Links to your website provide two important benefits in getting customers to visit it. The first is if any of your potential customers are visiting the website that hosts your link they may see it and click through to your website. The other benefit is that Google and other search engine spiders will see your links and the more links into your site that you have the better page rank you will receive and the better chance your website will show up in searches which will help get more customers to your website.
Your inbound links are the single most important factor in determining your site’s rankings. But not all links are created equal. Some have the power to dramatically boost rankings, while others can actually drag your rankings down or even get you penalized. Links from some websites could be 10, 20, or even 100 times as valuable as other links.
In the past if you wanted a link to your website you simply exchanged a link with another website and you both would have a new link. Today, search engines are smarter and are actually penalizing websites for link exchanges. What search engines are looking for today are One-Way In-Bound Links coming into your website with no links back to that website anywhere on your site. When the search engine finds such links on your site it thinks this must be an important website and gives it higher page rankings.
Linking Triangles should also be avoided. This is where website A links to website B and B links to website C and C links back to A. Search Engines are smart enough to find such linking schemes and can penalize your website if you participate in them.
Another linking scheme that you need to know about and avoid is a new style of link exchange being promoted widely on the Internet today. This is where website owners will contact you asking for a link to their website from yours. In return, they will give you a link from a different website of theirs. You link your website A to their website B and then they link their website C to your website A. They explain to you that since their two websites are not connected in any way the Search Engines will not see it as a reciprocal link and will not penalize you.
They are telling you the truth in that respect, but what they fail to mention is that you are linking your valuable website to theirs giving them a lot of link juice. And in return they are linking some low quality website to your site which provides little if any value to you.
Anchor Text is the actual clickable part of a link that is made up of words typed out on a webpage instead of a button or other graphic. These are a great place to put Keywords on a webpage. For example, you may have the words “Diamond Engagement Rings” in text in the side bar on your home page and those words are linked to the page on your website that shows Diamond Engagement Rings.
Keywords in Anchor Text Links tend to be given more weight than regular copy. Search Engines give a lot of extra value to the destination page, if that page is optimized for the same Keywords that are in the Anchor Text.
The extreme value Search Engines place on Anchor Text Links was demonstrated a few years ago. If you did a search in Google for the phrase ‘More Evil than Satan Himself’ the top ranking website was Microsoft! The phrase ‘More Evil than Satan Himself’ did not appear anywhere on Microsoft’s pages much less in any of the important places we have discussed for including Keywords. So why did their website come up in the searches? The sole reason was because a number of websites put that phrase in an Anchor Text Link on their website linking to Microsoft.
A more recent example of the power of Anchor Text Links is a contest among several Search Engine Experts on the phrase “Coolest Guy on the Internet”. The idea was to see who could get their website ranked the highest for that search phrase without including the phrase on their website. For a while these websites lead the search result pages for the phrase.
If someone could get a website ranked #1 in a search for a phrase that did not appear on their website, but just in an Anchor Text Link, imagine what you can do if you use Anchor Text Links in combination with other Keyword optimization techniques.
Do not use the same Anchor Text on every website. It would look very unnatural if every website that linked to you used the very same words. Changing the word order of your Keyword Phrases and using synonyms of your Keywords are the best way to add variety to your incoming Anchor Text Links.
This is one of the larger benefits to having your Keywords in your Domain name. If the website linking to you does not use text as a link to your website, your URL already has the Keywords built into it and you automatically gain an Anchor Text Link from the URL text link.
The enormous boost that well placed Incoming Anchor Text Links provide your website is the main reason that most successful Internet Marketers do not have just one website. Having multiple websites that you control spread out over the Internet gives you immense power to dominate Keyword Phrases in the search results.
To maximize your links to your website and to receive the optimum value from search engines you need to employ a Deep Linking Strategy. Having all your links on the Internet pointing to your Home Page does not look ‘natural’ to search engines. Links to your Home Page are not nearly as effective as links to a page deep in your website that pertains to the same subject matter as the web page from which the link originates.
Deep Linking simply means having links to specific pages deep within your website. For example having an Anchor Text Link for the keywords “Custom Design Jewelry” to your website would be good and much better than other type links. However, having that same Anchor Text Link, linked to the page on your website that tells about your Custom Designed Jewelry is by far the BEST type of link you can have on the Internet today.
The same is true with links from videos. Videos linked to your website are starting to out perform many other types of links. But again, links from videos to your Home Page are not nearly as effective as videos linked to a page deep in your website that pertains to the same subject matter as is playing in the video. For example having a link from a video about diamonds to your website’s home page would be good. However, having that same video linked to the page on your website that tells about your diamonds is by far a better link and will help you get a better page rank.
For more information on marketing your store on the Internet, getting higher search engine rankings, or using the Internet to keep in touch with your existing customers go to www.Internet4Jewelers.com.
