SEO Training

In my last post I wrote about on-page search engine optimisation.  Of course that is only half the story.  Unless you are lucky enough to operate in a vertical with no competition then you are going to need to do some off-page SEO too. Understanding how google works is imperative if you want to make progress in this area.

Build links to elevate your website in Google (SEO for SERPS)

Off page SEO is where most sites fall down.

Most sites fall down somewhere in their SEO efforts.  If you are happy that your on-page SEO optimisation is up to scratch then it is time to look at off-page optimisation.

How Google rates your site in plain english.

The currency of the web is links. Every link provides important information for search engines like Google. This information is used to rank your website in terms of importance when somebody does a search.
There are some key factors in establishing which sites are most relevant for whatever has been typed into the Google search bar. In establishing how important your page is relative to others, these are some of the more important factors: -

1. How many other pages link to your page? Look at it logically.  If I find a great bit of information on something I’m writing about then I will link to it.  If it is rubbish then I will link to something else.  Therefore, the more inbound links a page has then the more likely it is to be a useful page.  That makes it more important.
2. How relevant is the content on the linking page to your page? Is the page that the link is on covering a similar topic?  Indeed is the website itself generally writing on the same topic as your page?  If it is not then your link will carry less value.  There must be relevance.
3. How important is the linking page? How well does the page the link comes from rank itself?  If that page also has a high trust and multiple inbound links to it then it will increase the value of the link to your page.
4. How many people click on that link? Think of each click as a vote.  The more people that follow the link the better.
5. What do those visitors do when they reach your page? Do they stay and read for a while and visit other pages on your site or do they just leave straight away?  If they leave (bounce rate is high) then that will devalue the link too since it is obviously not providing visitors with a good experience.

Turbocharge your links

Ideally you want keywords in the link text.  This will turbocharge your links.  This site is about SEO training, and my main site also has a page on Search Engine Optimisation on it, so linking to it like that makes sense.  It is relevant to this site and provides a further resource for people who want to have their website optimised.  Because I have used the text that I want the page to rank for (in this case “search engine optimisation”) as my link text, I am telling search engines that the page I linked to is important for that phrase.

SuperTurbocharge your links

Don’t forget to add in your title text to your links.  This is another opportunity to tell both humans and search engines more about the page you are linking to.  In this example I have used the text “SEO consultant Wicklow”.  By hovering over the link this text will come up.  The code for doing this is <a href=”http://whatever.ie/whatever” title=”SEO consultant Wicklow”>

Where can I get links to my site?

At some stage every webmaster (that’s what you are if you run a website) runs into the problem of where to get links back to their site.  Here are six ways to get links…

1. Ask for them.  Ask people who run relevant websites to link to your website.  The worst they can say is “no”.
2. Directories.  Submit your site to relevant directories.  Some of these are useless, but some still carry a little weight.
3. Submit Press releases and articles to press release sites and article sites.  Many of these have just been depreciated with the so called Google Panda update, but as a rule of thumb if you can find a suitable site easily it probably has not been affected by the update.
4. Utilise social media.  You will not get a lot in the way of useful links from the sites themselves usually (most have nofollow attributes on their links), but by getting your content out there in the social world there is a higher chance of somebody else reading it and linking to it (organically the way all links should theoretically be made!).  It is also a good PR exercise, so no excuses for not using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg etc.
5. Forums.  These really come under the social media category in some ways.  They are of limited use but can sometimes create a good stream of traffic which is never a bad thing.
6. Blog.  This is my favourite way.  Establish a good blog and it will become a resource in itself that will gain in importance.  It is a low cost way of building links for long term gain.  Commenting on somebody elses blog is less useful.  What about doing a guest blog post on someone elses popular blog?

Do NOT do this to get links!

Here are some things you should definitely avoid when building links to your site…..

