One of the key strategies of inbound marketing is to improve your website’s search rankings and to drive more traffic to your website. You can do this by participating in other people’s blogs, discussion groups and social media sites. When you create a new discussion or add a comment to an existing discussion, and link back to your website you create an inbound link. Search engines, like Google, consider these links when assessing the value of your website. The more links you have, the higher your ranking.
Not all types of inbound links are equal. Links that use clickable hyperlink text, or anchor text as it’s called, carry more weight than simply adding the URL of your website. Here’s an example.
Say that you have just read someone’s blog. Rather than leave a reply such as, “Nice article, Bob”, you could leave a more helpful comment like this:
Many small and medium businesses are interested in lead nurturing, but are not sure how to get started. I recently wrote a blog article titled, “Mark Twain and Lead Nurturing – Just Get Started – 10 Easy Steps.” Check it out.
Mark Lennon
Espresso B2B Marketing
https://espressob2b.com
As well as being more informative, this example opens opportunities to create links back to your own website or blog and raise your profile with search engines. Here’s how:
- You can turn “lead nurturing” in the first sentence into anchor text with a link pointing back to a page on your website.
- You can make the title of the blog article into anchor text and have it point to the URL of the blog article.
- You can make the company name, Espresso B2B Marketing, into anchor text and have it point to the home page.
The text will look pretty much the same although the anchor texts may sometimes be highlighted blue. Readers can click on the anchor text and be directed to your website or blog.
Many small and medium businesses are interested in lead nurturing, but are not sure how to get started. I recently wrote a blog article titled, “Mark Twain and Lead Nurturing – Just Get Started – 10 Easy Steps.” Check it out.
Mark Lennon
Espresso B2B Marketing
https://espressob2b.com
Creating the anchor text is pretty simple, a procedure of cutting and pasting the link into the body of the text, along with some html tags as shown below:
Many small and medium businesses are interested in <a href=”https://espressob2b.com/b2b-marketing-blog/potato-potahto-is-there-a-difference-between-lead-progression-and-lead-nurturing/”>lead nurturing</a>, but are not sure how to get started. I recently wrote a blog article titled, <a href=”https://espressob2b.com/Mark-Twain-and-Lead-Nurturing-Just-Get-Started-10-Easy-Steps/”>”Mark Twain and Lead Nurturing – Just Get Started – 10 Easy Steps.”</a> Check it out.
Mark Lennon
<a href=”https://espressob2b.com”>Espresso B2B Marketing</a>
https://espressob2b.com
In the example above, we’ve created four inbound links – three using anchor text and one using a URL. You should spend some time every week, preferably every day, building inbound links like this. The pay-off will be higher rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo, and more traffic to your website. You’ll also be contributing to discussion groups, getting yourself better known and regarded as a thought leader.
Some other recommendations about anchor text links.
- Make sure to build inbound links to as many as possible of the pages in your website, and not just your home page. Google likes to see inbound links to many pages in a domain.
- Don’t use the exact same keyword phrase to point to a page in your site. Use different phrases that have similar meanings. This is called anchor text variation.
- Google likes brand anchors. So rather than list the URL of your home page all of the time, use your company name and build an anchor text link out of your company name.
- Because Google ranks links in the footer of a post or comment lower, build your anchor links up in the main body of your post or comment, not just in the signature area.
