Onlinenerd24

Even if it’s a good thing that most SEOs concentrate on building links by negotiating link exchanges, buying links or asking people to link to their sites, natural links might be the most underestimated type of link.

Optimize free links

While webmasters are more than happy about people voluntarily linking to their site they take them for granted and think they can’t do anything about them or even optimize those links. Which is not true. While you often can’t change the anchortext (the keywords) of those links, you can still optimize these links to gain even more traffic for your site. The key is changing the way you normally think about linkbuilding. While you normally choose an anchortext that fits the keyword you are targeting with your linked page, you have to think the other way around, when it comes to natural links. You need to take advantage of the keywords that the people used to link to your site and probably adapt the text on your page to fit this keyword as well.

Keywords in the URL

A lot of natural links might come from post in forums and weblogs. Often forum software just displays the URL of the linked page as the anchortext. This is why you want to have your main keywords in the URL or probably even in the domain name. More sophisticated forums and blogs might pull the title tag from the linked page when inserting the post into the database. If you properly on-page optimized your page you are good, since you already have your keyword in the title of your page.

The interesting part

Besides URLs or title tags people might also link to your page by using individual keywords. Those links can be an undiscovered treasure for SEOs. People might used completely different keywords to link to your page, then you yourself use on this page. These keywords can be synonyms for the keywords you target or even your keywords in another language. Just think about a Russian site linking to a English site related to cars. Would they use “Cool Cars” as the anchortext of the links? Most probably not. They would naturally use the russian translation. These are the links you want to identify and these are the keywords you prbably want to put into your page along with the existing content. While the anchor text of the link alone is a very important factor to rank for this keywords, actually having the keyword on your page will most probably give you an additional boost in the SERPs. So, here’s the basic idea of optimizing natural links.

• Take a look at referring websites
• Identify the anchortext
• Decide if you want to add this text to the linked page
• Put the text into the linked page
• Enjoy your additional traffic

To wrap up this post, I have another tip. Spare yourself the time to optimze for “click here”. You will never push Adobe from their No. 1 postion

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 15:17 and is filed under Uncategorized.