If you are a student of SEO, you know the importance of building incoming links from high-trust sites.
In addition to obtaining links you also want your incoming links to reinforce the relevance of your site. Two key ways to improve the quality of your incoming links are to be specific about the link text relevancy and target page selection.
1. Link Text Relevancy. The actual link text used to link to your site is an important factor in the value of a link. If you are selling Chlorine-Free Pool Chemicals, it would be much better for a link from another site to read:
Check out the huge selection of Chlorine-Free Pool Chemicals
than something like this:
Check out pool chemicals from JoeysHiQualityPools.com
The ideal scenario is for the link text to include your keyword phrase. If all of your incoming links simply include your domain name, the search engines will not reward you for your relevancy for specific keywords (unless, of course, those keywords are in your domain name).
2. Target Page Selection. It is hard to be too picky about incoming links, but the optimal situation is if incoming links go directly to the interior pages of your site. Ths is called deep linking. If you have a page on your site about chlorine-free pool chemicals you will want incoming links with with that link text to go directly to a page on your site about chlorine free-chemicals.
If every link into your site goes to the home page, the search engines will likely not value your site as highly as if you have a range of links going to content-specific pages on your site.
So how do you obtain links that are structured the way you want? You ask! Use every opportunity to make it easy for others to link to you.
Here is an example of a link request page you can put on your site:
You can similarly email the link text to others that you would want them to use when they link to your site. Let the recipient know they can just copy and paste the snippet you have provided for them.
Whenever you create an inbound link to your site from another website, be sure you are using best practices, such as those described in this post.
If you are curious what your current incoming link text looks like in Google’s eyes, Google Webmaster Tools has such a report for doing a quick scan of incoming link text at:
Your site on the web -> Links to your site -> Anchor Text
Don’t sell yourself short by settling for generic incoming links. At every opportunity, request for those links to be built in a way that will give you the greatest SEO boost.
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