This is one I’m guilty of not always following – anchor your text correctly.

When you insert a link into a post, it is very important from a search engine point of view, that the text you use is relevant to the link. Google appears to be refining their search results almost daily, with a real focus on relevancy, and if you want your writing to be rated highly by the Googlebots, you need to give them some relevancy, whether the link is outgoing or incoming.

Bad:

To read a hugely informative article on anchor text, click here to visit Blog-Op.

Good:

Visit Blog-Op to read a hugely informative article on anchor text.

As you can see, the two sentences tell the same lie, but the second one has much more relevant text anchored to the hyper link. This is equally true when asking people to leave links for you – if you can, get them to use anchor text of your choosing, and if enough people use it, you will rank highly for that search term in Google. An example of this is where John Chow asked people to link to him using the anchor text Make Money Online. At the time of asking, entering MMO into a search engine got John returned on page 147, as you can imagine it’s a popular search term. Days after requesting this, John’s site now returns as the second result, firmly on page 1 of Google.

If you want to take this to extremes when setting up a new blog, find a URL that is the same as your blog name, AND relevant to your search term. That way, when people link to you, they have to use your chosen anchor text.