How to lower your SERP with external links

So you understand the importance of gaining inbound links for your web site, and you've set out to get your link placed in all the directories you can. Great, but before you start, think carefully about the link you are going to submit. Are you about to LOWER your search engine ranking by placing all your keywords on someone else's site?

When submitting links, there are 3 basic bits of information that are required: the URL, the Anchor Text, and the Description. The URL is pretty obvious. This need to be either the address of your site (http://www.after5webdesign.com for example) or the address of a page in your site (http://www.after5webdesign.com/directory/index.php for example). A link to a page other than your main index page is called a "deep link". These are very good, but not all directories allow deep linking. Your Anchor Text is all the text between the A tags. For example, in the link {a href="http://www.after5webdesign.com"}My Web Site{/a}, "My Web Site" is the anchor text. The description is the bit of un-linked text that is before or after the link.

Now let's take a general look at how a page is ranked. First, a spider grabs all the text in the html document and this text is subjected to word commonality algorithms. Common words like "the", "a", and "and" are ignored, but other words are counted and totaled. For example, this article uses the words "link" about 21 times, "submit" 6 times, and the phrase "search engine" 5 times. Therefore it would be a safe bet for a computer to assume this article is about submitting links and/or search engines. Thus when someone searches for the phrase "submitting links for search engines" this article could be one of the results. On the other hand, because of my examples, this page uses the word "prom" 15 times, search engines will likely determine this is also a valid result for that search term.

Another factor that comes into play is what other websites say your page is about. If you've viewed a cached Google search result and seen the phrase "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page:", that means that the anchor text on other sites contain that term, but that term doesn't actually contain the term. Another example of this in action can be seen by searching Google for the term "Liar". What's the first result? A biography of Tony Blair! This is because several pages have pointed a link to his biography and used "Liar" as the anchor text. Because the term liar appears in the links anchor text so frequently, Google assumes the page must be about "Liar".

Let's look at an example of how to shoot yourself in the foot with link submissions. Suppose you have a website selling prom dresses, and you submit your link to a directory using "My Prom Dress Store" as the anchor text and "Prom dress, prom tips, prom ideas, what to wear at prom, prom music, prom night, prom, prom date, prom dresses, prom planning" for the description. You have done well with the anchor text, because you used your "prom" and "dress" keyterms in the anchor text, but you then proceeded to add your "Prom" keyword to the page another 10 times. This directory page will now have at least 11 occurances of YOUR keyword, and only one of them is used to point to your site! Further, the directory will likely have several other sites listed in your category which will means even more occurances of your keyword. Congratulations, you've just helped the directory rank better for your keyterms, and since their site contains links to other sites, you've also helped your competition.

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