Google uses over 100 criteria to determine where to rank a page for a given keyword. Some of those criteria, or factors, are on-site and some are off-site. On-site factors include factors such as saturating your page with keywords in the title tag, copy, and headers. On-site factors cover factors include the age of the website, the PageRank, anchor text, and many more.One of the most important off-site factors is anchor text, often called link text. When Page A links to Page B, Page B gets credit for the keywords that are in the link from Site A.  This works whether it’s one page of your site linking to another page of your site, or a page from another site that links to yours.

Here’s an example. Let’s say I want to improve the ranking for the keyword ‘sheet metal fabricators’ to a Page B. I would link to page B with the keyword ‘sheet metal fabricators’ in the link text.  Every time I link to Page B with the keyword ‘sheet metal fabricators’, I get more credit from Google for that keyword. See, I’ve just given page B a little boost for the keyword ‘sheet metal fabricators’.  This is a great way to increase your ranking for a keyword if you have already saturated the page with keyword and you’re still not ranking as high as you want to be.

So how do you build link text to your page?  There are two ways. The first is to work with the links within in your own site. The second is to build links to that page from other sites.  Next week I’ll show you how to build your link text using both.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under General, Advanced SEO Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.