by John Eberhard

I recently wrote about the supreme importance of anchor text in internet marketing optimization factors. To make sure everyone understands what I mean by “anchor text,” it is defined as text on a web site, usually a keyword phrase, that is linked to your web site.

According to Planet Ocean Communications, anchor text is the most important thing you can get in terms of raising your rankings in the search engines. We know from Google that they consider inbound links to your site to be the most important criteria in determining rankings for a given keyword, but it is more helpful to have the actual keyword linked to you, rather than just showing your web site URL.

So how do you get those anchor text links? Some social media sites are friendly to the idea of letting you put anchor text up, and others are not.

Squidoo

I’ve become a fan of Squiddo.com. They allow you to put up a “lens” which is basically a page, on pretty much any topic you want. You can enter anchor text into the text of your article, because guess what, Squidoo is “friendly” to using their site to market things.

Squidoo has what I think is a realistic idea of why someone would want to put stuff up on their site. Oh sure, there are people who want to write lengthy articles and create Squidoo lenses about the mating habits of lower Bolivian orange poison frogs, complete with photos and journal entries from their last trip down the Amazon. Not to denigrate people who want to put up lenses or articles elsewhere on the web about their hobbies or interests, i.e. that aren’t trying to sell things. But I like the fact that Squidoo thinks it’s OK for the marketing guys to put up things too and link to their own web sites and so on.

When you create a Squidoo lens, it can contain an intro with picture, the main article (did I mention that it can have anchor text in it), links to Amazon.com, photos from Flickr.com, videos from Youtube, links to your blog or RSS feed, a guestbook for people to leave comments, and a place to put your Delicious.com links. So you can put up a lot of content related to your main article.

HubPages

HubPages.com is another site you can use to put up articles with anchor text. Unfortunately, they are not quite so friendly to the guys from the marketing department, and I have had pages shut down for being overly promotional. They allow anchor text, but you can only link to your site once per HubPages page.

On HubPages you can put up your article (with one link), photos, links, an RSS feed, news, comments, and a poll. So you can add a rich palette of content to these pages as well.

I am using both of these sites now, but my marked preference is Squidoo.