The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 3

7. Anchor Text

Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.

8. Link Popularity

Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.

The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.

Google - 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
Yahoo! - 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity

In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles.

Yes usability and marketing comes first - you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.