SEO / SEM Blog by Search Circus

Content, content, content – that is the mantra of any skilled person or company that’s involved in Web site marketing strategies and SEO. And among the Web site marketing strategies that are key to crafting Web pages that bring in traffic is having unique content that both engages the user and achieves the kind of search engine optimization that ensures high rankings from Google.

Additionally, there are simple Web site marketing strategies that one can use to achieve excellent search engine rankings, like having proper text for your links. Simply called “link text” these are the words that are encased within the anchor tags. In other words, the link text is the portion of text that you click to get to another page. On most Web pages, they’re blue and often underlined. If they are not blue, then on most well-designed pages, the link text is still a distinct color, a color that says “hey, click on me and I’ll take you to another page with more information.”

Properly-optimized link texts are important to anyone who interested in Web site marketing strategies that can help their Web site to reach its full potential. Google and other major search engines like Yahoo! and MSN take note of each page’s link text. If the word “gardening” appears several times in a Web page’s link text, then search engines will assume that the page has something to do with gardening and will give it a better ranking for that search word. So that means putting relevant keywords inside your link texts is one of the most powerful Web site marketing strategies that will benefit your page’s search engine rankings.

The first thing to remember when writing good link text is to make it look natural. Search engines are advanced enough to recognize normal human writing, and that’s the kind of writing they like. A good habit when executing and a part of your Web site marketing strategies would be to write your Web page’s content without even thinking about what words you want to make linkable. Then go back and see which ones work best.

Also, avoid using words like “Click here” or other imperatives. These days, most Web designers will tell you that it’s considered a bit garish for links to stand out like that. And SEO specialists will tell you that “Click here” isn’t good way to execute any successful Web site marketing strategies because it really doesn’t give Google much information to work with. Instead, try incorporating important keywords into each piece of link text.

Finally, studies show that at least initially, Web site visitors do not read a page from top to bottom, but rather scan the page and note the different colored links. So that’s another reason why you want descriptive link test. Would someone who only read the highlighted links on your page get a good idea of your page’s purpose? If not, then it might be time to try updating your link texts. Remember, the key to great Web site marketing strategies is to remember that content is king. Even for those little highlighted link texts.