Welcome to the sixth in our seven-day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

To attract traffic from Google, you'll need to include relevant keywords in your site's links.

Watch this video and you'll discover how to include keywords in your website's internal links.

This knowledge is crucial to your SEO success. So what are you waiting for? Get watching ...

Here's what's coming up

In the 'Profit from Keywords' series, we're going to show you:

Day 1: Search engine success starts with keywords
Day 2: Keyword mapping and site structure
Day 3: Titles and Descriptions: Vital elements of your page
Day 4: Site audits: Things you never knew about your site
Day 5: Keyword Rankings: Monitor your progress
Day 7: Expand into new markets and beat the competition

Once you've watched the tutorial, click here to sign up for a free 7-day trial of the new Keywords tool

Did you know we offer a risk-free guarantee? At any time during the first 30 days you can ask for your money back and we'll happily refund you.

Click here to learn more about the Keywords tool

Read the transcript

Welcome to the sixth of our seven day series on how to get the most out of your first week with Wordtracker. Today, we'll be talking about the critical importance of internal and external linking text in achieving better search engine rankings.

If you want to get to the top of page one on Google, it's important to know how to leverage internal linking text, over which you have complete control and external linking text, which you can't control, but you can influence.

This is an example of a linked keyword phrase:

You're not just providing a link, you're providing a clue about the actual content, by using the keyword phrase as part of the link. So, why do we do this?

First, keyword rich text is very attractive and can really improve your conversion rates. Second, it tips off Google and other search engines as to the linked page's content. Google really likes this, and can reward you with a higher ranking.

This is an example of internal linking text - which are links to other pages on your site. They come in two basic flavors: navigation menus, and body text links that you can use to link to other documents on your site:

This navigational menu, while basically correct, is keyword poor, and thus offers only limited help in the search engines. Let's fix this:

Now, the relevant keyword phrases will work for us in raising our rankings. This menu linking text will go to major category pages on your site. See how the linking text is now the same as our major niches?

We can use our keyword map to plan our site structure by organizing it into niches that match site categories. Going back to our first example - this is a nice keyword phrase.

Many content authors, if they do any internal linking at all, make the classic mistake of placing the link on the wrong content (on 'Click here', for instance) - so remember to make your anchor text out of the keywords for which you want to be highly ranked and watch those rankings improve.

Now let's take a look at external linking text. These are links that arrive on your site from other websites and you can make these links keyword rich.

Obviously, since you aren't the author of these sites, you don't have total control there. As you can imagine, this isn't very compelling to the search engines:

If you can, try to convince the website manager to phrase your link a bit more like this:

Of course, it can often prove challenging to be linked to externally at all, much less dictate what the link text should say. Here are a few tips for achieving exceptional link text:

The keywords you want to use for link text are your most wanted keywords - the primary keywords for your site's niches - but it's important to also use variations of your important keywords ...

... and of course you can find this alternative link text within each of your niches. Any of these keywords can be used as link text.

You can help out those sites who link to you by providing the exact html for them to simply paste in ...

... thus increasing your chances of getting the exact link text you want.

Develop relationships with other people in your industry. If you're generous on your site, with keyword rich links back to their sites, it's very likely they'll return the favor.

Blogs, online newsletters and other information sources will often accept well-written articles for publication, generally including a signature box describing what you do, and will link back to your site in whatever way you specify:

Link building is hard work ...

... but especially if you try to make those inbound links keyword rich, you'll be rewarded with better rankings.

This concludes our day six tutorial. In our final instalment, you'll discover how to one-up your competition by expanding into new markets.

About Mal Darwen

Mal Darwen joined Wordtracker in 2008 as part of the Customer Service team, and now as well as running webinars in SEO and how to use the toolset is Product Manager. In the five years since starting with Wordtracker, Mal has also spoken about SEO and keywords at conferences, and has a healthy hand in Wordtracker's tweeting.

When not Wordtracking Mal plays with a band called Praying for the Rain. He also plays guitars and basses with a number of other UK and International artists. He lives in London with his family and two slightly insecure cats.