Why Your Keywords Should Be in Links to Your Site (Part V: Keywords for Authors Series)
In the last section, Part IV: Using Keywords on Your Website, we talked about how to optimize your home page for the keyword you selected earlier. Now we’re going to talk about how getting links from other sites can increase your placement in the search engine results.
You see, what you do on your website is only a part of the search engine ranking equation. What also matters is other sites’ reactions to your site. If no one’s linking to you, your site can’t be very important, now can it? (That’s the way Google sees things anyway.)
One of the key ways to boost traffic and increase your search engine rankings is to increase the number of links point to your site.
There are ways to go about getting links (without paying anyone) and we’ll discuss that more in the future. For now, just worry about the links that are already out there to your site, the ones that are from friends, family, co-workers, etc. (all the folks you’ve cajoled into helping your promote your book).
When you read these links, what do they say? (The links are the actual clickable text, and that’s called the “anchor text” in the biz.)
Do they say your name? The name of your book? “Click here”?
Ideally, you want as many of those links as possible to use your keywords. This is especially true if you’re trying to do well with Google (and you should be, since it is by far the most popular search engine–they can deliver the most traffic to your site).
“Click here” doesn’t help as much as a keyword related to your book.
If I’m trying to come up highly ranked in the search engines for “fantasy books,” I might ask a friend to blog about my site and write something like: If you like fantasy books, please visit my friend’s site. Fantasy books would be the clickable link.
When the search engine sees your keyword in a link pointing to your site, it’s going to think your site is about your keyword. It’s going to think people searching for your keyword on the Internet want to go to your site.
If lots of sites link to your site using that keyword, you’re going to rank highly for the term. Don’t worry about every single site linking to you with “fantasy books” or whatever your term is (in fact, that could look a little unnatural to the search engines), but it’s definitely a worthwhile goal to make sure some of the links say that.
When you combine the keyword optimization you did on the front page of your web site with the keyword-rich links coming into your site, you’ll start to see improvements in how your site ranks for those terms. The closer you get to the first page of search engine results (and the closer you get to the top of that first page), the more traffic you’ll get to your site. And more traffic should mean more book sales.
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