In spite of all this (and as most of you know), I Don’t Buy Links. So what do we do to get good anchor text? Here are a few of the ways…
Naming Conventions
Naming conventions are about picking names for your company, site, and pages that contain your critical keywords. People who choose to link to you often use these labels as the anchor text in the link they give you. Here are some ideas for your home page:
- Pick a good business name – Perhaps you are already running your business, and your company name is Kalbertron. A large percentage of the links to your site will use your company name. If the big keyword you are looking to rank for is Orange Juice, consider setting up a DBA for your company, such as “Kalbertron Orange Juice Co.” A name like this will print links with good anchor text (as long as your site is worth linking to).
- Pick a good URL for your site – While it is true that domain names are getting harder and harder to get, you can still usually get one that contains critical keywords in it. Let’s say, for example, that your company is called Acme Manufacturing and you make blue widgets. See if you can get acme-blue-widgets.com or acmebluewidgets.com for your web site URL.
- Good home page title and header – Even if you don’t have a great company name, using a keyword-rich title header on your home page will net you some keyword-rich anchor text. If you use the DBA concept as outlined above, or already have a keyword rich company name, make that a prominent part of the title and header.
You have only one home page, and you want to get keyword rich links to the lower level pages of your site too. Since you can’t have a different name for your company on every page of your site, the area to focus on your pages other than the home page is in picking smart page titles and headers. People will pick these up and use them in links to your pages.
Off-Page Strategies
The key thing to focus on with regard to off-page strategies is to find ways to entice people to link to you, while using your superior content as a weapon. In order to remain compliant with search engine terms of service, you want to avoid being deceptive, and you want the link given to represent a legitimate endorsement of your site. Here are some ideas:
1. Write articles for distribution to third party sites. This is an oldie but a goodie. In return for providing the content to the third party free of charge, include an attribution link back to your site. Guess what? As long as you are reasonable with your keyword selections, most of the time the publisher will allow you to choose the anchor text.
In addition, you can point this at most any page on your site (but pick a page directly related to the article). As long as the relevance of your article to the page on your site that you provide the return link to is high, the link you get should represent a legitimate endorsement (after all, they took your content and published it).
2. Distribute widgets or tools in return for links. This is basically the same concept as with syndicating articles, except now it is encapsulated within Ajax or some other similar construct. Request a link from anyone who uses the tool or widget. Most of the people who use it will comply.
A couple of critical points about this are:
- Don’t be deceptive. Recently Google Blogoscoped flagged a deceptive hit counter scheme section of their Javascript. Shortly after this post was done, the rankings for these sites plummeted.
- Keep it highly relevant. Putting aside the hidden link aspect of the example just given, a hit counter is simply not relevant to your business. A link in return for providing a hit counter does not represent a real endorsement of your business. But, if you are in the business of making furnaces for gold smelting, and you produce a widget that does calculations for flux recipe adjustments, a return link for that is a good one. This also greatly increases the chances that your link will come from relevant sites and pages.
3. Pursue Social News Campaigns. This is basically another way of promoting content, but with a little added twist. If you have generated an article that goes hot on a social news site such as Digg, it will produce a ton of links. In addition, on Digg for example, most of the links to your article will use the title of the Digg submission, not the title of your article (they don’t need to be the same).
Summary
All the above strategies depend on having quality content and leveraging it wisely. None of these strategies rely o deception. Used properly, every single link gained will represent a real endorsement of your site, and it’s content. This is ultimately what the search engines want the links to your site to represent.
