Curious Little Person » anchor text

5 Great Ways to Anchor Your Backlinks

Sandy — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:28:56 +0000

They say that “content is king”, but to backup your content to rank highly in SERP’s you need need to remember that getting quality keyword anchored backlinks is of prime importance. After you take care of onpage SEO for your individual posts, backlinks with the right anchor text is the factor that will get your site ranked higher for your desired keywords.

When obtaining backlinks to your site, it is important to include you keyword as the text for the link! Google uses the anchor text to make choices about the content of your page and how to rank you for certain keywords.

5 Great Ways to Anchor Your Backlinks

While Building backlinks:

Vary your Anchor text with your theme keyword, related keywords and long tail keywords.
Anchor deep pages with keywords
Develop a “keyword” nick name & site name
Get creative with your anchor text. If you’re companies name is “Blue SEO” and your offer SEO services within your local area, you would anchor text your backlinks with “Bangalore SEO Services”
Use your keyword in your site title, like “How to Make Money Online“, that way people will use the keyword as the anchor text when they refer to you.

Looking at someone’s anchor text really shows how much they know about SEO. But anyways, the role anchor text plays in your SERP’s success is huge. Put some thought in creative ways to get the anchors you want. Of course, sometimes you have to go with the site name or your name, but try to get as many keyword related anchor text links as you can.

We would be glad to hear from you on how your anchor your backlinks? What strategy do you follow?

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What Are Paid Links? And It’s Effect on SEO

Sandy — Sat, 28 May 2011 12:36:14 +0000

Paid links are when you sell text link ads on your site and do not place a nofollow attribute on the link. A nofollow tag is an attribute that instructs Google to not pass pagerank or a vote. By not placing this nofollow you are not allowing a person to purchase a vote. People will buy links off high ranked, high PR, sites that are highly related to their site. In addition, they’ll usually use their desired anchor text.

Why Are Paid Links Bad

Google has cracked down on it recently by catching up with JC penney and penalized them by a drastic reduction in their Organic traffic. It has also made it against their Terms of Services and the result of getting caught doing it is a PR slap.

But the reason Google doesn’t like paid links is because selling links allows people to use money to influence search engine results. They want to stop that, because their concept is to allow a natural voting process via linking to select the best sites. This gets diluted when a spam site is willing to spend lots of money to obtain a ranking. So this gets in the way of their business model and they’ll penalize anyone who is violating it.

Should You Buy Links?

Not sure about this one. Personally, this blog is built on purely white hat techniques. I’ve not dared to go the uncharted route. But, in the end I’m aware that people still buy links. They’re just don’t mention it openly. Instead of advertising it on their site, people are contacting webmasters one by one, and requesting the purchase. They aren’t using services or forums as much to announce them.

So it’s an individual choice, you just need to be informed. Paid links can hurt your sites PR and ranking. But many people are still doing it, and using it to out rank others. So you have to decide the risk you’re willing to take with your business. Its influencing Google Search Results, but has amazing results.

How Do You Report Paid Links?

We’ll if you learn on of you competitors is buying paid links, you can blow the trumpet by reporting it to Google. If your competitors are breaking the rules to beat you, a simple report will take care of the problem for you.

Check out Matt’s post: How to Report Links

How to Correct a Paid link PR Slap

If you’ve used paid links to influence your search engine results and Google slapped your PR down a few points, you can get it back

You can file for a reconsideration request.

To fix your errors:

Stop buying and selling links
Add nofollow tag to all links on your site people paid for
Add sentence to your advertise page that clearly notes that you do no sell PR
Make a public post about no longer selling PR on your blog
File a reconsideration request and explain all the changes you’ve made

Most websites get their PR back over time, but there is no set page rank. The clearer it is that you’ve stopped, the better chance you have. Make it clear, and ask them to reconsider your site and to remove their penalty.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, knowledge is power – it’s just important to know Google doesn’t like paid links and will penalize you for buying or selling links. It’s still done in the SEO world, and is still an option. Buying links is still risky though, so it’s a personal choice about the risk. You can manage to rank high without them, if you put in the effort and have patience though.

