When Writing Your Article Bio Box, Keep These Linking Strategies in Mind
by: Daniel Irwin
For those of us who write and submit articles to various content directories, we do so primarily for one reason:To get the link back to our site.However, it’s important to keep in mind that not all links are equal in the eyes of the major search engines.How your links “appear” to the search engines can be nearly as significant as the number of links that actually point to your site.
As you cultivate links to your site, the goal is to have as natural a link structure as possible.What this means is that search engines like to see links presented in a manner that does not appear to be phony, or an effort to fool the search engines into thinking your site is more popular than it actually is.In our efforts to do this, it is important to keep in mind the following:
First, your incoming links should increase gradually.Search engines see a sudden jump in links as artificial and not an indication of your site’s popularity.When you submit your articles to an article directory, your links generally increase gradually as they are picked up over time and published on web sites and archived ezines.
Second, whenever possible, your incoming links should not be reciprocal.Many of you are now saying, “easier said than done”.Perhaps, but submitting articles to article directories is a great way to build these types of links.
Search engines view sites that rely heavily on reciprocal links as not necessarily containing sought-after content that others want to voluntarily link to.That is, pure link reciprocity implies that the only purpose of the link is to build links and has nothing to do with the quality of the content on the web site.
Third, it’s very important to be consistent in how the link to your site is published.The following example will illustrate this point:
The following URL’s all point to the same page, of course. However, as far as the major search engines are concerned, they are all different:
http://articlelists.comhttp://articlelists.com/http://articlelists.com/index.htmlhttp://www.articlelists.comhttp://www.articlelists.com/http://www.articlelists.com/index.htmlTherefore, if your incoming links vary as listed above, your page rank is being watered down by up to a factor of six.So if you are not already doing it, be sure to be consistent in how you have your incoming links published.
This last item discussed here concerns anchor text.Anchor text is the actual text that appears for a particular hyperlink, and is perhaps one of the most important issues to consider when building your incoming link structure. For example, in the following link, Free Article Directory, the words “Free Article Directory” constitute the anchor text.However, when you place your cursor over the link you will see the destination site,
www.ArticleLists.com, displayed in the status bar.
There are two important rules of thumb to remember about your anchor text.The first is that your anchor text should vary.That is, the incoming links to your site should not all have the same anchor text. This creates a more natural appearance to the search engines and will help in your rankings.The second rule is to place your keywords into your anchor text whenever possible.The reason this is important is because search engines view the anchor text as an indication of the topic of your webpage. So you get a two-for-one effect:You not only get the desired inbound link, but you also create a more natural-looking incoming link structure which will be viewed more favorably by the search engines.Of course, you would first want to do some keyword research to determine the popularity and importance of various keywords relating to your web site, and then use the ones for which you are trying to rank well.
When you begin to view your inbound link structure from the perspective of the search engines, you begin to see the logic of what needs to be done to rank well.For the search engines, it’s all about content and delivering the most relevant web pages possible for a given search term.
Creating an inbound link structure that appears more natural, or voluntary, will indicate to the search engines that your content is indeed something that their users would find useful.Assuming your site publishes quality content, you have, in a sense, helped the search engine do their job; and in the process you’ve gone a long way in making your web site more visible on the Internet.
About The Author
Dan Irwin is founder of ArticleLists.com and serves as its chief editor. ArticleLists.com is a free content directory where authors can submit their articles for maximum marketing effect, and publishers can access a growing library of quality and relevant content for their web sites and/or ezines.
