When writing content in external sites such as blogs. Is it good or bad to link relevant keywords to your website. For example if i wrote about pogosticks, and my site was a site dedicated to this, would i link the words pogostick to my site. Sorry if someones already explaiend this, but i thought making a topic would help me.
Yes of course it makes sense to link your site from external blogs if you are writing content on them. Keep in mind that it depends on blog owner's consent as well
You should always link with your keywords. That is what the search engines take to determine what your site is all about. Especially the anchor text for your links should be as much close to your keywords as possible.
Thanks for your help guys. So your saying in the Anchor text, don't use the keyword. So if the keyword was Banana and linking to my website, what would the anchor text be (its not banana its just an example hehe)
You typically want to use keyword phrase(s) (or slight variations of those phrases) from the <title> element of the page that the link points to as the anchor text. For example, if you have a page with the URL http://www.example.com/car-maintenance.html and the <title> of the web page found at that URL is "Car Maintenance"... then when pages on your site (and other sites as well) link to http://www.example.com/car-maintenance.html it is best if they link to it with the keyword phrases "car maintenance" as the anchor text: <a href="http://www.example.com/car-maintenance.html">car maintenance</a> or some slight variation of that keyword phrase as the anchor text like "car maintenance tips", "types of car maintenance", "car maintenance for winter", "DYI car maintenance", "how to maintain a car", "automobile maintenance", etc. It helps most if the keyword phrase in the link text exactly matches the targeted keyword phrase. It helps a more if the keyword phrase being targeted appears at or as close as possible to the begining of the link text than if the keyword phrase appears at the end of the anchor text. And if any part of it appears in the link text it will help some only to a lesser degree than having the entire keyword phrase appear in the link text. You want to link to it primarily with the exact keyword phrase you are targeting, but you also need to vary the link text so that it looks natural.
Only link keywords, but try to use different ones so it does not appear as spam. Use long tail keywords also.
You want to do the same thing basically with the alt attribute for image links. If you have a clickable image on another page that links to http://www.example.com/car-maintenance.html then Google and most engines will consider the text contained in the alt attribute to be the image link's link text. Assuming the image is a picture of a man working on his car and the image is located at http://www.example.com/image/man-performing-car-maintenance.jpg then you might want to have the HTML for the clickable image to appear as follows: <a href="http://www.example.com/car-maintenance.html"><img src="http://www.example.com/image/man-performing-car-maintenance.jpg" alt="car maintenance" title="Man performing maintenance on a car" /></a> The engines will see "car maintenance" as the link text for the image link pointing to http://www.example.com/car-maintenance.html because of the alt attribute. The image would display "Man performing maintenance on a car" as the hover text when someone hovers their mouse over the image. Technically, the alt attribute should describe the image... since it is an accessibility attribute used by screen readers to read the page to the blind or visually impaired. In this case the alt attribute should probably be something like "Man performing car maintenance" or "Man performing maintenance on his car". But it would generally be considered acceptable by most to use "car maintenance" as the alt attribute.