Do share with us your views on Paid Links and its effects.

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Directory Submissions for Link Building

Sandy — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:13:14 +0000

Directory Submissions is generally not considered as a great link building technique by most SEO’s. They get written off as low quality spam links, so many internet marketers simply ignore them or only submit to the very top directories like DMOZ or paid directories like Yahoo, but success can be found in directory submissions. These types of links are not sufficient to dominate highly competitive terms, but help you gain one way anchored links to your small niche blogs that target long tail phrases.

Evaluating Directories

You should evaluate directories for the link value they provide. There are various factors that can come into play here, but basically you want to get the best directories possible.

Factors to consider while evaluating a directory submission:
Homepage pagerank
Pagerank of sub pages,
Depth of your listing,
Number of indexed pages, and if it is being used as a link farm for many spammy niche sites.

With bad directories, you’ll notice that only a few pages have PR and the PageRank does not spread well across the site. This may result in many of the listing pages not getting indexed. You may also notice several footer links out to gambling, porn, and prescription sites. This places this site in a bad neighborhood – You should stay away from these sites

One thing that people refer to a link by the PR of the homepage. Yes, evaluating the homepage PR is a factor in determining the directory’s quality, but you are not getting a link from the home page. People talk about directories and say stuff like “it’s a free/easy PR 6 link”. It is likely a PR 0 link as PR is assigned per PAGE. The power of the link will be based on the PR of the linking page, not the home page.

Directory Submission Best Practices

The purpose of directory submissions is to gain keyword anchored links, not to generate traffic. Our focus is getting anchored links. There is a very small chance you will get traffic from these links, unless it is one of the huge popular directories.

The biggest key to success is varying your submission information. Most important, vary your anchor text. It is good to vary your description and keywords, but it is a must that you vary your anchor text, which will make the links look more natural. For example, you’re targeting a keyword – Hostgator review, following are a few variations you should use

Hostgator Review
Review of Hostgator
Hostgator Webhosting Reviewed
Review of Hostgator WebHosting

It is important to have variation in all your link building methods. The more natural it appears, the more success you will have.

Does Directory Submission Work?

Yes. Of course, these are not the best links, but they should be one part of your link building. It’s great to diversify your link building strategies and this is a great method to do so. You need to get links from as many different places as possible.

Directory submission can really help you increase the number of anchored links to your site, which will solidify your rankings with your long tail niche sites.

How To Find Directories?

The first is Directory Submitter. I’ve tried the free version and not too aware about the paid version. It does have a nice set of directories you can submit to and it semi automates the process by auto filling in the forms. You can also check out the below to help you get started

Conclusion

Directory Submissions are not the best links either. They are one way anchored links from new link sources though. If you’re not seeing the success you’d like, consider submitting to directories.

Do let us know your thoughts on Directory Submissions as a Link Building Strategy

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SEO: Optimize Your Internal Linking Structure

Sandy — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:02:35 +0000

A good internal linking structure means that it takes a very few clicks around three to get you to the targeted link from your Homepage. A solid Internal linking structure can increase your overall bog authority which can help increase your search engine rankings for your individual posts.

Since search engines rank each page on your site and not your site as a whole, it’s important that you’re internal pages rank well. If you’re interlinking your blog posts, it would mean that you’re passing the link juice to all pages on your site which is very advantageous from an SEO point of view.

Internal Linking also enhances user experience by making it easier for them to navigate through your site which just a few clicks.

4 Steps to Optimize your blog’s Internal Linking Structure

1. High Level Navigation – Ensure that you have an excellent navigation structure for your blog. You can utilize headers, sidebars and footers to place text-based links which are crawlable to improve you’re blogs overall navigation structure. Avoid the use of flash images and links contained within a javascript – they are not followed by search engines.