1. Buying links: This is the number one thing not to do to boost your SEO.  Buying links is bad.  It goes against Google policy and you WILL be penalised for it when you get caught.  Think you won’t?  Trust your competitors not to drop you in it by reporting you when they find out how you got above them in the Google ranks?  Don’t do it.
2. Reciprocal Links: “I’ll give you a link if you give me a link”.  My next post will probably be on Reciprocal links for more information.  The short reason is that you want more links in to your website than out of your site.
3. Pay somebody else to build your links without knowing exactly what they are going to do: It may seem obvious but lots of people pay for others to build their links (I even provide that service myself), but many do not know where those links are going to come from or the methods used in getting them.
4. Go for quantity over quality: Leading on from the last point, you need quality links and quality is harder to get than quantity.  If you have many links from unrelated sites it could lower the level of trust in your site.  If you owned a search engine would you rank sites you trusted lower than sites you didn’t trust?

Link Building is not an exact science.

All your links are not going to be ideal.  What I have done here is give an overview, but there is quite a bit more to it.  There are times to break the rules and times not to.  I have paid for links because of positioning and only on specific, relevant sites.  This has been more to do with gaining traffic through them than what it will do for my own sites Organic Listing SEO.  I have never and will never bulk buy links (I learned from others mistakes there).

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Domaining, or the practice of buying other domains for SEO purposes used to be popular.  That was because it worked.  Now though, particularly since it is difficult to get relevant domains as .com, but also because of changes in search engine algorithms domaining is not as effective as it once was.

Brian Cowen Supports Domaining for SEO.... but it's still a good idea. (he may not actually know what I'm talking about)

Does this mean we should all give up on domaining?  Not at all.

Here are 5 reasons why domaining is worth doing.

1. Domain Typos

As an example let’s say I had a site called wortley.com.  Wortley happens to be my surname.  The trouble with it is that hardly anybody on the planet can spell it properly!  In Ireland the most common mis-spelling is Worthley.  So if somebody was to try and find my site, then typing in www.worthley.com would return them precisely nothing.

So if your company name is prone to typo’s then buying similarly named domains that people may type to get to your site makes sense.  You just redirect them to the correct site.

2. Your Company Name Is Often Shortened to Initials or has the word “and” in it, or other confusing letters.

If my company name happened to be Wortley and O’Connor Ltd for some inexplicable reason, then it is not going to be readily obvious what my website is going to be.  Is it woc.com, wortleyoconner.com, wortleyandoconner.com or even wortleyoc.com?

For this reason I will never name a company in this way.  Particularly since nobody can spell Wortley in the first place and the apostrophe in O’Conner sends people into a state of utter confusion.

If I was stuck with that as a company name I would be well advised to get all versions of it though.

3. .com or .ie

If my site was wortley.ie then (assuming people have learned how to spell it) how many people would type in wortley.com first?  A lot.  People assume .com endings.  You may notice that this site does not have the .com version.  You may also be amused to note what happens if you type in http://www.seotraining.com

If you do you will notice that you are redirected to a .org domain.  (probably won’t notice that first though).

If it is possible, then getting the .com, .net, .org and .ie versions of your site makes sense.  One other good reason to do this is that nobody else can come along and set up a near duplicate site to yours.  Imagine if your business is an online shop with a .ie domain name and somebody comes along and sets up the same domain name with a .com ending.  They could make the site similar looking to yours and sell similar products.  You would lose business.

4. Keyword rich domains

If you are in Ireland and do a search for SEO training then you will find that this site comes up at the top of google.  Why is that?  Well the domain name is seotraining.ie, the subject matter is SEO training and generally you will find references to search engine optimisation creeping into nearly every post.

I am using this domain to target those keywords.  My main site http://www.webshed.ie has no reference to seo in the domain name and it would be a lot harder to make it rank for that.

I have heard a lot of “professional SEO consultants” say that it doesn’t work anymore.  Well it does for this site (and a few others I have).  Also I have not put any effort at all into link building to this site.  It is all about the content.

