Social Marketing: How To Add Anchor Text
To Your Social Media Site Profile

The 80/20 rule applies to social marketing as much as it does to anything else. If you’ve never heard of it, the 80/20 rule states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Here’s a small, easy, quick procedure for getting big results from your social marketing program: It’s called anchor text.

One thing people use social marketing for is to get links to their business website, bringing more traffic and increasing their site’s search engine ranking. For the best results, give some thought to the keyword phrase you would most like to rank #1 for in search engine results. What words do people search for when they are looking for a site like yours?

Your Social Media Site Profile
Let’s say you specialize in cloth dollmaking. If so, you’d probably love to have your website show up at the top of Google results when someone searches for a handmade cloth doll. Keeping in mind that your social marketing profile alone won’t make your organic search listings, you can influence your website’s link popularity directly, and your organic listings indirectly through that, by including a bit of anchor text in your social marketing profile. The way you do it is like this:

1. Go to the social site of choice
2. Register to use the site
3. Go into your profile page and add your bio and other information about yourself
4. Find the place where you are allowed to enter information about your business or website
5. Write your description using anchor text, but don’t overdo it (one or two instances of anchor text is fine

When you include the anchor text in your profile information, make it a part of the regular flow of your description. Make your description stand out by focusing on user benefits and throw in the anchor text in the middle of your paragraph to make it look natural. It will look something like this:

I’ve been making dolls ever since I learned to hand sew in junior high. Over the years, I have made more than 300 specialty dolls and have created my own line of handmade cloth dolls based on some popular models on the market. My dolls are safe for children as they are soft and machine washable. You can see my dolls at http://grammiesdolls.yorkadamssmb.com.

I recommend including one instance of your URL and one instance of anchor text in all of your social marketing profiles. That way, you can use the URL as a branding tool and if it is easy enough to remember then you might encourage return visits to your website through direct browser input rather than searches in the search engines. Your anchor text will weigh more in the search engine algorithms due to the keyword phrase that is important to your site.

How To Create Anchor Text
When you create your profile be sure to pay attention to the policies of the social marketing site that you are using. They all different ways of creating links and some don’t allow links at all. Here are some policies you might encounter:

• Use of plain HTML
• BBC code or wiki
• Proprietary code unique to that site
• Anchor text not allowed
• External links not allowed

Yes, some social media sites do not allow you to link back to your site. You can usually include your URL in those sites, but it won’t be linkable, which means if people visit your site from those social sites then they’ll have to copy/paste your URL into their browser. Hey, if it works, it works. Right?

To create an instance of anchor text in HTML, all you have to do is put the following code in front of the text that you want linked back to your website:

< A HREF="http://www.myurl.com" >

Change myurl to your domain name. You can link to your home page or directly to an internal page using that code syntax. Be sure to take out the space before and after the opening and closing brackets and include < /a > without the spaces after your anchor text phrase. Otherwise, the link won’t be activated.

If you do this correctly, you’ll have one more inbound link to your website than you did before and that should give you a bigger boost at the search engines.

NOTE: While Grammies Dolls is a real website, for the purpose of illustrating how to create anchor text the above bio is fictional.