Link Text: Revisited - Inbound Links
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Clearly, the optimal link to your site will contain your main keyword phrase. Unfortunately, however, a webmaster's ego will get in the way of optimization (this applies to title tags as well all too often), and just the company name will be used as linked text, for example 'XYZ Ltd.' Here's an example:
Let's say you have a website that sells car insurance online. When you solicit links, and fail to give guidance as to what the link should like, you will commonly get something along the lines of 'John Smith's Insurance Ltd' as the link text. This is great if you want to be found with your company name and can compensate for the extremely broad term 'insurance.' It is, however, far from the ideal.
The ideal would be something like 'Cheap Car insurance - John Smith's Insurance Ltd', whereby only 'Cheap Car Insurance' contains the link. If this whole sentence is too long, simply 'Cheap Car Insurance' or just 'Car Insurance' is preferable.
There is also some evidence, although not conclusive, that the title attribute can add a slight ranking boost. So let's take the example above and show you the html code for it.
<a href="http://www.johnsmithsinsurance.com" title="car insurance">Car insurance</a>
In the case of the very first example:
<a href='http://www.johnsmithsinsurance.com' title="Cheap Car insurance">Cheap Car insurance</a> - John Smith's Insurance Ltd.
If you do not specify the html code to be used upon successfully soliciting a link, you will very likely just end up with the following:
<a href="http://www.johnsmithsinsurance.com"> John Smith's Insurance Ltd </a>
Or worse,
<a href="http://www.johnsmithsinsurance.com">http://www.johnsmithsinsurance.com</a>
(Note: This is why all those domains with keywords in their domain tend to do well.)
Clearly, this is not specifying the exact link text and code can lead to a waste of a good link text opportunity.
The solution, therefore, is to provide a webmaster who has agreed to link to you with the exact html code. This has two main advantages. First, the webmaster will be grateful, as all he/she has to do is copy and paste the code in his/her site. Second, you also get the text link that does your site the most good.
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