5. Company Rebranding

My last post was about rebranding your website.  If your company is taken over, does a merger or simply wants to rebrand what happens to your website?  You will still have visitors going to the old domains.  You need to redirect that traffic to your new domain.

Get found online

Getting found online is not all that difficult.  It is not incredibly easy either.  Of course it depends on how much competition you have.  Why do some sites show up above others? On Google it is a combination of over 200 factors!

In general these are split into two types of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – On page (the actual website itself) and Off page (links from other sites to your site).

For On-page SEO all you need to do is follow Googles Webmaster Guidelines.  Although, there is quite a bit to that, and it may take some time and patience to work your way through it.  There are other issues too.  Try looking up information on keyword density for example.  The web is full of different opinions.  The reason that some people will tell you not to exceed 4% density (4 percent of total text on the page) and others 8% density for example, is that nobody knows exactly how many keywords will get your page flagged for keyword stuffing.

Here is the problem…..

You want your site to get found online for specific keywords (SEO training in the case of this blog for example).  In order to show that the site is all about SEO training, it is tempting to use the phrase lots.  However, if I do that, then it will look like I am trying to influence search engines and they will penalise me for it.  This is not to say that it does not work…. but eventually the chances are your site will plummet down the rankings if for keyword stuffing.  I always advise clients to stick to the webmaster guidelines rigidly.

Off site SEO is where a lot of people come unstuck.  How do you get links to your site?  How many links do you need? Should you pay for links? Does it matter where the links come from?

It is a mine field.  Get it wrong and you will pay for it!  Get it right and your site will reap rewards.  By the way NEVER pay for links! It does matter where the links come from too.  What is more, external link building should be something that is an ongoing practice.  I will be posting more on link building in the future.

If you want to get found online, then it really does pay to get somebody who knows what they are doing to either train you, or do it for you.  This saves a lot of time.  Nobody knows it all (the search engines do not release the details of their criteria) but using a SEO professional who has gained experience from spending time on research as well as experimenting and finding out where some of the limits are pays off.

Nobody likes spam on their blogs

Spam Blogs (splogs) are bad enough.  There is nothing worse than landing on a site only to find that there is no useful information and that the blogs only purpose is to create links to other sites or to generate revenue through Adsense.

For those of us who maintain blogs though, the comment spam is hugely annoying.  Spammers crawl the web looking for blogs and then automate posting comments.  The sole purpose is to gain links back to their own site.  My biggest problem with this sort of link building is that it is not even as effective as it used to be.  Google employ a large number of people who are tasked with discounting this sort of spam.

So what are the solutions for a blog owner?

You could turn off your blog commenting, thus preventing anybody from posting any comments.  That is all well and good, but the whole point of blogging is to stimulate debate.  It is a social medium.

Alternatively you could employ a spam blocking plugin for your site.

I prefer to catch them manually though.  The reason is that I can learn from what these spammers are doing. Spammers do it because it works.  Some people approve these comments.

Spotting a Spam Comment

1. Check the users url.  This is often the best indicator.  If the site is full of rubbish or content you would not be comfortable linking to, then don’t approve the comment.
2. References to sex, gambling or drugs of any description in the body of the comment (often with links) earn instant spam marking on any of my blogs.
3. Generic terms like “Great post, I’ll have to bookmark it on Digg”.  These posts have no reference to the content of the post itself.  “I like your ideas on this topic” rather than “I appreciate your thoughts on blog commenting” is a flag for me.  If the post is not specifically referenced then it’s 99.9% likely to be spam.

My favorite blog spam ever was a comment complementing me on the theme of this site and asking me where I got it/ how I made it.  This blog has the default Wordpress theme, I never bothered changing it, although I will at some stage in the future.

I clearly use the power of blogging for SEO.  There is no quicker way of climbing the Google ranks.  However, there is a difference between what I do and what the comment spammers do.  I try to give good content.  Although this site feeds my Webshed site, It is a stand-alone site in it’s own right.  That is responsible SEO.

