Andy Coates Blog

If you are new to blogging or building websites in general the first thing you should do is read a little about anchor text and how it can affect Google searches when you are trying to promote your site. Unfortunately we do not always have control over what anchor text is used when people link to our sites and we are relying on the good nature of people to link to us using good descriptive anchor text. Luckely if you use Google webmaster tools you can see what text is being used when people are linking to you. If you have never used web master tools its well worth taking a look at as any analytical information about your website can only be a good thing!

Once you have logged into your account, click on the statistics tab and then navigate to the page analysis link. If you haven't yet registered do it now, I'll wait. Registration is a simple process of submitting your site and then adding a meta tag to the code to prove (verify) that the site is yours. Once you are up and running and have made your way to the "page analysis page" you will be faced with a treasure trove of information. The first box will show you which "Phrases" have been used to link to your site, phrases are quite important as these can constitute long tail keywords which I am going to write about later this month. in the meantime check out this great post over at Dosh Dosh Long tail keywords. At the moment there is no data for my blog for "Phrases" so here is a screenshot of another of my sites The Residual Income Project to show you how it works. Phrases are very important as if people are searching a particular phrase this indicates that they will me more targeted towards your site.

To the bottom right of the page you will also be able to see the top 100 keywords used to link to your site as shown on the screen shot below.

Incoming Links

As you can the top two most used anchor text is name which is pretty useless unless someone is searching for Andy Coates but the next three are Earn Money Online. This is excellent as around 20,000 people search for "earn money online" each month but on the downside I'm competing against around 12million other results. This is OK as the old saying goes "Rome wasn't built in a day" so I'm expecting over the next 12 month I can climb that list though its never my intention to get to the top. Continuing down the list of incoming anchor text will give you a general idea of how others see your site depending on the relevant anchor text.

Not only can you see how your site is being linked to but you can also see where you need to improve depending on which direction you are taking your blog. I am going to be writing more articles on investing so I would like to try and get the anchor text investing, or investment ideas as part of some of my incoming link. Overal this is a great free tool which you can glean a load of information from.