Encouraging good anchor text for inbound links

How many times do you get an incoming link using your website name? To succeed with a website these days, you must have plenty of good quality inbound links with good anchor text. This is where many websites fall down and fail to get the organic traffic they could potentially get. But how do you control how someone else links to your website?

The importance of anchor text

If you have a website called example.com, then the simplest way and most common way people will link to your website is like this: example.com. If the website is selling cars, ideal anchor text would be something like this: the best value for cars. Now that link suggests to the search engines that the website linked to is about cars as well as “voting” for the website.

This strategy is well experienced in marketing for franchise.

Over time as the number of links increase, hopefully the keyword “cars” is included in many of them and so you start to rank highly in the search engines for the search term “cars”.

Get varied anchor text

Again if we use the example of a website selling or about cars, ranking in the search engines for the term “cars” may be extremely difficult due to high competition. Having links such as the best sports cars or a great variety of green cars would help the website rank well for search terms such as “sports cars” or “green cars”

The point is that it is preferable not to get the same anchor text in all the links to your website.

Encourage others to use optimal anchor text

So you are probably wondering how you can control how others link to your website. The answer is you can’t but what you can do is encourage them to link the way you want them to by making it easier for them.

Tag lines

Tag lines or catch phrases at the top of the homepage can encourage others to use that text to link to your website. Craft them carefully to include keywords you would like to rank for.

Homepage text

Putting a couple of lines about your website right on the homepage in the prominent place can also encourage use of this text as anchor text.

About page

If you have an “About” page, again make sure the first paragraph is optimized to include keywords.

Combining these three tricks and making sure each one has a different combination of keywords, you will increase your chances of getting good varied anchor text.

Link campaigns

If you are still doing link campaigns, emailing related website administrators asking for an exchange of links, you can provide an example link to your website.

• Provide the full HTML code with the anchor text you want to make it easy on the administrator.
• Offer to use any anchor text they would like to send you in return.
• Use different anchor text in different requests so you get a variety of link text.

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Link bait

Link bait is an article, video or application that is “link worthy”. In other words, it causes people to link to and bookmark that page. It is critical that there is usable text to use as anchor text. For example, the title of a video should be carefully constructed as it could be used as anchor text.

There are other tricks that work if you use a little imagination.

Next time I will talk about deep linking