The hard part about SEO isn’t getting people to link to you. It’s pretty easy to build links when you think about it. The tricky part is getting people to link to you with an anchor tag that actually matters. Most people link back to a site with that sites URL as the anchor. While people are happy to take any link they get, if you really want to help someone out why not think about what their dream link might be.
Let’s say you are my buddy Drew, author of BenSpark.com. If I was writing a post and wanted to link to him I could link with the anchor of drew or benspark.com… but neither of these links is going to be terribly effective for him. The keyword drew would drive random, low quality traffic, and he already ranks #1 for benspark.com. What would probably help him out more is if I linked like this: Benspark.com, a popular photography blog. I am pretty sure Drew would be on cloud nine if he ranked for that term.
When you link off to someone else’s blog take a minute and see if you can guess their dream link. A good place to start is the title. For instance, Michael Brito’s blog britopian.com has a title of Social Media Blog : Conversational Marketing. If I was to link to him I would link like this: Michael Brito runs a social media blog that covers topics such as conversational marketing.
You might even consider letting your readers know what your dream link is. IZEA’s dream link is social media marketing, SocialSpark’s is blog marketing. Each time you link you are casting a vote in Google’s eyes. If you are going to cast a vote for a site make sure that it actually makes a difference.
What are your dream links?