Directories are now about as much use for SEO as a telephone book

The internet is full of directories, and full of people offering services to include your site in all those directories.  They are of little use for SEO today, certainly when compared to Social Media as an SEO tool.

Going back just a few years businesses were going mad about directories.  Online budgets were being spent on premium placements and button and banner advertising.  Things change however.  Directories no longer hold the same power.  Google have even said that they will not be placing as much emphasis on dmoz (the mother of all directories).  This is because many sections are without editors and there has been widespread criticism of some editors.  It is something I noticed myself.  It can be extremely difficult to get a site listed on dmoz.  At best it can take months.

Am I saying not to bother with directories and to concentrate instead on Social Media?

Not quite.  When it comes to Google Local, the map results for businesses, local directories seem to hold some weight.  This is because Google is slow to trust submissions to Google Maps by businesses.  If the business address given on your contact page is the same as that listed in various local directories then it builds that all important trust.  It also helps to identify you as an actual local business.

The links from directories still hold some weight too, depending of course on the directory.  They just don’t help your SEO as much as they once did.

For my money, I’d rather invest in SEO training and in particular Social Media training than on expensive banner advertising on directories.

Niche directories are probably more useful than general directories now too.  This is because nobody really uses directories to find sites any more.  Search engines are just fine for that.  A niche directory however will get you targeted, specific results, and probably ranks better for whatever it is you are searching for than a generalist directory.  A good niche directory will hold information on the field too, rather than just being a list of businesses/ websites.

By the way, don’t bother with paid directory inclusion services, they are likely to do more harm than good!

Be My Valentine ... Google

With Valentines day fast approaching I started thinking about what is wrong with how we think about SEO and Google in particular.

With SEO training Google tends to be the main focus with clients.  They want to climb the Google ranks.  That is because in many ways Google is the only search engine that matters.  However, romancing Google is not how we should view SEO.

Saying “be my valentine” to Google is much akin to saying “be my valentine” to your sweethearts mother.  You will not get the girl/guy by focusing your affections on their mother.  You will get the cold shoulder.

In SEO circles there is much talk of getting some Google love. But Google doesn’t love.  Google rewards the love that others give you.  They reward the relationships you build with other users.  Google are blatantly open about this.  The first three Google webmaster guidelines for content and design deal with making your site easy to navigate, easy to find (sitemap) and creating useful and information rich pages.  In other words they are telling us that we should create websites for people and not search engines.

Our focus should not be on romancing Google, but on romancing visitors and other webmasters (all of whom are human).  Of course you have to keep your would be mother in law happy too.  There is no harm in being charming with Google, but the way to Google’s affections is to concentrate on your content and your visitors.

Unlike most mothers I know, Google is quite happy to see you “sowing your wild oats” with as many people, across as many sites as possible.  Rather than utter “be my valentine” to just one user, it pays to shout it out with gay abandon across the entire universe that is the internet.

If your heart is true (your content is fantastic), you will attract the affections (links) of users across the world.  Human nature being what it is, more links means more visitors.  Charisma is infectious.  Once you gain the affections of some of your users more will come, just because you appear popular.  It’s just like in school, when people want to be associated with the “in’ crowd.  They put effort into getting close to them, creating links with them and boosting themselves through association.  So what have the “in” crowd got in internet terms?  Nothing more than great content.

What makes great content is another discussion entirely.

Don’t be my valentine Google.  I prefer humans to algorithms.

What relationship does link positioning on external sites have with the effectiveness of a link for delivering results to your site? (I’m just going to stop for a breather after that horrible sentence… the rest will be better… honest)

Some would argue that links are links and you take them where you can get them.  Surely though it is smarter to try and get links that are actually worth something to your site – particularly if you were about to part with cash for them.  Onwards with our SEO training – Lets take a look at how the position of the link on the external site can have an effect on how effective the link is for you and your SEO.

