How to maximize your linking success

Nevertheless, we still see many webmasters do it wrong when trying to improve the link popularity of their web site. There are two common mistakes:

The link text should contain your keyword
If your web site doesn’t come up in the top 10 rankings for your most important keyword, chances are that other sites link to you the wrong way.

For example, if most links to your site are created this way
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>My Site</a> then you will not get high search engine rankings for your most important keyword unless your keywords are “My” or “Site”.

If your most important keyword or key phrase is “Automobile Repair”, then other sites should link to you this way:
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>Automobile Repair</a>

Ask everyone to link to the same URL
It’s important that you tell people to use the same variation of your web site URL.

For example, search engines see URLs such as

* http://www.your-site.com
* http://your-site.com
* http://www.your-site.com/index.htm

as different URLs although they all lead to the same page. If you want to get high link popularity for a specific keyword, then pick one of those URLs and stay with it.

It makes sense to give others detailed instructions of how to link to your site. In your link request email message, you could write:
Please use the following HTML snippet to link to my site:
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/autoparts.htm”>Automobile Parts</a>