You could also make use of breadcrumbs on your blog. As per Wikipedia “Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point”

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page or Home page >> Section page >> Subsection page

You can get the Breadcrumbs WordPress Plugin to achieve this.

2. Interlinking & Anchor Text – Interlinking related pages / post helps enhance reader experience as you are providing more information to them. Anchor text helps indicate to your readers an overall summary of the page you’re linking to. If you have multiple pages & posts on your blog, there will be a few posts that attract more traffic than others. Using Interlinking with Anchor text, you will be passing traffic to them as well.

You can check out Insights Plugin and SEO Smartlinks to interlink your blog posts with Anchor Text

3. Broken Links – Whether you like it or not, over a period of time you will find broken links on your blog. They are neither liked by search engines nor readers. You can use Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin to find & rectify them.

4. Sitemap – Have two sitemaps, one for your users and one for search engines. An XML sitemap helps google learn about your site’s internal structure, thereby increasing chances for search engines to find and index you internal pages. A sitemap for users can have all the category links & links to internal pages of your blog.

Do let us know if you follow any other tips to optimize your blog’s internal structure.

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SEO: Do URL Shorteners Pass Anchor Text & PageRank

Sandy — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:29:43 +0000

With the introduction of social media and Google considering social media links as one of the ranking factors, we were wondering how Google treats links from URL Shorteners in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & do these custom URL Shorteners pass pagerank & provide anchor text for links.

As you see the video , you will realize that Matt Cutts states that Custom URL Shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects. When Google tries to crawl a page and find a 301 permanent redirect, which all well-behaved URL shorteners like bit.ly & goo.gl do, then pagerank will pass to the final destination. So there is no harm in using URL shorteners. The pagerank flows through which should not be a matter of concern

However, Twitter’s Web pages have a “no follow” tag – which means that anyways pagerank does not pass through.

In conclusion, it can be said that URL shorteners are not a problem from SEO point of view.

Just ensure that your URL Shorteners service uses a 301 redirect to get the most benefit from it. If you use Shortened URLs’ in other places apart from Social Media for different purposes, you can get pagerank and anchor text benefit.

We’ll be glad to hear your thoughts on what Matt Cutts has to Say on URL Shorteners Passing Anchor Text & PageRank

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How to Build Backlinks To Your Site

Sandy — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:15:21 +0000

Backlinks are fuel for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Backlinks is the whole & sole reason you will receive loads of traffic from search engines. Links from other sites to your site are basically a ‘vote’ that tell search engines you are trusted and you are a good resource for whatever your content is about. Today, we will see the most popular known methods to build backlinks to your site.

7 Killer Ways to Build Backlinks

1. Blog Commenting – Commenting on relevant blogs in your niche is one of the best methods to build backlinks to your site. But, you should remember most of the blogs have nofollow tag by default and will not pass their link juice to your site when you comment. The trick here is to find blogs with the dofollow tag who pass link juice when you comment on them. It would be an icing on the cake if you could find dofollow blogs with keywordluv enabled as that will enable you to get your backlink with the anchor text of your choice. A great way to find dofollow blogs is by using Free Blog Commenter or google search operators

2. Forums – Recently we’ve come across this fact that there are hundreds of dofollow forums with high PR. Forums are places where you can network with like-minded people and use your links during your sign up stage. Also another good way is to add links to your forum signatures. You need to remember that if you join a forum that is very popular with 1000′s of posts, your backlinks are not going to be that powerful as it could be from a forum with a lesser no. of posts. You can find some good forums relating to your niche from http://www.big-boards.com which lists around 2000 forums in many different niches.

3. Article Marketing – Promoting your site with the help of article marketing is a very well-known strategy to build up backlinks as well as traffic. You need to be choosy while selecting your article directories out there as there a lot of them that are more like link farms and google’s recent panda update devalued these sites. Few of the well-known article directories are Ezine & GoArticles.

