Thread: Diversify your backlink keywords - big post

Meta description, content keywords, image tags all play an important roll, but keywords in your backlinks are very, very important.

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 once again, I wish to retain ownership of this article.

Comments, questions or suggestions?

Excellent writing. I personally never did work on this detailed level of SEO. But all these makes much more sense.

One possible barricade we may get into, if somebody else post a link for our sites. We have little chance edit them.

Thanks for sharing pal.

After doing a couple of searches for the keywords "visit poster's website" and a link to my site, I found it.

I had joined a high ranking forum that is firearms related, and those keywords were coming from the website button under my profile in each post. So I removed the link to my website from my profile and redid my signature.

By posting this thread, and looking at my own sites I learned something.

Wow that's a great article. I can't believe it hasn't gotten much response yet.

Rep+ added.

Great article kev, excellent points and very well written! Keywords in backlinks are very very good.