It is important to note that positioning is just one element in the SEO equation.  We will look at others in future posts.

Link Positioning for SEO

Banner and button links: Google does not like paid links.  Banner, Skyscraper and button links are images.  This in itself is not bad.  There is little difference between a text link and alt text in a link.

What is bad is that the positioning of these elements is just about always the same on a site.  Worse still they often come with “Sponsored links” or some other such text in their vicinity.  That is like painting yourself yellow, wearing nothing but a pink tutu, and running past Google buildings shouting “I paid for a link” while a team push flyers with the details into the hands of everybody entering or leaving the building.   Obviously it’s the algorithms you have to worry about mainly (unless you get a personal review). A link to another site from a banner is therefore only worth the number of clicks you get from it.  Add in “ad blindness” and paying for a banner ad seems to make little sense in most cases.

In truth it probably won’t do you too much harm to buy button or banner ads, but it’s not likely to do you as much good as you would like in terms of SERPS.  That said, a nice banner ad on a popular and related site could get you enough click throughs to make it worthwhile.

Footer Links: This is one for you web designers.  You put your links onto every page you design…. in the footer.  It doesn’t do you any good.  Well, it doesn’t do you any good compared to having a nice link in the middle of the page copy.  The footer is also another place where advertising is often placed.  In short, don’t expect much from footer links – they do not work well.

Header Links: Links in the header are not a lot of use either, for much the same reasons.  In general the only links you ever see in headers are paid advertising.  The search engines know it.

Positioning in the source code structure: When your page is crawled, it is the source file that will be read.  Traditionally, important content would be placed as high up that code structure as possible.  This is because crawlers used to only crawl a proportion of each page.  Using CSS you can float the main column rather than the side bar, thus it is closer to the start of your code.  It is still worth doing this for other search engines, but not necessary for Google any more.  Google can understand your page layout (providing you keep to reasonable standards).  Thus positioning in the source code is not as important as positioning on the page.

Best position on the page for a link: I love in-text links.  I think that a good relevant link in the middle of a paragraph of relevant text is the bees knees.

Surrounding Text: What about the text surrounding a link?  I think that the surrounding text is quite important.  It helps to show context and is simply a way of telling dumb machines that it is less likely to be a spam link.

Blogrolls and other Site-wide links: It depends on the site, but having the same link on every page of a site is often not as good as a few links on relevant pages.  Firstly, Site-wide links may be confused with advertising, secondly, in my experience they are just not as good in many cases.  So, if somebody offers to put you in their blogroll, ask them for a link in a few individual blogs instead.  You can ask for a few, because it will probably seem to them like they are giving you something less important.  Get some blogging training and start making great quality links for yourself.

The ideal place for a link on an external site: The perfect link position in my book is in the center of the page (in the main body of text), as near as possible to the top of the page, with relevant surrounding text and good keyword use.

Links are less useful if:-

• The link is in the header or footer sections of the page.
• The link is in a list of unrelated links.
• The page is badly formed (broken source code)
• The link is in Javascript
• It is an image link that has no alt text (makes it nearly entirely useless)

When it comes to training someone on link building, there are a lot of factors that go into what makes a good link.  The page positioning on the external site is just one of the factors that play a role in how effective your SEO is.

Search engine optimisation relies on a wide range of factors (there are over 200 elements taken into account by Google when analysing a page).  The wonderful thing about SEO is that even by paying attention to just a few you can make a positive change to your site.

Use internal links to chain your site together and make it work as one unit

One of the things I forgot to mention when I was talking about on-page SEO was internal linking.  This was very remiss of me so I thought I should cover it immediately.

Internal linking is the practice of creating links in your text that point to other pages on your site.  It is a part of SEO training that is often not covered.

