To understand this, you’ll also have to have some understanding of anchor text linking and why it’s important, in addition to LSI, which we’ve already talked about.
To keep it really short and simple, anchor text links are among the most powerful one-way links you can get back to your site.
Two things would make them more powerful. One of those I never talk about in public. I’ll go over it briefly in the High Profile Article Marketing Seminar Series during the second multimedia set. It heightens the effectiveness of anchor text linking so much that it’s just too precious to share in public.
The other thing that can make a one-way anchor text link even more powerful is when the link is in a larger context that relates to the page that it is linked back to – and with article marketing, there are several ways you can generate these types of links yourself.
With even the most basic article marketing campaign, you can target an article to be contextually on the same topic as the area of your site that you are linking towards. But with high profile article marketing, once you start to show up in high profile publications that have editorial processes or are staff-only publications, the link is even more valuable, because everyone can’t get it.
This is part of why you need to go beyond attempting to get what I call “bare” links back to your site – the ones that just appear as http://www.freetraffictip.com. You also want relevant anchor text links, the ones that might appear like so: Free Traffic Tips.
Why would I want this?
Because anchored text gives another level of value to the link in my article.
By using a keyword I would like to rank for, I’m sending a message to whatever search engine spider comes across my link. I’m saying “Let me make your job easier. The site www.freetraffictip.com is directly relevant to Free Traffic Tips. Build an association between this text and this keyword phrase.”
Now, if for example, Google sees this one time, it may take note but not use the information in your favor.
If it sees this happen ten times, at ten different sites, it may start to weigh this factor in your favor. When it sees it 50 or 100 times, from sites it considers important, embedded in articles that are on that same topic, it notices this as a pattern.
These kinds of patterns are a site’s best friend. To realize why – you only have to remember your good friend LSI.
And if only that is all there was to it. But alas, your good old neighborhood search engine is a little more intelligent than that.
There are a few specific strategies you need to keep in mind when you’re using this method to get better keyword rankings. You need to know how to do the keyword research properly, and set up your site so that it isn’t your article and the other article sites that benefit the most from the keyword you targeted, or you’ll end up pointing the search engines in the wrong direction.
If you want to see this common mistake in action, go to any article directory, such as EzineArticles.com, Echievements.com, GoArticles.com or PromotionWorld.com. What you’ll see is that some people who have successfully learned how to use anchor text linking are implementing in such a way that the results are all pointing in the wrong direction!
I challenge you to pick any ten articles where you see a keyword phrase hyperlinked in a resource box, and find two that are using anchored text linking properly. (And first, look at the article. You can tell who is only interested in trying to manipulate the search engines with mediocre content, and who is writing articles people will actually want to read.)
8 out of 10 people’s sites will not come up before any of the directories where their article is reprinted for the keyword phrase they linked to in their resource boxes. As a matter of fact, you probably won’t even find them for a similiar phrase.
Even worse, they have no idea that this technique is actually having the opposite effect.
So what happened? And how can you keep this from happening to you?
I talk a little bit about this in the next installment of my free Article Marketing Tips eCourse, which continues today. The free course goes a little more deeply into the hows. The whys are in the Seminar Series, and we go in-depth on this in both of the first two groups of multimedia audio and video.
Thursday is the last day this home seminar series will be in pre-launch, so if you’ve been meaning to take a look at it, now is the time.
That’s all I have today regarding LSI – though if you join the article marketing tips series, you’ll see some exclusive information about combining the power of high profile article marketing and blogging.
See you on Traffic Thursdays!
Tags: free traffic :: latent semantic indexing :: search engines :: article marketing :: high profile article marketing.
