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A Definition Of Keywords & How to Use Them
By Ken | February 20, 2010
The Secret World Of Keywords, Titles And Anchor Text
Download This Post As A Free pdf file HERE
Why This Report? – Six Months Of Wasted Time!
When I started out in internet marketing I had no idea about the information held in this report. I therefore wasted 6 months of frantic activity that was going nowhere fast. I wrote articles, I submitted responses to blogs, went to forums and everything else you are supposed to do when you are trying to promote a website and build a business.
What I didn’t know and appreciate was how important the detail is in putting content on my website. It took me another few months to understand that links are the lifeblood of any web page. It also really matters how you set these links up.
I now work smarter and better. I also get results that are finally putting money in my pocket. I am not a well known “Expert”, but I have learnt the importance of keywords, titles and anchor text.
Some Terms Explained.
Web page – I talk in terms of web page rather than website because that is how the search engines view your pages. They see pages not sites. That is why you need to have good internal linking within your group of web pages. You are in complete control of how these internal links are set up so you might as well do a decent job.
Keywords – A Keyword is usually not just one word. It is a phrase of 2 -5 words that are being searched for in the search engines. I have not covered keyword research here as I really want to focus hard on the main topic.
Titles – This is the title of the web page. I see this as the most critical thing to get right when you put up a web page. One of the first things a search engine will look at is the title of the page. It is also what is presented in the search engine results pages when someone gets their results for a search
Anchor Text – This is what is visible on the page to the reader. It is the highlighted words that can be clicked to move the web page visitor to the new page.
A brief look at the internet and why it is a “Net”
One of the most important aspects of making sense of the internet is how it is all linked up together. The Billions of web pages are useless on their own. They are like unrelated stars in the sky. They look interesting but that’s all. You can’t make sense of it all unless all the web pages are linked together in a way that is logical.
The web pages can be linked in a coherent way that makes sense to the visitor. They can also be linked in an ad hoc way that makes no sense at all. A human visitor to a web page will quickly lose interest if the pages are linked to irrelevant content elsewhere on the internet. Not only can human visitors see that the links are off topic. The search engines have learnt to see when the internet links are relevant and when they are not.
So I want to talk about how you link your pages to each other and how you use back linking to make the most sense of your web pages.
The Importance Of Links
It matters enormously how you gain links and how those links are shown on the page. As a precursor to this, it also matters that your page is well written and contains the right sort of content in relation to your keywords and subject.
If your page has no links then it is a lone “star” that no one will ever find. It could have the greatest keyword researched article on it with highly valuable content. This will not matter if you have no way of making it part of the “net” So you need to obtain links as a first priority. I give some easy ways to get links at the end of this report.
You do not need thousands of links if you have done your keyword research correctly. Good long tail keywords will be found and ranked well by search engines if you can get about 20 links to your page.
Some examples of links…
Link Style 1. Full web page address (url)
http://www.quinoatips.com/how-to-sprout-quinoa-new-method/
This lengthy and messy link takes you too a page about how to sprout quinoa but you would never guess it because the link looks ugly. (The Website is a niche blog I run)
Link Style 2. Click Here
This looks a whole lot better but still does not give the reader the whole picture. More importantly, it doesn’t indicate to search engines what the content on the new page is about.
Link Style 3. Using A Keyword As Anchor Text
This looks much better. It also IS better for a number of reasons. Firstly the person reading the page has a good idea of what the new page will contain. So you stand a better chance of getting the click through to the other page. Secondly, it will be clear to a search engine that you have provided a good link.
How to Make Your Page Look Relevant To The Search Engines
The process of how search engines decide if a web page is important and relevant. To help me rank well for the keyword “How to sprout quinoa” I prepared this page ensuring the following was included when I submitted the page.
- The title of the page contained the keyword.
- The meta description of the page contained the keyword
- The meta keywords included the phrase
- The content included the phrase
- One paragraph has the phrase in bold as a heading
Now the search engines are just machines, they cannot think for themselves so they have to be taught what to look for. Imagine that I have a link somewhere out on the internet on a web page someone is reading. They see a link to my web page saying “How to sprout quinoa”. They click through to and find that there is a page of “on topic” content.
