Cyberactive Marketing SEO

In the previous articles on anchor text, we have covered why you should use keywords as anchor text, how to choose the right keywords for anchor text, and when to use the company name instead of anchor text.

What other way, in addition to link building with keyword rich anchor text, would help your website get to the top of search results for a particular keyword or phrase.

Let’s take a look at this example using the search results for “internet marketing” on Google.

What you will see is that four of the top ten results for “internet marketing” have the words internet marketing in the domain name or the URL. And the rest have internet marketing as part of their main page title.

The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that if you plan well from the beginning of your website’s conception and you are able to include your main keywords in your domain (xyzinternetmarketing.com), as web page file names (yourdomain.com/internet-marketing.html), and as your website’s title (XYZ Internet Marketing Company), then you will already be well on your way to dominating search results for your targeted keywords.

But don’t think that you can completely ignore link building with keyword rich anchor text just because you have those keywords in your domain, URL or title. There are over 158,000,000 results of “internet marketing” – the first ten will receive much more traffic than those further down in the search results. Especially if you are after a popular keyword, SEO work for that term is a must!

In the previous articles on anchor text, we have covered why you should use keywords as anchor text and how to choose the right keywords for anchor text.

Now we are going to back track a little and point out a few places where anchor text may not be needed or useful.

When would anchor text not be necessary? There are some directories or sites that you may want to list your URL in because they will bring direct traffic, but those directories do not pass on what the SEO world commonly refers to as “link juice.” Sites that use nofollow links, for example, specifically instruct crawlers to not give SEO credit to a link, therefore it does not count as a “vote” towards the anchor text of the link.

Another way of not giving “link juice” are sites that use an internal redirect address to your site instead of directly linking to your URL. The easiest ways to spot sites that do this is to hover over other links on the page, and see if they are pointing to the targeted domain, or if they are using a link that is theirdomain.com/some-kind-of-redirect-code, usually in PHP. These links will also not count as a “vote” towards the anchor text.

Finally, consider local directories where someone will be looking for you by name – you wouldn’t want them to have driven by your business and remember part of the company name is XYZ, then search their local directory to find a list of 10 companies all called “internet marketing.”

In the previous article on why you should use keywords as anchor text, we covered the basic reason why you should use anchor text as opposed to just your company name when building back links to your website. Next, we need to focus on how you choose the keywords for your company.

Choosing keywords for your anchor text can be an easy process, albeit sometimes too easy. Some companies can think of a ton of different phrases they would like people to see their company rank highly with, and others can only think of a broad keyword that will be difficult to gain quick results with.

The best place to start is with free keyword research tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool, pictured above. Simply type in one of the main focuses of your company, for example, marketing. You will be given a list of the most popular searches made globally monthly, and also locally monthly. As you can imagine, the number of companies competing for the word “marketing” is going to be pretty high. Why not focus on some of the other top results, such as internet marketing or brand marketing.

Once you have done some research, decide on a few keywords or phrases. Up to 5 is a good place to start. These will be the keywords you will use as anchor text in your ongoing link building campaign.

When it comes to link building, one of the key things to consider is your anchor text. What is anchor text? This is the text used in the link to your website. Most businesses use their company name as anchor text – our company, for example, would appear as Cyberactive Marketing.

But is using your company name as your anchor text really the best idea? If your business name is XYZ Company, and your domain is XYZCompany.com, then anyone searching XYZ Company will likely get your domain first as it is in the domain name.

What you need to consider is other search terms, or keywords, that you would like your company to rank highly with in search results. So if XYZ Company does internet marketing, then they would want to use “internet marketing” as the anchor text.

What does link building using specified anchor text do for your business? Consider each incoming link with specific anchor text as a vote saying that your site is the place to go for that anchor text. If another site has, say, 5 links pointing to their site using the words “internet marketing” and XYZ Company has 50 incoming links using the same anchor text, it is safe to assume that XYZ Company would come up higher in searches for internet marketing.