Why use internal links?  After all you have a navigation menu so what use are more links to the same pages?  Navigation does not generally allow you use the keywords you would like a page to be found for.  The “home” navigation item is a prime example.  You could forgo the word “home” and put in something that relates to the actual page, but that would be at odds with good heuristics (ease of use) for your user.  Visitors to a website expect to see a home page.  So we need to give it to them.  The trouble is that the word “home” does nothing as far telling a search engine what the page is about (unless you have a property site perhaps).  The same is true with all your navigation links.  They do not give an ideal idea of what the page is about.  They are usually only one or two words long for a start.

With internal linking in your body text, because you control the website, you have total control over what text goes into those links.  Let’s look at it from a search engines point of view.  They look at links, the text in the links and the relevance of the page the link points to.  They assume that the text in the link is representative of the page you are pointing to (otherwise it’s a pointless link).  If you have descriptive text in a link, it tells the search engine a bit more about the page than it could gain from simply crawling the page itself.  You are telling the search engines that the keyword(s) you use in your link are important for that page.  The search engines take that information, and when somebody else types those same keywords into the search engine, the search engine goes, “oh, I know, This page here is about that”, simply because it has been told it is by the link text.  Link text is a prime SEO factor.

That over simplifies it a bit, but it’s all you really need to know about it for now.

How to use internal links.  Like with all areas in SEO, moderation is king.  But I thought it was content that was king I hear you say.  Well yes, but Moderation in SEO efforts is vital.  Otherwise you are stuffing.

Here is a wonderful benefit of using internal link text.  You get the benefit of the words twice.  Say, for example you have a front (home) page on your site (which doubtless you do).  On that page you want to inform visitors about the whole sites’ contents.  To do this you write text that talks about all the things you have going on in the site.  Within that text will be keywords that you want to be found for, and those keywords will relate to other pages on the site.  Make a link out of them and point them to the other pages.

By creating a link in text you are saying to both users and search engines that they can find more information on the subject of the linked text by clicking on it.  The keyword is on the page and at the same time you are pointing out that another page on your site is also related to that keyword.  Sweet.

Blogging is a prime example of where this technique is used well.  I don’t do enough of it.  I sometimes write these posts just to remind myself of what I should be doing.  Take a look at copyblogger though.  Not only do they have a fair few internal links, but they also do a great job of teaching you about writing internet copy (that’s text to you and me).  They also write nice short posts in general, something I should learn from.

A word of caution.

I have seen this done to excess.  Try not to make your pages a horrendous looking sea of links.  Remember that guidelines say that you should have less than 100 links per page.  That includes all your navigation by the way.

Also, I should point out that including several links to the same page within your text is regarded by some (myself included) as a waste of time.  There is some evidence that if you use two different keywords to link to the same page, the first keyword will be given preference and the second will be ignored.  Somebody actually set up an experiment to test it and it would seem to be the case on Google.

Make sure the keywords you use in your link are relevant to both the page you link to and the surrounding text on the page you are linking from.  This is important.

I should have given you the short version of this post really:-

Create internal links with relevant keywords and don’t overdo it!  It will do you wonders.

Rewriting dynamic urls like

www.mysite.ie/information.php?page=information&id=45

to

www.mysite.ie/45/information.htm

using mod_rewrite makes sense for your users.  It is easier to read, and should somebody be good enough to give you a link then they are less likely to make a mistake ending in a 404 error.

So what is the mistake?

In two words… “Capital Letters”.

If you rewrite the previous to

www.mysite.ie/45/Information.htm it is not the same as www.mysite.com/45/information.htm.  A link to the wrong version will again lead to a 404 error.

The mistake seems to come about as a result of good coding practice.  We might right $myDetails when writing our back end scripts.  This makes our scripts easier to read and makes sense.

However when we write www.mysite.ie/45/myDetails.htm as a url it is looking for trouble.

