Inbound links are some of the most important SEO practices you can do to help you get a good ranking in Search Engines. Google, Yahoo & MSN all put weight on inbound links. So the question is how important are inbound links. You see if I have a website with 100 inbound links and I’m competing with another website that has say 200 links then the one with the most links wins the higher ranking in search engines. Well it’s really not that simple. On page factors make a difference too. If I used more keywords in my content that will help me but at the same time a real world scenario is more likely my site has 100 links and my competition has more like 6,000 links making a listing in search engines impossible. That is more the case with popular search terms. Low competition keywords are very easy to get a top listing if you know how to use links in the right way.
Inbound Links Are Becoming More Important Than Reciprocal Links
It used to be common that getting a lot of reciprocal links was really important to helping a website get a better rank in search engines. Now days this will still help you but they need to be some what related to your website or content that you are talking about. You can even get penalized for have to many reciprocal links to unrelated sites.
Inbound Links & The Anchor Text
Inbound links are important to ranking your website in search engines but more importantly is the Anchor Text used to link to your website. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN all put a lot of weight on inbound links. This is you off-page SEO. Using keywords in your Anchor Text really tells what a webpage is about. This also has an effect on internal links as well. The keywords are taken into account for what keywords you website is ranked for. Using keywords in you links will help you get a much higher ranking than you realize.
The Anchor Text & On-page Keywords
If you can try to link to a your webpage using at least on or 2 keywords. If you have the keywords optimized on the page you will get a bigger boost for you ranking. But the truth is it doesn’t really matter if the keywords are listed on your page at all. You can still rank in search engines and no even have a single keyword on the page it’s self. But how? The Anchor Text caries a lot of weight much more than you think. It’s just a matter of how many links you have with your keywords. The more the better.
Do I Have To Use My Keyword-phrase Exactly How It’s Written?
To answer the question I would say that you do not have to. Using the exact Keyword-phrase will give you a bonus for your rankings but be careful. All you really need is to place a on or 2 of your keywords in the Anchor Text. Be careful when using the same keyword-phrase over and over again. If you do it too many times in a row you will set off a flag. Search engines will see it as spam or manipulating search results. They will penalize you for this. If you decide to use your keyword-phrase in your Anchor Text make sure to use several different search terms and do it on and off switching between them. This does not apply to internal links.
An Example Of How Much The Anchor Text Really Matters
A bunch of SEO all over the internet decided that they wanted to make a statement about are president. They used the word miserable failure to link to his white house page. Google found out that it was a Google Bombing and corrected it in their search results. Yahoo still has not figured it out check it out!
For all you bush fans I didn't do it. I'm just showing you the effects of a Google bomb and Anchor Text in links.