What search engines are doing is worming their way through these links to check if they are good links. So our search engine worm will check first the page that has the link on it. What’s that page about? Then it will check the anchor text and compare it to the 5 page features mentioned above. If there is a synergy and relevancy then the worm will report back that the web page has some value. I am simplifying something that is much more complex to help you see the importance of the anchor text in the link.
So it is critical that your web page has incoming links with the right anchor text contained within it. This will ensure that your page is well ranked. But that’s not all.
Using Different Keywords As Anchor Text
You should obtain links that have a variety of related terms within them. If all your inbound links have the same anchor text then this will appear unnatural to the search engines. Eventually they may see the page as spam. So to continue with our example I could use the following terms as link anchor text.
Sprout Quinoa
Sprouting quinoa
Can you sprout quinoa
Quinoa Sprouts
Quinoa sprout
Quinoa Sprouting
You get the idea. It is crucial that these terms are researched keywords that you have decided will help you get traffic to your website. If your web page has some of these terms within the content of the written word then this will also show the search engines that the link and the content are good.
Keeping your anchor text and page titles natural.
One mistake I made was to find what I thought were good keywords that didn’t make grammatical sense and use them exactly as my research told me I should. So if I determined that “Sprout Quinoa Easy” was a killer keyword then I would put it in the title and content and use it as anchor text.
Bad Decision. Search engines are cleverer than you think. Constructing weird sentences to accommodate these phrases will just attract their attention and they will pick up that you are trying to manipulate them. Its like you are broadcasting to the internet that you are playing games with your link and content.
4 easy ways to get good anchor text links now
Your target is to create 20 links to a post using these 3 methods. So you will have 1 internal link and 19 from article directories, Squidoo and Blogger. All these links must use the anchor text or a variation as the link.
1. Internal linking within a Wordpress blog
One way you can immediately get good links to your post pages in Wordpress is by linking to another post using anchor text. When you post to your blog make sure you link to the previous post with good anchor text.
2. Submit Articles To Online Directories
How to prepare your content for an article directory
Submitting articles to article directories allows you to get relevant links. Before I submit the article I have it completely prepared in a text editor – I use notepad. So I have the following set out on the page before I go online to post my article.
- The Article Title (Including Keyword phrase)
- The Keywords (Including Keyword phrase)
- The content of the article (Including Keyword phrase)
- The Description of the article – Not a paragraph from the article. I write a teaser couple of sentences. (Including Keyword phrase)
- The resource box ready with the correct anchor text and pointing to the web page you are targeting.
If you prepare your article in this way you will get the linking part right first time. If the directory has a WYSIWYG editor then you can highlight your anchor text and click on the “Add Hyperlink” Icon to enter you web page address. If the directory doesn’t have a WYSIWYG then you can put your links in using a line html code.
The HTML you need to set up a link with your keyword rich anchor text in your article is set out below.
Anchor text is highlighted words on a page that link to another web page or resource. Clicking on the text, called hypertext, loads the linked resource in the user’s browser.
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/pagetitle.html”>The Anchor Text</a>
The anchor text (Also Called Hypertext)is the text that occurs between the angle brackets. Place your page address in between the Quotes and the Anchor text where I have put the phrase “The Anchor Text”.
3. Create A Squidoo Lens
A squidoo lens lets you gain links from the content you place there. There are plenty of reasons to have a related lens but I use them for the links. Recently I have put my quinoa blog on my lens as an RSS feed. It means my lens have new content when I post to my blog. I actually do not know for sure if this helps me in the search engines but my hunch is that it does.
4. Create A Blogger Blog
You can post articles to a blogger blog and get backlinks in the same way as squidoo.
Final Tips
If your keyword is hard to work into a sentence you can make it an anchor by writing what I call a “more info” line. What you can do is put the following at the very end of an article
more info >>> How to sprout Quinoa
Some keywords can work well together to make one anchor text. So you can combine them. e.g.
If you had these keywords
“Learn Piano” and “Piano lessons online”
You could make them into one anchor text and page title of …
“Learn Piano Lessons Online”
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