The anchor text on any website is completely editable and can provide some great SEO value from inside a website and from external websites as well. Essentially the best practice to use in any situation is to provide the most accurate description of what the link destination is as possible. Use the image below as guidance, so for example “Johns Cars” website had 3 important pages about; car engines, types of wheels and cars for sale.

Now what’s important within the internal structure of Johns Cars is what kind of anchor text is used to link to these pages. What you should try and avoid in the setup of your navigation or links within content using unrelated anchor text to link to a page. Terms such as “click here” and “this link” don’t really provide any useful description of what’s at the destination or what users should expect.

If you provide a good description of a page explaining what users can accurately expect to see once they arrive at the link destination then you’re optimising your internal link structure successfully. By doing this you are letting the search engines know what’s on the page, making the destination more relevant to a page with just a “click here” link. See the diagram below to show how internal anchor texts should be used:

This type of method also applies to external links i.e. backlinks. In an ideal world you would aim to have hundreds or even thousands (depending how greedy you were) of links with accurate anchor texts pointing to your content. Google and the other search engines use the anchor text to help determine how useful pages are, and rank them accordingly (this is only a fraction of the ranking algorithm). The only problem is, you have no legitimate way of controlling what anchor text is used to point to your website. What we don’t really want again is phrases such as “this site” or “check this out” – although a link is a link and beggars can’t be choosers!

As the diagram indicates above although these links are pointing to Johns Cars they are not really providing any real added value in terms of anchor text. They are not telling the search engines or users what content should be expected on the website. Not to go too far into detail about getting the correct anchor texts as there are ways such as paid links and link bait but essentially any external links should ideally be keywords you are trying to rank for, so in Johns case, “Cars for sale”, “Types of wheels” and “Car engines”.

I ran my competitor reports this morning and have noticed page rank updates happening across the board.

I have noticed many increases and some decreases in some large brands. This will make it the second page rank of 2009 and the third page rank in nearly 6 months.

If you want to check your own page rank visit Dig Page Rank

Let me know what you guys find out

While many SEOs headed back to the drawing board to think up new and innovating ways to attract links to websites some SEOs have continued to play the paid links game. I’m not one to judge, if you buy links, there are risks, if the pros out way the cons then go for it. There are plenty of large brands out there who have more than obvious paid links strategy, yet never seem to receive any penalties, in fact they seem to get rewarded by great rankings.

I get questions from people and clients asking “is there a safe way to buy links?” well the short answer is no – but there are ways that websites seem to avoid detection which cut risks. From my analysis of competitors over the last 12 months there are methods which are used:

1. Link Brokers – These give you access to a selection of websites that are willing to sell text ads. Usually the system is automated, sellers place code on their sites allowing brokers to distribute links throughout networks. These seem to be the most obvious method that is identifiable by Google.

2. Unrelated content – If you buy links on a website that has no relevance to your own content then what value does this give the users? None. Organic or natural links more often than not will link to relevant content, providing added value to their website and the users that visit the links.

3. Anchor text – In an ideal world every link established naturally would contain keywords and phrases that you want to rank well for. Unfortunately this very rarely happens, natural link growth will include nofollow tags, banners, brand terms and a selection of utterly useless keywords such as “here” or “this website”.

4. Link relationships - Having 100% followed links with targeted keywords will undoubtedly set some Google alarm off somewhere. A natural link relationship look will have a selection of followed, nofollow, affiliate and tracking parameters.

5. Link increase – Something that is often overlooked by other SEOs is the natural versus manipulated link growth. A natural increase will be slow but generally consistent, with maybe a few spikes due to new content and site updates (which I believe Google checks). A manipulated increase will be quick with many spikes and even overall drops – people do forget to pay for their links. See the diagram below to show how a natural link increase usually looks and a blatantly obvious manipulation:

6. Link placement – A sure way to get found out for buying links is placing your link in the footer of a website where there are no other relevant links or too many external links. If you’re stupid enough to think doing this will give you any ranking value or traffic think again. Natural links usually get listed on resource pages, blogrolls, in blog posts (not paid) and perhaps the body of website copy.

7. Looking for Page Rank – It is true, people still search the high seas looking for page rank, alas this will do no good. Content and site relevance plays more of an important role these days than page rank in terms of obtaining high quality links. If a new website suddenly gets 10 page rank 5,6 and 7 links pointing to it then I fear its life in the Google index will be short lived.

At the end of the day as you can see trying to create a paid links strategy is a long, time consuming process which does hold risk. If you get away with it, you’ll achieve great rankings (which many top websites do) but the more rewarding ethical method is of course to create a linkable website with valuable content. Google will undoubtedly have 101 other paid link identifiers in their algorithm, plus they already have the option to report paid links in the Google webmaster console. If a linking opportunity arises be sure that you are within the Google guidelines to be safe.

