Well, that did not take very long! Barely four days after I changed the rules for the Make Money Online reviews, I am on page 1 of Google.com for the term “make money online.”
If anything can demonstrate the power of anchoring you text links, this is it. Four days ago, this blog was ranked 158th place for make money online. Now it’s at the number 3 spot. Judging by the number of sponsored links, make money online is a highly prized key phase.
How does this translate in terms of traffic? The overture keyword tool says there were over 44,000 searches last month for make money online. Overture only reports on Yahoo! properties so you can expect Google to have at least twice that volume. If just 10% of searchers click my link, it could mean 8,000 or more Google visitors to this blog every month. And this is just for one search term!
Getting everyone to link to my blog with my anchor text was just part of the puzzle. I had to make some changes to the blog to speed my charge to page 1 of Google. The first thing I did was change the title of the blog home page from John Chow dot Com – The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul to Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com.
The second thing I had to do was to make sure some posts on the front page had the targeted keywords in them. Ideally, they should be in the blog post title because more weight is placed on that. Now you understand the evilness behind some of my post titles. In addition, the targeted keywords should be repeated a few times in the article.
Tips To Choosing Anchor Text
Sure, you may think “super cool dude” is a great anchor for your blog but if no one searches for it, then it’s worthless. The best way to find out what anchor texts to go after is by using a keyword tool like Overture or WordTracker.
Overture is free but doesn’t give you much information other than how many times that keyword was searched for over the previous month. WordTracker cost money but offers a ton more information. You enter some keywords, and WordTracker tells you how often people search for them and how many competing sites use those keywords. They also offer a free trial and 30-day money back guarantee if it doesn’t work out for you.
The other way to choose an anchor text is to look at what words searchers are using to get to your site now and try to rank for variations of it. For example, I could go after make money blogging or just make money. You just have to be creative. And being a little evil helps too. 
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