Unless you provide only one product or service chances are you will want to rank for many key phrases. One way to help achieve this objective is to change link text you want all new sites to use periodically. Vary anchor text slightly each time and by doing so you can cover more of your targeted key phrases. This approach can help your site rank for many keywords rather than just one or two.

If you do only provide one product or service on your web site it is still important to vary anchor text. If you sell ‘blue widgets’ then you could also use link text like ‘cheap blue widgets’ or ‘blue widget store’. This means your links take on a more natural feel and are much less likely to be penalised or filtered out by search engines for being ‘fake links’.

2. Set up your link information differently - create a link in context

Typically people set up their link information in a very similar way, however you could offer your link information with hyperlink inside description instead of at beginning.

Imagine this is a description about your web site on a partner’s link page. Instead of a typical hyperlink followed by a description you could write a sentence describing your web site and then place “your descriptive hyperlink” inside it.

One reason for doing this is that it reads more naturally and search engines may value link higher as it reads more like a narrative. Many webmasters will be happy to accept this style even if some do not. To cover yourself offer link in context as a second option along with your regular link information, that way if some sites can’t support layout you still get your link.

3. Vary where your links point

Try to vary where link partners point to on your site. It’s fine to have majority of links pointing into your home page, however it can be beneficial to have some links pointing to other key pages on your web site as well. Taking this approach balances out your linking and can help raise profile of more pages on your web site.

4. How to find potential link partners from your competitors

The first step to successful SEO is always keyword research. Without it you are shooting from hip. If, for example, you would like to create a website about cooking you could optimize your site for generic “cooking” term but how well is that going to perform? Well according to Overture there are 8,233.8 searches /day for “cooking” sounds good right? Not exactly…in order to rank high for this term you would have to compete with high end websites such as cooking.com and foodtv.com. Now that might be your ultimate goal but if you are just starting there is little to no chance you will be ranked high enough to receive any traffic for term. If you were to do a little keyword research you might find more specific terms with much less competition like italian cooking 344.3 /day or crock pot cooking 253.5 /day. Now obviously number of daily searches is much less with these terms but your chances or ranking will be much greater. Its always a good idea to start off with several low competition terms and as your site builds start optimizing for larger terms.

Step 1: Create a list of related terms Open an excel spreadsheet and start making a list of all major industry terms and buzz words related to your site in one column. The list doesn’t need to be extremely detailed quite yet so don’t add part numbers, brand names or several variations of each term. For example if we want to remain on cooking theme our list might look something like this. Cooking, chef, cutlery, foods, meat, dairy, wine, seasoning, poultry, fish, dining…(simple generic terms)