I for one noticed this heavily in one of the industries I manage (travel related), every day one of 3 or 4 large brands would be shifted onto the homepage from the second or third page. This changed on a daily basis, giving these larger brands any position between 6 - 9.

Over the last week however it seems that this update has stopped dead. These brands are no longer being boosted to great positions for very highly searched phrases. I debated whether or not to mention this, part of me wants Google to have forgotten to switch the boost button on and the other part of me knows that updates in Google are as regular as minutes in the day.

Just my observations and would love to hear if any other SEO’s have seen the same?

It’s kind of obvious that having a targeted keyword in your domain name is going to help you in some respects in terms of rankings. However there are other indirect benefits of choosing a domain name with keywords included in them.

Natural links

These natural/organic/golden/mythical links which are generated over a long period of time are the ones Matt Cutt’s and Google say will bring the most value to any website. It just so happens I agree with them (lucky Google), however if you run a small to medium sized website they are often few and far between. Ideally you would hope that the anchor text given out of generosity would contain your desired keywords, however if your company/domain name does not contain any keywords then the likelihood of this happening is very small. If your domain name is keyword driven then guess what – you’ll probably get a bunch of desired anchor text links naturally.

Directory listings

Now it’s fairly easy to get into most directories, except a few high value ones which have certain criteria’s for listings. One such common listing must is that your website anchor text be your website or company name. Bad news for the majority of websites out there as you are probably losing a little bit of value by having your brand name as your anchor text. However if you have desired keywords in your website name then your anchor text is much more appropriate to the phrases you’re trying to target. Of course directory owners have the right to refuse your listing, but the majority which come with a sign up or review fee will gladly accept such a method.

Blog Links

As many of you will know or should do, the most common referrals in a blog posts are:

• Joe blogs at Website name

• Source: Website name

• Website Name

These phrases are generally used the most by bloggers (not necessarily SEO bloggers) to describe a finding online or to point to a recommended resource. So it really does pay to have keywords in your domain name as the amount of targeted natural links you will acquire will be much larger than if your domain/company name has no keywords associated with them.

1. House the content in an appropriate folder i.e. mycars.com/tyre-information/ - include keywords in your folder name that accurately represent what’s included inside
2. Make sure the pages are accessible from your HTML sitemap, this is important to help the pages get indexed quicker
3. List the files in your XML version of the sitemap
4. Make the content area accessible from your main navigation too, this will add the extra layer of visibility to your content area and show the search engines it’s valuable enough to warrant a link from your main menu.

Now the content itself will help your website’s performance for a number of keywords depending on the number of pages you add per strategy. However if there are particular pages on your site you’d prefer to rank better than others then make sure you use this next tip. Link to your targeted internal page in each new section of content. So highlight a relevant keyword in each page and create your link in the body of the text, this will directly pass most of the value and page rank to the targeted internal URL, boosting rankings for your already existing page. The diagram below shows how the value is passed between your new and existing pages As mentioned this is a very simple strategy that does work with established websites to get new long tailed traffic and to help increase current web rankings.

For those that are unfamiliar with Robots.txt, this is a text file that should sit in the root of your websites directory. The Robots.txt (RT) file controls what the search engines can look at and index throughout your website. It’s surprising how often I find clients not even aware that such a file exists. Is the RT file the responsibility of an SEO strategy or something much more?

First off I always recommend that clients have a RT file on their server, even if they want all their pages indexed, it’s just good practice to have this file in place. For me it’s the “I am being good” file, for spiders and search engines, I believe that having such a file in place you get a very miniscule amount of positive value. Based on my experience I have seen websites indexed quicker on a larger number of search engines versus websites that don’t use it.

For larger organisations multi channel marketing is often carried out covering PPC, SEO, Affiliate marketing and Direct Marketing. When such activity is carried out, the tendency for duplicate content and unfriendly landing pages is sometimes an issue. Not to mention when tracking you ideally want your data to be segmented into appropriate channels so mixing a combination can lead to unreliable results.

For example I am a strong believer in PPC landing pages and SEO landing pages being handled differently, essentially you are after the same goal; usually this is involves a conversion of some kind. PPC landing pages work best when kept short, including clear defined actions and some smooth looking graphics. SEO landing pages work best in rankings when there is sufficient content added to this formula. So where a RT file can help is that it can block off an entire directory from being indexed, meaning no content will be duplicated and the results captured will be from two separate marketing channels.

A great resource to learn more about Robots.txt files can be found at robotstxt.org

Some examples on the types of robots.txt files:

Allow everything to be crawled:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

To disallow everything from being indexed:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

To exclude specific folders from being crawled:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /PPC/

Disallow: /Affiliate/

I work on SEO for a number of clients in the travel insurance industry and I started to notice strange listings appearing in the top 10 results. At first I assumed it was Google testing something out, I researched the competitors to see if they had received a sudden impact of link juice, which they hadn’t. What startled me was that some of these websites had very few links in comparison to the usual “top dogs” of the industry. Added to that the actual content on these pages was not great usually and the listings looked completely out of place an irrelevant.

