchor text that you ask others to use to link to your website with!
Let’s go back in time to when I was starting out my reciprocal link campaign. The first mistake I made was I did not ask for a reciprocal link. Instead I just told other webmasters that my son and I had created a website and that I thought they might like to link to us. We did get links that way, and I reciprocated them after the fact. However, we would have gotten many more links to our website if we had asked for reciprocal links.
The second big mistake I made in promoting our website was not including the text that I wanted people to use to link to my site. At the time, I didn’t even know it mattered.
I thought all that mattered was getting links. I was very mistaken!
Note: I will continue this story in my next post (on Thursday).