ARTICLE: ANCHOR TEXT

When seeking links to your website, make life easy for the person or company who is going to link to you by writing the text you would like them to use so they can just copy and paste it onto their site. There is an ulterior motive for this – if you write the text for them, you can control the anchor text. Anchor text is the text a user identifies as the link – a link is made up of some visible text to click on and an address or URL. The URL will be your website and the anchor text should include your keyword phrases for which you are attempting to rank well in the search engine.

• Bad example: Click here to join the Share Results Affiliate Network.
• Good example: Join the Share Results Affiliate Network.

If you are wondering which keywords you should use in the anchor text pointing to your website, you can look at the November issue of Ecom Express for four tools that are highly recommended! Once you have started your inbound link campaign, you will want to monitor your progress. While there are several link popularity tools on the market, Marketleap has designed a link popularity tool to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players. Be sure to watch for next months Ecom Express to get some specific ideas on getting other sites to link to you without your having to ask!

TOOL OF THE MONTH

McDar Keyword Analysis Tool - this tool requires you to input a URL and a desired Keyword Phrase. It then returns the top 10 sites in Google for that phrase; the number of pages indexed for each site; the number of incoming links, etc. It's a great tool for seeing who your competitors are and how many incoming links they have! This is one of 92 Free SEO Tools offered by another Canadian SEO Company.

ASK AN EXPERT

Each month we will feature a question from you – our readers! So send your burning SEM questions to: Ask an Expert . This month's question comes from Stéphan:

I made my first affiliate sale and am really excited about making more, however I am confused as to why I am able to see the dollar value of the transaction when I log into Share Results, but I am unable to see my affiliate payment. Am I going to get paid for this sale?

Affiliate Commissions

Rest assured you will receive your affiliate commission once you have met the minimum set out by the merchant you are signed up to. Now the reason why you can not see your sale in the payment report is because your transaction is still pending.  It will stay this way until the merchant approves the sale. There is a really quick way to identify pending sales: When you are logged in to Share Results, go to View Reports > Transaction. Select the merchant for whom you made a sale; set the transaction status as pending and modify the date range to include the date of your transaction and click on Update!

Once the transaction has been approved by the merchant you will see your commission in your payment report (follow the same process as above but choose View Reports > Payments as opposed to Transaction.

IN CLOSING

We here at Ecom Access and Share Results want to help you kick off your New Year with successful internet marketing strategies! If you have any e-marketing questions or require some help with your site, we would be more than happy to spend a few minutes answering questions, looking at your site, etc.

Send an email to: darlene@shareresults.com with your question pertaining to PPC, SEO, email or affiliate marketing! Please note that you must be a registered affiliate or merchant of Share Results to be eligible so be sure to include your ID!

If you do not want to become an affiliate or a merchant of Share Results, you can always send your questions to Ask An Expert at Ecom Access and have your question profiled in the next newsletter! Hint - this can be a great way to get an incoming link as well as traffic to your site!

Till February,

The Ecom Access and Share Results Team

Have a question? Email us at newsletter@ecomaccess.com - we'd love to hear from you!