How to diversify your backlink keywords

Discussion in 'Member Articles & Tutorials' started by kev, Jun 24, 2009.

  1. kev

    kev Regular Member

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    Meta description, content keywords, image tags all play an important roll in how search engines see your site. But keywords in your backlinks are very important and often over looked. Putting a keyword into the link tells the search engines "what" your site is about.

    Lets start off with your google webmaster tools:
    Go to - Google.com - my account - webmaster tools - domain name - Statistics - What Googlebot sees - In external links to your site. In that column, there will be a list depending on how many backlinks you have. This is what google sees as to the content of your site.

    Are the keywords listed there the most important ones to your sites nitch? If you have never checked this list, chance are you will have "visit my site", or "my website" listed. These keywords are taken directly from your backlinks.

    In that whole list "In external links to your site", where does your keyword rank? If your most important keyword is not on that list, you and your site have problems.

    My top 4 keywords for example:

    These are the results to one of my wordpress websites

    1. survival gear articles and information
    2. barricaded store fronts during a disaster
    3. visit poster's website
    4. hurricane ike video series part 1

    Some forum I posted in has a link to my site with the keywords "visit poster's website". The only thing I can do there is remove the link to my site from my profile on that forum. Its doing more damage then good. My most important keywords are #1. Now I have to work on the rest of the keywords.


    The problem some people run into, they use the same exact keyword phrase in every link. I am guilty of that myself, and this is how I learned from my mistakes.

    Take a look at the chart in your google webmaster tools, each phrase is only listed once. Even if you use the term "widget blog" or "widget forum" in 1,000 backlinks, it only gets 1 slot in that chart. After that, google will start filling in the other rows with the sites name, "visit my site", blah, blah and more blah.

    Lets say we have 1,000 backlinks spread over 5 forums with dofollow signatures. So we have an average of 200 post per forum.

    1st forum signature - widget blog
    2nd forum signature - widget forum
    3nd forum signature - widgets
    4th forum signature - how to build a widget
    5th forum signature - widget building

    The same thing goes for directory submission. If you submitted to 100 directories and used the same phrase in every submission, you have done little good to help your site. It would have been much better to use several different phrases in those 100 submissions.

    From here yall should get the idea of the keyword structure. So you have just given google keywords to fill in the top 5 rows of the "In external links to your site" column.

    By not checking your google webmaster tools and tweaking your sites backlinks, you have done damage to your sites ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages. Even if you started right now, its going to take weeks before you see any real results.


    So what do you do now?

    First - check your google webmaster tools and see where your important keywords rank in that list.

    Second - get a piece of paper and a pencil, and write down every forum, directory and anywhere else you have a link to your site posted.

    Third - if you used the same phrase on every backlink, get those links edited and diversify the keyword structure.

    You should start seeing results in a few days, weeks, maybe a month or two. A lot of it depends on how often those other sites with your backlinks are scanned. Sites that use a sitemap generator and submit their pages to google, yahoo and msn are the better ones to post in. That way you do not have to "wait" for google to find you backlinks.

    The intended goal of this is to populate the "In external links to your site" list with keywords that are important to your site. Not with keywords pulled from random links.

    This article is an original and is not copied from another website. And I wish to retain ownership of this article.

    This post has been promoted to an article
     
    2 people like this.
  2. Tyler

    Tyler The Badministrator

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    Another great article, Kevin! :thumbup:
     
  3. 50calray

    50calray Grand Master

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    Good article but I'm having issues with viewing my keywords. I can't find webmaster tools after clicking on my account? You got any suggestions?

    Thanks,
     
  4. Nick

    Nick Regular Member

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    Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools. Is that what you're looking for?
     
  5. Michael

    Michael Regular Member

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    Nice read Kevin, were all guilty of using the same link texts all the time :D
     
  6. BabyDesigner

    BabyDesigner Adept

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    Oh this looks like a good article :) ill be coming back when the little one is asleep so i can properly read!
    Thank you for posting this!
     

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