Good SEO will remove as much user error as possible.  As soon as you use caps in your urls you are opening up a mine field.  You WILL end up with bad links, with users who can’t access pages when they try to type them directly and will eventually have to rewrite them.

Get it right in the first place.  www.mysite.ie/45/my-details.htm is a much better way of doing it.

Which leads to another question “-” (dash) or “_”(underscore)?

When you look at a raw link (no css applied) then the answer is clear. An underscore will be swallowed up in the underline that shows it is a link.  Therefor a dash is definitely the better option.

“I don’t need to rewrite my urls.  Google can read dynamic url’s just fine.”

That is true, but websites are not just for search engines.  Make life as easy for users and, from an SEO perspective, for those that will give you links, as you possibly can.

How do I rewrite a page?

Let us assume you want to rewrite the page

http://www.mysite.ie/myinfo.php?page=myinfo&id=45

to

http://www.mysite.ie/45/my-information.htm

In your .htaccess file (apache) write the following

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

You just need to write that once.  Then the rewrite code…

RewriteRule ^(.*)/my-information.htm/?$ myinfo.php?page=myinfo&id=$1

That’s it.  So what does it do?

In plain english the line says take any characters that come before /my-information.htm (in our example this is 45) and make them into a string ($1 in this case – but if there were two (.*)’s then the second would become $2). Then rewrite that to myinfo.php?page=myinfo&id=45 (it took the dynamic 45 from the regular expression (.*) and created $1  from it before adding it to the final url.

Warning.  www.mysite.ie/anything/45/my-information.htm will also be affected by this expression. Your $1 would then become “anything/45″ which would undoubtably mess with your GET statement.

Simply by changing around the page you can get around this.  There are other ways too but this is the simplest method and means you don’t have to learn as many regular expressions.

Instead of rewriteing it as www.mysite.ie/45/my-information.htm

we could rewrite it as www.mysite.ie/my-information/45.htm

The mod_rewrite would then be

RewriteRule ^my-information/(.*).htm/?$ myinfo.php?page=myinfo$id=$1

Done and dusted!

The text in your inbound links is extremely important.  Like with everything in SEO it is not the only factor with links that you have to take into consideration, but it is one of the ones you need to concentrate on.

The trouble with links (natural ones) is that people tend to link to your page with your site url.

If your site is http://www.jackiebrownmedical.ie and your site is about medical recruitment, then a link with the text www.jackiebrownmedical.ie is not going to do you much good.  However a link that reads Medical Jobs is far more useful.

So how do you make people use that version when they link to you?

In all probability you will not be able to (directories etc all use the site url).  The best way to control your inbound link text is to create those links yourself.

Here are some ideas of how to do that.

1. Create a blog like this one.  Every time I write I can include and links I like with whatever text I like.  The example above will not be particularly useful to Jackie Brown Medical for several reasons.  But If this blog was called www.medicaljobs.ie and the article was about medical jobs then it would certainly be useful.  You get the idea.
2. Forums.  Create a signature in every forum you use with a link that uses a keyword you want your site to show up for.  In addition you may be able to put the odd link into the text of your forum posts.  Beware though that if you abuse it you will fall foul of the forum moderators.
3. Feeder sites.  Blogs are simple, but why not create a whole site about the keyword you want to show for.  Then use that site to link to your main site.
4. Blog commenting.  Comment on other peoples relevant blogs.  Make it useful or interesting though.  Blogs get huge amounts of spam.
5. Ask for it.  Contact the webmasters of other sites and ask for links.  If they are willing to give you one then they will probably be willing to give you one with the text you want.
6. Social bookmarking. Digg, Delicious, reddit etc. Submit your pages.  You can alter the title text of your page on most of them to be your keywords. ( I always alter them a bit just because I don’t want two pages with exactly the same title if I can help it).

Search Engine Optimisation is not an exact science.  Link building is more of an art in many ways.  Experiment and try new things.  Some may work, some not, but that’s the best way to learn. (other than SEO training of course)