Personalized Anchor Links are the heart of Search Engine Optimization, and as well, Search Engine Orientation.

The essence is to create a link to your website / web page / weblog with your name in the anchor text. (Or you can link to a topic, as I did above). As long as your name is in the target page, Google and other search engines with similar algorithms.

Of course anybody, but they’d need to obsessed enough with you to do that, and need to recruit other obsessives.

So how do get a personalized anchor link placed on another website? Forget link farms and automatic link exchanges – as harbors of spam, the search engines try their best to ignore them.

Once upon a time you could leave comments on other blogs and sign your name with your website. This too was susceptible to spam abuse. In 2005, Google introduced the nofollow attribute to hyperlinks. This has been employed by the popular blogging platforms, so a PAL in a comment signature is ignored by the search engine.

Additionally, you can set up accounts on open social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, which is designed for managing your professional connections. But LinkedIn does not support PAL (since I just coined it). For example, here’s my page on LinkedIn. It links back to this website using the anchor text “My Website.” But using my name as the anchor text would be infinitely more helpful.

You could join directories as well, for whichever communities you happen to be in. Just ensure you get a PAL link and not one that says “website.”

In the end, what’s the sure-shot way to get PALs? Make friends. And hope they recognize the value of PAL-linking for people just starting out.