One of the most important parts of link building is to get your keywords in the links to your site. For example if a lot of sites link to you using the keyword ?sheep? then it is likely you will appear high up in the search engine rankings for the search term sheep.
However it is important to say that it is not as simple as that. Google will also look at the content of your website and make sure that the keywords in your link do actually relate to the content of your site. This is to stop spammers getting their site listed for the wrong keywords just to catch more people.
What to do if you have no Links
When you are working on getting links to your website it is important to make sure you get your keywords in the links to your website. This will significantly help your rankings in the search engines. However when doing this you need to make sure your links do not look like spam. This means you will need to make sure you vary the test used in the links to your website.
Let's look at our example and again and assume that you want to rank for the keyword ?sheep?. Although you will need some links that use the term ?sheep? you also need to mix it up and have links that use the text like ?white sheep?, ?great sheep?, ?sheep and other animals? and other variations similar. You should also make sure that the page that you link to actually contains information about sheep otherwise you will still look like spam.
If you are not sure where to start getting links then your competitors can be a good place to start. Use Yahoo! Site explore to find out what sites link to your competitors and then contact each of them in turn for a link to your website.
What to do if you already have links
If you already have links to your website then you want to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit from them. Again use Yahoo! Site explorer to get a list of all the sites that link to you. Again check each of them out and see what the test they are using is. If it does not include your anchor text then contact the webmaster and ask them to change their link text. You will find that most of them will be happy to do this.
It is important to remember that you need to optimise the links to your website. However this is not the only thing you need to do. In order to have a quality SEO campaign you need to make sure you optimise your website as well. These things should all be done in tandem to make sure you have the maximum effect. It will also ensure that the work you do on your links matches the content on your website which is what the search engines want most.
