Strategic Linking Strategies
Lesson 10 from You Can Make Money Writing
This lesson is primarily about linking strategies for links
from other websites, but much of it is directly relevant to the
links that you put in your author's resource boxes that go with
your articles. It expands on what was already covered in Lesson
9, and shows you a few more advanced techniques.
Strategic web site linking used to consist of simply exchanging
links with other sites that had a theme related to your own.
This can still be a valuable strategy, but it became less so
when search engines started downgrading the importance of these
"reciprocal" links. A link is considered a kind of
"vote" of confidence or popularity, but once exchanging
links purely for optimization purposes (to rank higher in the
search engines) became common, the search engine algorithms were
adjusted to give these traded link less value.
Now one-way links are much more likely to convince a search
engine that your web pages are important enough to be in their
search results. By the way, this can still be accomplished with
link exchanges if you or the trading partner have more than one
website. You can agree to link to his website from your site
"a" if he links to your site "b." This makes
both of the links one-way, and therefore of more value. This
may be considered a way to "trick" the search engines,
but if you really like each other's sites it is perfectly fair.
The value of those one-way links is one reason why article
submission is such a powerful marketing tool for your website.
The links you create in the author's resource box are one-way
links to your pages, both from the directories you submit to,
and from pages where other site owners use your articles. However,
it does matter what the links say, and where they go. I have
touched on this topic in the previous lesson, but I will cover
it more thoroughly here.
Strategic Linking - The Anchor Text
First of all, what should the link say? The basic guideline
is that it should have the keyword in it for which you want to
optimize the "landing page" (the page it goes to).
Search engines pay attention to the words in the incoming links
to determine whether to display that page in their results. These
words are called the "anchor text."
This anchor text of a link is used by search engines to decide
what the page the link points to is about. For example, if you
search "click here" you'll probably get Adobe reader
as the first result, because so many links that lead there say
"click here." I don't know how many people search for
"click here." It may not be the best keyword to be
optimized for. On the other hand, if you want searchers for "books
on money" to find your page in the results, you can help,
by using those exact words in incoming links.
This can be difficult with articles, for two reasons. First,
as explained before, you're often safer using the full URL as
the link, so that those who use your article will be sure to
link it to your site properly. A way around this problem was
suggested, which is to use a keyword as the anchor text, followed
by an unlinked URL, on the assumption that if the link is messed
up or lost, at least the website owner may link to you using
the URL (or the reader can copy and paste the URL into his or
her browser).
The other problem is that some directories limit the number
of words that you can have in a link. One recently rejected my
article because they allow only three words as anchor text. I
couldn't have the keyword "creative real estate investing"
as a link. In these cases, pick the best short keyword phrase
from within the longer one and use that. For example, I created
a link something like this; "Go get more creative real estate investing tips at...
http://www.housesunderfiftythousand.com/creative-real-estate-investing.html
Another thing that helps is to have the keyword in the URL.
In the example you'll notice that the extension or file name
for the page is "creative-real-estate-investing.html".
That assures me that if the directory automatically makes a link
of any URL, I will have the right keyword in the anchor text.
This is also true if anyone uses the article and links to the
URL instead of using the anchor text I used.
The value of "link language" is a good reason to
have a valuable keyword in your domain name as well. Every time
anyone links to my website on removing carpet stains; http://www.HowToRemoveCarpetStains.com,
they automatically include the keywords, "remove carpet
stains," and "carpet stains" in the link.
Continues here... Page Names
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
|