What I did notice was that the sites were .gov or a brand I recognised through other marketing channels, i.e. TV, direct marketing etc. As it’s probably been a week since this update has occurred (I don’t care what Matt Cutts says, this IS AN UPDATE). The random brand websites making an appearance seems to change daily and only one or two websites actually change on the first page, however pages two and three are moving all over the place.

To give you an example of what I mean about this update, look at the screenshot below, displaying the top 10 UK results for Travel Insurance, I have highlighted the term travel insurance to show which listing doesn’t belong in the results.

Now I’m sure this will calm down a bit over the coming weeks but this makes ranking for the smaller brands and sites that much harder and the bigger boys seem to have it easy – More to follow.

Areas to keep an eye on that I will investigate:

• Brand anchor texts
• Brand mentions
• URL anchor texts
• Domain age
• Brand Universal Search

Quite basic tips I know but to get maximum results for image search it does require a strict process which must be maintained to achieve best results.

Image location

• Don’t save your images in an external location (like an image hosting company)

• Don’t save your images in your root directory (i.e. www.domain.com/photo1.jpg)

• If you have a small to medium sized website I would recommend keeping you images in a separate folder named “images” i.e. www.domain.com/images/photo1.jpg

• If you run or maintain a large website or an e-commerce website then managing images should be more categorised, for example:

www.domain.com/images/cars/blue-car.jpg

Image naming

• Quite obvious but make the image either gif, Jpeg or Png  format

• Use targeted keywords that give accurate representations of what’s in the image

• Using your targeted keywords as image descriptions may up your on page keyword density but this does not portray an accurate representation of what your image is.

• Common image naming structure:

http://www.domain.com/images/keyword1-keyword2.jpg

• Bad image naming structures:

http://www.domain.com/images/photo1.jpg
http://www.domain.com/images/cars/catid29876.jpg

Image placement

I have created a mock to show how I would choose my image placements for a page trying to optimise for Bill Gates + Microsoft. Based on experience image optimisation only really helps when you make the images as relevant as possible to the content you are writing about.

Image Tag

An example of a good image tag (Alt tag) would be:

• <img src=”images/bill-gates.jpg” width=”100” height=”100” alt=”Bill Gates”>

An example of a bad image tag would be:

• <img src=”images/photo1.jpg” alt=”Microsoft’s Bill Gates Microsoft”>

Like I said this is quite basic stuff but think it’s important to be reminded of it at times as I for one have been lazy at times and have not always followed this out.

Without benchmarking how would you determine the success of a strategy? You need to capture results for whatever metric to be able to show how your SEO initiatives have affected your clients website.

Some examples of SEO metrics I use to assist with reporting and monitoring performance are:

1.    Keyword Rankings
2.    Search Engine Traffic
3.    Referral Traffic
4.    Direct Traffic
5.    Cache Dates
6.    Index Percentage Penetration
7.    Time on Site
8.    Page Views
9.    Time of Visits
10.    Day of Visit

How to perform Benchmarking?

The only accurate method of benchmarking in my eyes would be manually. Ok, this may be time consuming on resources but accuracy matters. Obviously some of the metrics I have discussed above can be captured effectively by Google Analytics which has the awesome price tag of free. However when tracking keyword positions over major search engines there are alternatives to doing the work yourself.

I have used the following three pieces of software, all with positives and negatives but in case you are unfamiliar with them I’ll give you a short piece about each.

Authority Labs

These guys are the new kid on the block if you will – I originally picked up on this resource by Raven SEO’s blog. It’s a web based system which allows you to add domains with each of the keywords you want to benchmark for very easily. The software will even provide you with recommendations of keywords if your own keyword strategy is not available. Then every 24 hours data is updated, and will show you any increases and decreases over Google, Yahoo and MSN. A great little feature which I love is the graphical representation of keyword progress over time, you can see very easily influences that you might be implementing taking effect. They offer a free tester with limited keyword tracking and they have a tonne of features in the pipeline so I suggest you guys check it out.

Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a Firefox extension free to download by SEO Book. This tool is great for estimates – you can add as many domains and keywords as you like and you can check over a number of different territories for Google i.e. you can see differences between Google.co.uk and Google.com. Depending on the number of keywords this tool can take a while to give results but when the checking is finished you can download a CVS format of the results which will display all data each time you have benchmarked. Like I said this tool is great for estimates, I find the ranking positions to be quite inaccurate at times, so I wouldn’t recommend using the data for reports – but for monitoring this is great!

Web Position Gold

These guys have been around for a long time and it shows with the level of detail that can be obtained by this bit of kit. It’s the most expensive (although you can take advantage of their free trial). You can enter virtually unlimited domains and keywords and get pre designed reports at a click of a button showing all kinds of keyword activity and recommendations. It’s a bit tricky to get started but once you get a complete understanding of how it works, this is a necessity for any SEO.