Some of you will remember the day when you could Google “miserable failure” and be taken to the White House website bio of President George W. Bush. It’s called Google Bombing and it was all too real, and worked like a charm. Web pages were ranking for keywords that didn’t even appear on the page itself. All because of the anchor text of the links pointing in.

Anchor text is the text that is used within a hyperlink from one page to another. The best way to link from Page A to Page B is to use the primary keyword that appears on Page B as your anchor text. That anchor text goes a long way to ensuring that you rank highly for your important keywords and for webmasters who have performed link building campaigns around effective anchor text, they’ve been able to see great results, many times taking pages buried deep within the SERPs all the way to page 1. Anchor text is one of the most powerful tools in your search engine optimization arsenal.

While Google Bombing may have worked for awhile, the best anchor text has always been the use of keywords that already appear on a web page. It is possible to rank a web page for two or three important keywords or phrases just by performing that many link building campaigns focusing on separate but equal anchor text phrases. It takes planning, but your anchor text can improve your search rankings tremendously.

Did you know you can own the top 10 search engine positions for your name or brand simply by filling out social networking profiles? It’s true. Join a couple of dozen social networks and remain active in them and that’s mostly all it takes to have your name or brand appear in the top search results at Google. Some of the social networks whose profile pages rise to the top quickly include:

• Digg
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Mixx
• StumbleUpon
• Yahoo! Answers
• Folkd
• MySpace
• SocialSpark
• BlogCatalog
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• MyBlogLog

Even social networks that offer nofollow tags except in the user profile will often rise to the top of the search results for user names, but almost all of them will rise faster to the top of the search results the more active you are on them. If time is a factor and you can’t be active on all of the social networks (who can?) then at least fill out the social network profiles and let them do what they do naturally. If you ever do find the time to be active on them, you’ll already have your profile set up.

Eye tracking experts have figured out where people’s eyes naturally navigate to when they first land on a web page. Webmasters can use this information to their advantage in several ways. If you know that more eyeballs will see the top left corner of the page, for instance, then you’ll get more clicks on your ads if you put one in that location. The same principles hold true for links.

Let’s say you’ve built a web page that links to three other web pages on your website. Where do you place your links?

First, you should identify those parts of your web pages that are most viewed by the most people. Generally speaking, the top of the page is preferred because you’ll have more eyeballs “above the fold”. The reason for this is simple. No matter how well written your content is and no matter how well you do in building a great web page, there will always be people who land on the page then exit without taking any action or reading below the scroll point. That’s just the way it. But they will still see what you have above the fold at the top of the page.

You can use your bounce rate to your advantage. Place your most important links and ads at the top of the page where bouncers will still have their attention set. If your web page doesn’t provide them with what they are looking for then maybe one of your links will.

Aside from the top of the page, the section to the left of your web page just below your header is another hot spot for eyeballs. In that quadrant, typically where your first paragraph of content begins, or the sidebar right next to it, is a great place to put important links. If you draw a line diagonally from that point to the bottom right corner of the page, that’s where people’s eyeballs generally migrate to and those points along that line are usually the best places for your links.

What you need to think about is how people will scan your page because most readers will scan before they read. If your page is broken up into sections where you have three or four subheads on your page then the first paragraph of each of those subheads, the topmost ones most favorable, will be hotspots for eyeballs. Links in those paragraphs will generally do better.

When deciding where you want to put your most important links, think about where your visitors are most likely to focus their attention not only your search engine optimization strategy. That’s where your links need to be.