4. Web 2.0 & Free Blogging Sites – Another great source of obtaining backlinks to your sites are web 2.0 sites like squidoo & hubpages. These web 2.0 sites allow you to create your own pages and can write any topic of your choice and get a one way link with anchor text of your choice. Free blogging sites like wordpress.com, blogger.com & typepad allows you to create your own free blogs on any niche and write content of your choice with relevant links.

5. Directory Submissions – There are a lot of directories that you can submit your site to. Submitting your links to directories like Yahoo & Dmoz will help you build up backlinks to your site. Although you will find a lot of free directories that you can submit your site to, we would not recommended that as obtaining links from bad neighbourhoods is also not good for your overall SEO strategy.

6. Guest Posting – If not all, most of the popular blogs accept guest posting. It helps not only in obtaining backlinks, but helps you build a brand for your site and gets you laser targeted traffic. A few of the popular blogs that accept guest posts are Traffic Generation Cafe, IBlogZone, FamousBloggers, DailyBlogTips & ShoutmeLoud.

7. Social Bookmarking Sites – Bookmarking your websites on Social networks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, & Twitter can help you get backlinks. Also, if your post makes it to the top of a Digg or goes viral in StumbleUpon – you could end up receiving a lot of traffic.

Feel free to let us know if you use some other strategy, methods to build backlinks to your site.

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SEO: The Importance of Anchor Text

Sandy — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:10:49 +0000

In Simple terms, Anchor text is the text used to describe a web page link. Anchor text makes it convenient for visitors to click a link that has been assigned with an Anchor text, as it looks less “spammy” and the user has a fair idea about what that information that link contains.

By using anchor text on your posts, you also make it easier for the search engines to index the pages that you’re linking to, which also makes your posts rank higher.

Here’s how it works:

A link that reads “Bounce Rate” would indicate to users & search engine that information on the linked page is going to pertain to Bounce Rate. Now, if the page does not pertain to Bounce rate then it is very unlikely that the page will rank in a high position in SERP’s. The appropriate use of anchor text (which should ideally be your keywords) ensures that your posts rank highly in search engine result pages.

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

We all know that backlinks are the life blood of SEO. SEO is the art of ranking your posts highly in search engines for targeted keywords. Backlinks are considered as a vote from a website to your content in Google’s eyes and they help rank you rank higher for targeted keywords. Building backlinks with the targeted keywords as your anchor text is the best way to ensure that your posts rank highly in search engine result pages.

Creating Anchor Text for a Link in your WordPress Blog

You can have anchor text for your links very easily on your WordPress Blog by using the following code on your HTML editor while writing your posts

Anchor Text

Make sure to replace the website link and “Anchor Text” field to your targeted Keyword

The Anchor text has huge SEO benefits if used appropriately and can help increase your page’s ranking in Search Engine Result Pages. If you would like to rank for a keyword, try to build up relevant backlinks to that page with targeted keyword and your Anchor text.

We would be glad to hear your experiences on using Anchor Text for long-term SEO benefits?

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Importance of Keywords in a Domain Name

Sandy — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:30:10 +0000

Keyword in a domain name has been a hot topic in the SEO industry ever since. On March 11th, 2010 Matt Cutts came out with his take “How Important is it to have Keywords in a Domain name” video.

One of the best ways to find out importance of keywords in a domain name is to do a simple test by purchasing a domain name with the keywords you would like to rank for, put a page up on that domain with content that doesn’t mention the keyword in the body, copy, title etc & then link to the site from another site using the text “click here”.

The Result – The page will not rank for the targeted keyword. Content still plays the key part in getting noticed and found when searching. A keyword in a domain says nothing about the quality of the content on the site – it’s something that anyone can manipulate in an instant and at very low-cost.

