The following article is a guest post by my friend and fellow domain blogger Morgan Linton of Domainvestors.tv.
When developing a domain, good SEO can go a long way towards generating consistent traffic and revenue. While search engine algorithms are changing all the time, there has been one methodology that continues to dramatically improve search engine placement - anchor text. The great thing about anchor text is that this technique applies to hand-coded websites and blogs alike. If you aren’t an HTML-wizard and instead use a tool like WordPress to develop your domains - this technique will work exactly the same way.
The idea behind anchor text is simple, however a bit of research must be done on your part to make sure you are using anchor text as efficiently as possible. The basic idea behind anchor text is to place links to carefully selected keyword phrases that you would like to rank well for in search engines. An example would be writing a blog post about fishing and including a link in your post to “Catch a Fish” which then leads either to another post that you’ve written or a highly accredited website about fishing.
Search engines rank websites higher when they have keywords that are linking to content that the keywords themselves describe. This makes sense since the web visitor will get more value from a keyword phrase if they have the ability to click it to learn more. Many web developers overlook this step and instead repeat the same keyword over and over in their text. While keyword repetition is a good strategy, having linked keyword phrases will go much further in the SEO-game.
So how to do you know what keywords to use? Using a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword tool can help you determine exactly which keywords are the most popular related to your subject area. Using my fishing example - you know that “Fishing” is one keyword you want to use as anchor text, but what related keywords are the most popular? By entering the word “fishing” into the Google Adwords Keyword tool you will see what the most popular search terms are related to fishing. I usually take the top ten and try to have at least one piece of anchor-text related to these keywords somewhere on my sites.
Anchor text is a great way to improve your SEO while providing your visitors with even better access to information. Whether you are developing a mini-site, a complete website, or just a simple blog post anchor text will help rank better and get more visitors to your domain.