I'd contacted a webmaster in May about getting a link on their site to my site, and they finally got back to me today with a "yes". I knew what page on their site I wanted the link on, and I'd already figured out what page on my site I wanted the link to point to. What I hadn't yet decided was what anchor text I wanted.
If you know anything about SEO (search engine optimisation), you'll appreciate the importance of anchor text in ranking. In a nutshell, using the anchor text "red widgets" in a link to your page gives that page a better chance of ranking in the search engines for "red widgets".
My thinking was that if my site is already ranking at position 1 in the search engines for "red widgets", I don't really need more links with "red widgets" in the anchor text. Hey, let someone else have those links! What I wanted to do was find some phrases I was getting decent traffic for, for which I was positioned further down the page than 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Then my link would help me rank higher for a phrase that I knew would bring me much more traffic. So, how do we find such a phrase: a phrase that would lead to the greatest traffic growth if we started ranking higher for it?
Holy different stats for different rankings batman - this sounds like a job for Google Webmaster Tools!
Using Google Webmaster Tools, you can see just how much traffic you get depending on what position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) your page is listed at. Your pages will move around teh SERPs quite naturally, so one day a particular page might rank #2 and the following day it might rank #5, for example. That page will receive different numbers of clicks for each different ranking. Obviously, rthe higher ranked pages will attract more links.
To get to this useful data, go into Google Webmaster Tools and access the dashboard for the site you're researching. In the Search queries section, click More >> at the bottom. Find the phrase you're interested in (this is the potential anchor text that you're investigating) and click on it. Ignore the data at the top; what we're interested in is listed at the bottom and has the heading Position in search results.
If you know anything about SEO (search engine optimisation), you'll appreciate the importance of anchor text in ranking. In a nutshell, using the anchor text "red widgets" in a link to your page gives that page a better chance of ranking in the search engines for "red widgets".
My thinking was that if my site is already ranking at position 1 in the search engines for "red widgets", I don't really need more links with "red widgets" in the anchor text. Hey, let someone else have those links! What I wanted to do was find some phrases I was getting decent traffic for, for which I was positioned further down the page than 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Then my link would help me rank higher for a phrase that I knew would bring me much more traffic. So, how do we find such a phrase: a phrase that would lead to the greatest traffic growth if we started ranking higher for it?
Holy different stats for different rankings batman - this sounds like a job for Google Webmaster Tools!
Using Google Webmaster Tools, you can see just how much traffic you get depending on what position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) your page is listed at. Your pages will move around teh SERPs quite naturally, so one day a particular page might rank #2 and the following day it might rank #5, for example. That page will receive different numbers of clicks for each different ranking. Obviously, rthe higher ranked pages will attract more links.
To get to this useful data, go into Google Webmaster Tools and access the dashboard for the site you're researching. In the Search queries section, click More >> at the bottom. Find the phrase you're interested in (this is the potential anchor text that you're investigating) and click on it. Ignore the data at the top; what we're interested in is listed at the bottom and has the heading Position in search results.
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