Keywords and Anchor Text

Obviously, keywords are words that relate to your site/product/etc. and they are the words that people might type into the search engine to find your site or product. The "key" is to use the right keywords and to use them properly. I’ve noticed that many people still seem to be guessing at what their keywords should be rather than doing a bit of keyword research to ensure they get the best results – even when doing something as simple as writing a blog post. Guessing may leave you far behind your competitors who are crossing their ‘T’s and dotting their ‘I’s. Getting good keywords will be discussed further in a moment. You also need to know what "short tail keywords" are vs. "long tail keywords". Short tail keywords are generally very broad whereas long tail keywords are usually more specific and can help you target a more specific niche. Short Tail Keywords vs. Long Tail Keywords If you are in the Internet Marketing business and you simply use the keyword "Internet Marketing", you’re using a short tail keyword that has major competition and spans many topics and areas. If you use the term "Internet Marketing Strategy" or "Free Internet Marketing Strategy" then you are using long tail keywords that are a bit more specific and reduce some of the competition. It’s imperative that you use long tail keywords in combination with your short tail keywords to bring more traffic for specific terms your way…and here’s the lovely thing; you will also get credit for the short tail keywords contained within your long tail keywords. So "Free Internet Marketing Strategy" would give me credit for that term as well as "Internet Marketing Strategy" AND "Internet Marketing". Nice. The long tail keywords can get even longer and more specific. It might even be "Free Internet Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses". Now that’s much more targeted and specific. And there are a combination of keywords in there that I would get credit for. Anchor Text The next thing you absolutely must do with your keywords is use them as anchor text. Anchor text just means that you hyperlink certain words with your desired URL. So, instead of using the raw link www.online-marketing-wizards.com I would use Internet Marketing Strategy (see how those words are clickable, that’s because they are hyperlinked to the website). What’s fantastic about anchor text is that you still get credit for your raw link but you credit your link with whatever keywords you’ve hyperlinked/anchored. So, using the example above, online-marketing-wizards.com would get credit for the keywords "Internet Marketing Strategy" and "Internet Marketing"…because remember we get credit for the short tail keywords in there too. Anchor text MUST be a part of your Internet Marketing strategy. No two ways about it. Now, getting good keywords. This can be a little tricky and we’ll get into even more details in another post but let’s cover the basics. Finding Good Keywords If you are setting up your website, you need to do thorough keyword research and this can get really deep if you’re researching like the experts. You need to find all of the terms that are being used to search for sites/products in your niche and maybe even take a look at the trends. There are a number of tools out there to do this with and each of them varies in their method and result. Most of the free tools will do the job just fine but you’ll need to spend a bit more time than if you pay for a keyword research tool to do the time-consuming stuff for you. If you’re making a blog post or bookmarking, your keyword research doesn’t have to be as deep but you still need to take a couple of minutes to see what keywords are being searched for in order to really benefit from the traffic that’s out there. Please don’t just guess because the words you might relate to your post may not be the same words someone else thinks of when they search…and using misspellings can bring you some decent traffic at times too. Many people misspell stuff when they are searching. Under the right circumstances, misspelled keywords can be great for you. When I’m doing a blog post or bookmarking something, there are two free tools I quickly reference. One is Wordtracker and one is the Google Adwords Tool. You can even use one or the other when doing a quick search at what keywords you need to target but I like to take a quick glance at both of them because they are very different tools. I like Wordtracker because it gives me the basics and I like the Google Adwords Tool because it gives me more details. This Google Adwords Tool will give you search data but it will also show you the competition that’s actually paying to rank high for particular keywords. I like to throw in a mix of the words that have high competition with the words that don’t have as much, or any, competition. And again, oftentimes, the words that don’t have as much, or any competition, contain the short tail keywords I’m also targeting so it can give me a double benefit. Don’t be scared of the words that don’t have many searches. If they don’t have much competition, they can be of great benefit for you the few times that one does use that keyword for their search. You will rank much higher for the less competitive keywords so you’ll very likely get the business over someone else simply because you used the less competitive keyword. If you’re in an extremely competitive niche, it will take you longer to get higher rankings but if you use the right keywords and you use your anchor text everywhere possible you will get there. Karen J. for Contemporary VA