Link Exchange and Anchor Text Tips
For Use with Adsense
by Heather Landry
Link Exchanges and Anchor Text
Link Exchanging
Link exchanges are helpful in getting your site to rank highly in
the search engines, particularly Google. When a site links to your
site, Google considers it a "vote" for your site. The more votes
you get, the higher your rankings will go. The links count much
more if they are from relevant sites. You do not want to link to unrelated sites if you can
avoid it. They don't count for much, and if you link to a known
spam site, your site could be penalized by Google and dropped from
the search results. Do not exchange with spammy sites such as
Casino, Viagra, Porn sites, and the like. It reflects badly on
your site if you do. It makes it appear to Google as though you
can't find any decent link exchange partners,
so you just take any partners you can find. That's not the image
you want Google to have of you. The more links you get from
relevant sites, the better off you will be.
To get links, you will have to write to the owner or webmaster of
the site you want to exchange with and ask them directly for a
link. If you use a linking program to do this, make certain that
your form letters are not obvious form letters. Many people ignore
link exchange requests if it's obvious that the webmaster used a
form letter. So if you use those, at least fill in the blanks
properly and read over the email before sending it. Here is an
example of a good link exchange request letter that I
received from another webmaster. It's a form letter, but it's a
good one.
Dear Webmaster,
I came across your website heatherswebdesign.com and it was an
excellent experience to be on your website, which I felt was very
comprehensive and knowledgeable.
It would be very kind of you, if you could add our website link at
http://www.heatherswebdesign.com/links_webhosting.htm or any
other related page in your website.
Our website http://www.websitepositiongold.com focuses on website
promotion and search engine optimization softwares. Exchanging
links will help both of us to increase traffic on our website.
As you probably know, that link popularity is one of the leading
factors towards attaining top search engine rankings, I humbly
request, if you would be interested exchanging a link to our
website. Further, I am pleased to inform you that I have already
added your website in our link directory and you can check the
same at http://www.websitepositiongold.com/links.htm .
Code:
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="arial"
color="#0000FF"><b><a href="http://www.websitepositiongold.com"
target="_blank">Web
Position Gold </a></b><br>
<font color="#000000">Website promotion and search engine
submission software to promote your website to search engines
and drive guarantee traffic. Download FREE Trial
today!</font></font>
</p>
The Link will Look as Below:
Web
Position Gold
Website promotion and search engine submission software to promote
your website to search engines and drive guarantee traffic.
Download FREE Trial today!
I would be grateful if you could give us a link on your link
page and please let us know when its live.
Anticipating a positive response,
With warm regards
Mark Naeil http://www.websitepositiongold.com
It's nice to complement a person on their site when you are
requesting a link exchange. It's best though if you have actually
read a bit of the site and can mention something specific about it
so they know you were there. And whenever possible, find the
webmaster's name and address them by it, so it doesn't look like
you are using a form letter. Since the name of my site is
"Heather's Web Design", any idiot should know to address the email
to "Heather", but as you can see in the form letter above, they
addressed me as "Webmaster." That's not cool, but at
least the link request was nice enough to make up for it.
Anchor Text
In order for your linking campaign to be effective, you must learn
how to properly use anchor text. Anchor text is the hyperlinked
text on any link. Always have other people link to you using your
keywords as your anchor text. The description really doesn't
matter that much, just make it so that it describes your site and
sounds good.
Good example of using anchor text:
Pimp My
Ride - Offering pictures and information on pimped cars, hot
women, and fast cool cars.
Bad example:
www.fastcoolcars.com - Offering pictures and information on
pimped cars, hot women, and fast cool cars.
We are trying to optimize Ron's site for the keyphrase "Pimp My
Ride", so I used that phrase as the anchor text instead of using
"Fast Cool Cars."
If you are optimizing for other keyphrases, then use those
keyphrases as your anchor text.
Some sites will link to you their own way and then write and ask
you for a link exchange. You must make sure that they are willing
to change your link so that it is set up the way YOU want it set
up, not the default way that their (usually) automated link
exchange program set it up. Some webmasters can take WAY too long
to change your link for you. Some of them also take way too long
to even add your link. If that happens, you can send them a
reminder, but if, after a reasonable amount of time has passed and
they still haven't linked back to you, you should remove their
link. Do not link to them in exchange for nothing because that
only benefits them and you get screwed.
If you can get one-way links to your site, that is even better
than a link exchange (because Google can tell when you are linking
to a site and that site is linking back to you and they aren't
dummies - they know what's going on.) A one way link makes it look
as though that site liked your site enough that they wanted to
link to you, even though they are getting nothing out of it. If
you have a really good site, you will get lots of one way links
from people who just enjoy your site and want to link to it. That
is the true meaning of "link popularity", which is a phrase that
is thrown around a lot in the linking community. You can get one
way links by paying for them, but that has some risks, such as
Google finding out that you paid for links. Your site can be
penalized for that, so just be sure you choose a reputable company
to work with if you are interested in purchasing links. I do not,
and have not ever, purchased a link, but many sites do it
regularly and successfully.
When choosing websites to do link exchanges with, you want to be
sure they have a decent Google PageRank. A 3 is okay, a 4 is good,
a 5 is great, and anything above that is fantastic. But you have
to see what PR their links page has (or the page where they will
be putting your link.) If their links page has no PR, then Google
may not even have it indexed. To check and see if a page is
indexed in Google, you can go to
www.Google.com and type the url with the "www" on it into the
search box. If Google brings the page up in their results, then
they have that page indexed. If they do not have the page indexed,
you get a "Sorry" message. You may decide to exchange links with a
site anyway, even if they do not have any PR, if you think that
it's a good site and they will probably get a PR in the near
future. Also, you can't be picky about PR unless you actually have
a good PR yourself. If your PR is really low, like a 2 or
something, you can't insist that your partners all have 5's. If
your links page is brand new, then it will obviously have a PR 0,
so you don't really have much to offer your link exchange
partners. You just have to start at the bottom and work your way
up like everyone else. Eventually your PR will get higher and then
you can insist on your partners having a good PR as well.
If you do not already have a links page on your site, you will
want to add one. Put a link at the bottom of your home page (or
somewhere that is visible) that says "Links" or "Resources" or
"Related Sites", something along those lines. You want your link
partners and potential link partners to easily be able to find
your links page so they don't think that you are scamming them.
There are a few scams in the link exchange world. The main one is
where someone exchanges links with you and later they remove your
link, but you are still linking to them. So you want to keep close
track of all your links and check occasionally to make sure all of
your partners are still linking to you.
When you set up your links page, you want to format your partners' links just
like the example above on this page, with the link title (anchor text), and
description. Don't ever link to someone using their URL,
http://www.fastcoolcars.com, because
you wouldn't want them to do that to you, and there are many sites
who won't exchange with you at all if you are not using the
standard linking technique that everyone else uses.
One other thing... Do not ever use programs like Search Engine
Gold or any of the automated programs that submit your site to the
search engines. Program like that clog Google's servers with many
requests and it pisses Google off and Google will penalize your
site for using them.