Keyword domain names and Branded domain names

A keyword domain name with reasonably good content will have anchor text from links pointing to your site. So in many cases, it is not the domain name that is influencing a sites ranking, it is the anchor text that helps the domain achieve good ranking for the targeted keyword.

Let’s look at this way – having “wordpress” in your domain name will help you rank faster because people link to it saying “wordpress”. If “wordpress” is the only keyword you would like to rank for, then it’s ok. But if you’re looking at targeting keywords like “seo tips”, “make money online”, “web hosting” etc. So, If you are building a niche website, targeting some low volume keywords and don’t plan to put a ton of effort in, a keyword rich domain is probably more important.

A Branded domain name is something that is more apt to remember. If you are building a high quality site that you have large aspirations for, then an exact match domain is less important and you can opt for a name that you would like to see as a brand in the future. Remember that keywords in domain names for large websites have low value as specific keyword value in domain decreases as your website increases in content.

Choosing whether to go with a Keyword domain name or branded domain name would ideally depend on what aspiration you have for your website.

Do let us know your thoughts on whether a webmaster should opt for a Branded Domain Name or Keyword Domain name based on your experience?

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KeywordLuv WordPress Plugin to Reward Your Commentators

Sandy — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 15:29:32 +0000

KeywordLuv WordPress plugin allows commentators to add desired keywords to their name link when leaving a comment on your blog. Using this plugin, you can reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Every webmaster would desire that their posts are read and commented upon by your readers. The KeywordLuv WordPress plugin helps you gain just that, as readers are enticed and encouraged to share their views on your posts since they are aware that they are being rewarded with a backlink to their desired location with their choice of Anchor Text.

Why is Anchor Text Important

Anchor text is the text used in a link. It is important because search engines use it in their algorithms to determine rankings for your keywords. Each time you get a link from another site, the search engines take note the anchor text of that link. Each time that word / phrase is used in your anchor text, your chances improve for increasing your ranking in Search engine result pages (SERP’s) for that word / phrase

How Does the KeywordLuv Plugin Work?

For example, When you add a comment on this blog, you would type http://www.yourdomain.com in the URL field and xxxx @ yourdomain in the NAME field

With the KeywordLuv plugin, by including an @ sign in the middle of their name and their URL keywords, the result is something like this

KeywordLuv is very useful plugin as it helps your blog receive more comments which is the reason blogs are made and reward your commentators in the process. Also, just to let you know that we are a KeywordLuv enabled blog now.

You can download KeywordLuv WordPress Plugin

Let us know what you think of this plugin and do you think having this on a blog will help increase discussions?

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Importance of Deep Linking in SEO

Sandy — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 08:41:20 +0000

Deep Link is a link that points to a specific page instead of that website’s main or home page. The process of creating such deep links is called deep linking.

The goal of search engine optimization is to increase the authority of your entire site, and not just a single page (home page). This can be achieved by deep linking

The Importance of Deep Linking in SEO

During a regular search on Google, you search visitors are likely to end up looking at a specific page on your website (blog) which contains the targeted keywords rather than your homepage. The aim of deep linking is to build up backlinks to your specific page to help you rank higher in SERP’s.

Interlinking your posts with each other is also a form of deep linking. The more relevant deep links in your content the more likely that your old contents will get exposed to your readers. This way you can generate more page views per visitor. This can be achieved using Insights plugin or SEO Smart Links WordPress Plugin

Anchor Text

Anchor text are a set of words that are used to hyperlink a particular URL in order to create a deep link. A good way to select anchor text is by choosing the keywords you are targeting

For example, you have targeted an older post with the keyword phrase “Keyword Density Checker”. In that case the most appropriate anchor text for deep linking the post “How to use Keyword Density Checker WordPress Plugin”. Using this you can increase your authority for the keyword phrase “Keyword Density Checker”.

Deep Linking has unmeasurable benefits is terms of SEO for your whole website. The number of inbound deep links to the different pages on your website will decide the overall authority of your website in the eyes of Search Engines.

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