Changing Your Internal Anchor Text
Sometimes, you’d love to link to your home page with your keyword as the anchor text, but it just doesn’t look right in the top menu or sidebar. An easy way to make your internal anchor text links reference your content with the anchor text you want while still maintaining the sensibility of your permanent navigation is to:
- Place your header/sidebar/permanent nav into an iframe that you serve on every page (that also limits the amount of unique content the spiders have to crawl per page – a nice benefit)
- In your footer, link to your content as you see fit – it makes more sense to use anchor text here and will serve to give you the kind of internal linking you want for both engines and visitors
Obviously, you can overdo this and get penalized, but if employed properly, it’s a great way to leverage your internal link juice in a more optimized fashion.
Link Building on the Forbes Network
In the world of finance, sites like Forbes.com, Investopedia.com, ChartAdvisor.com and other in the Forbes network of sites rank extremely well at the search engines. These domains have a lot of link love to give out, but there’s no formalized directory, blog or other way to acquire links. The only way is to buy your way in with advertising – here’s the page to submit an ad request. Note that they sell banners, text links and other ad options. You’ll need a big budget, but the links are worth quite a bit.
Best Tip Yet – Direct Links from Amazon Pages
I stumbled across a link source so unbelievable today that I had to check it a dozen times to be sure. However, it appears that certain blog sections at Amazon, though moderated, do allow for inclusion of anchor text and external links without nofollow.
Check out pages like:
Amazon is “syndicating” feeds from the authors (or in some cases affiliated parties) of the products. Thus, if you or your organization has a product on Amazon, you too can create this “feed” and get direct links from Amazon’s pages. Note that many of these not only rank highly in the search results but have high PageRank as well.
This is truly an excellent way to leverage Amazon for SEO value.
Disclosing Affiliate Links Effectively in Blogs
My friend Carsten Cumbrowski just sent this over:
I have a tip for you. It came to my mind when there was the discussion about the KeyCompete post at SEOMoz. KeyCompete have an affiliate program via Commission Junction, paying 30% commission.You might want to try something like the following.Have your designer create a link CSS “class” for affiliate links. A style that makes them stick out (e.g. a little “A” icon next to it or something like that), maybe also a formatted tooltip that has a disclosure text, e.g.:“This is an affiliate link. SEOMoz receives a commission for referrals generated by this link. The fact that the link is an affiliate link does not change our opinion about the referred to product or service, but you can support the SEOMoz team by using this link, if you consider the purchase of the product or services because of our post. Thank you.”You can also add that disclosure on a special page and only refer to it from the tool tip. This would allow you to make additional revenue with the blog.You don’t have to use it for the company, but the blog, such as to pay for drinks at a tradeshow to SEOMoz readers or do something like http://www.affiliatedinner.com e.g. “SEOMoz Dinner”.I just came back from Affiliate Summit and in especially good “free tips mood“, so you are welcome
This is great advice from Mr. Cumbrowski – probably not something we’d use on SEOmoz, but a fantastic idea for those seeking to effectively utilize affiliate links while keeping their visitors in the know.
How to Get Google & Yahoo! to Spider Your Site More Quickly
These “tips” have both been around for a few months, but they’re still not common knowledge, so it pays to have them here.
Google – set up AdSense units on every page you want indexed. Googlebot has to come by anyway to check that you’re following the rules, and thus you’re often spidered more quickly. Heard from a little bird that the AdSense trick doesn’t work, but that installing Custom Site Search may…
Yahoo! – install Yahoo! site search on your domain and Yahoo! promises they’ll make short work of indexing your domain. It seemed like a dirty trick until a Yahoo! engineer told a crowd at a search convention that it’s public knowledge and not, in his opinion, corrupt or spammy.
SEOmoz Training – 01
An Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
Download SEOmoz Training Segment 01 – part1
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Buy Links for the Long Term
When you go out to acquire paid links, consider offering a large sum for a full year or two, rather than paying monthly. Oftentimes, this can get you some very good deals. Typically, we see that paying for 9 months gets you the following 3 free and paying for a full year upfront can get you anywhere from 6 to a full 12 months for free. Just make sure you’re ready to negotiate – in particular, remind the link seller that you’re the one taking all the risk, as the link may not be worthwhile in a month or 2 or 6. Savvy sellers will often take a big chunk upfront and throw in lots of extra time, realizing that should they lose their ability to pass link juice, no one’s likely to come calling.
Using the Juicy Links Tool to Great Effect
The new Juicy Links Tool for premium members is a paradise for link builders, so long as you know how to search. My recommendation – use terms like:
- directory
- add url
- submit site
- resource links
- recommended sites
- add profile
in conjunction with your primary keyword phrases and you can really put together a fantastic list of potential targets for link acquisition. We tried these searches a couple times and were blown away with the value we could get from it.
How to Find the Right Paid Links
When you’re investigating your competition’s backlinks (usually through a Yahoo! link search), it pays to be very aware of labels like “sponsors,” “partners,” “contributors,” and other nice ways of saying “these folks paid me for a link.” When you find sites like that, get the email address of someone there (an admin or support or marketing email) and shoot them the following:
Their name,
I was checking out your site today and wondering about the “sponsors” list on this page (link XYZ) – is that through a broker or should advertisers pay you direct?
All the best,
Your Name
You can find some very, very valuable and achievable links in this fashion. Over the past few weeks, I’ve identified not only some good link providers, but also a few link brokers with what appear to be excellent quality networks.
