Keywords

Making a link work harder for you - Boost the power of your inbound links

When people link to you they generally use words to do so (although sometimes they use an image). The words they use in the link have a strong effect on Google. Google uses them (among other factors) to determine what your website is about. If a thousand people link to you with the text "free widgets" it's pretty safe to say you are giving out some "free widgets" on your website, at least google thinks so.

Lets use some examples to illustrate how important this little bit of knowledge can really be. We'll use a fictitious band called "The Dudes" who play rock music and are from Boston.

Example 1.

"The Dudes"

This link contains only the bands name. Of course we want people to find us when they search for us by name, but this type of link completely ignores what the internet is really good for- exposing your music to new listeners!

(Number of searches per word are per month)

Link Text		Keywords		Searches Per Word		Total Searches for Link Text
The Dudes		The		n/a
		Dudes		3,703		3,703

This chart shows us that the text of our inbound link will give us 3,703 additional opportunities each month to be found on the search engines.

Now lets take a look at another example.

Example 2.

"Boston Band The Dudes"

This link tells more about you, both for the person on a website reading the link and for Google.

Link Text		Keywords		Searches Per Word		Total Searches for Link Text
Boston Band The Dudes		Boston		125,438
		Band		112,742
		The		n/a
		Dudes		3703		241,883

Look at the difference in the total number of searches. Wouldn't you rather have 241,883 chances to get new visitors to your site than only 3,703?

Now you can see by adding some descriptive text to your inbound link you can greatly increase the amount of traffic you get from the search engines. In this way you've made your links work harder for you...and that's good!

Does this mean you should load all of your inbound links with longs lists of text? NO!! The more words in the text of the link the less impact each word will have. Keep your inbound link text very limited. Go for the few words that matter most to you! Also start with the most important word going from left to right.

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