I personally have never seen this before, but it is a great clear beginners guide to SEO straight from the horses mouth. You may know most of this information but it acts for a good refresher course.  Download the pdf here: Google’s SEO Starter Guide

W3C Validation

The W3C was started in 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote the web evolution

The Big questions is does W3C impact on your search placement in Google. Research done by Hobo SEO, still shows that Google prefers pages build to W3C XHTML and HTML compliant standards  and it can make a difference. I take this as very good news that Google is still promoting website that invest in this standard of the web.

I have always believed that being W3C c compliant can make the difference when competing for position if your benchmarks are very similar. However, not being W3C compliant does not mean you will not rank in the search engines, which I have heard before, simply that your website could have more potential to rank higher.

Finally a what is the W3C?

• W3C Stands for the World Wide Web Consortium
• W3C was created in October 1994
• W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee
• W3C was created by the Inventor of the Web
• W3C is organized as a Member Organization
• W3C is working to Standardize the Web
• W3C creates and maintains WWW Standards
• W3C Standards are called W3C Recommendation

We would like to announce the departure of Sean Revell from the SEO team, while he was a good friend we had to let him go after he was found to have been stealing paperclips

Sean Revell

Remember back in the day when you used to see AOL Keywords printed on video cassettes and adverts, well it seems the trend maybe starting back up again. While watching a tv trailer for Watchmen on British TV I noticed that at the end of the advert it displayed a message along the lines of “Search online for Watchmen”. So are some companies deciding to ditch giving out urls and giving out keywords. I will report back when I find out more on this topic.

As we have established from our previous posts on the South West SEO blog, there are many elements that are required for good quality Search Engine Optimisation on your website. Meta tags, Alt text and Anchor text are just a few elements that reinforce your website with the search engines, but something that is sometimes overlooked by people are the benefits of a good sitemap.

You would be right in thinking that not a vast amount of people use site maps, but they are proving to be an invaluable tool for the search engines to help navigate through the content of your website. There are two types of sitemap that you should be looking at which are the xml sitemap and a HTML sitemap.

HTML Sitemap
Adding a HTML sitemap to your site will allow users to navigate through the content of your website with great ease. Allowing HTML links from the site map is a great way to allow people to go directly to the content that they are looking for.  This will also allow the search engine spiders to crawl the websites content and pick up on any keywords that a user might be searching for.

XML Sitemap
This is a must for anyone wanting to allow search engines to crawl your website. This can seriously boost your search engine traffic referrals from search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are really the three main search engines you should be looking at obtaining good rankings in, as they have the majority share of the market.

Click the link for a little bit more information about what sitemaps actually are

So where do we start? If you have been looking into the use of anchor text on websites then you may have already established an opinion of what is going to work. You may already be familiar with a few of the thousands of posts, documents and articles available to read about the correct use of anchor text, but it seems people struggle to agree on the most beneficial way of its use.

This post will see another suggestion of how anchor text is analyzed at by Google and hold a theory on how the system may work. Those knowledgeable people over at SEOmoz have produced another theory on the benefits and drawbacks of anchor text and it’s location on a webpage.

For those people who are thinking ‘what is anchor text?’ Anchor text is a way of giving the user relevant information about the destination of the link. It may also be worth while knowing what a deep link is: A link that leads to a webpage on any site (same URL or different URL) that isn’t the home page - this is usually associated with anchor text. This is a way of getting you to the page you need without having to get you to go through the home page.

The new theory on anchor text appears to be (according to the published information at SEOmoz) that the location of your anchor text plays a part in the result of the keyword term searched. For example if you have a series of links at the top of the page home, ‘Information’, ‘Products’, ‘Contact’, ‘Location’ and ‘FAQ’ yet you also have an anchor link further down the page saying ‘see our products’ which leads to exactly to the same place as the ‘products’ link at the top of the page. It seems that Google will only acknowledge the first of the anchor text links to the products page.

To make things a little more complicated, it seems that Google doesn’t read the page like a user would. It appears that it is the code that is read by Google and the order of the links in the code bears the most weight as to what Google identifies first as anchor text.

Why are these things never straight forward?

For more information check out that the people from SEOmoz had to say about Anchor text.

I came across this new SEO tool called Exact Factor.

Its promises to check positions on the major search engines, and alert you when you have reached the top 10 positions, including

• Your position is up/down
• Your competitor has passed you
• You reached the first page in Google

The website is easy to use and navigate with a simple structure, its not trying to make the service it offers complicated.

My problem, how is it checking listings, and with Google policy on 3rd party software, where does Exact Factor sit within the market place. My big question is will clients I sign up be penalised in the search results?

I do feel it is important for the team to check and monitor there competing keywords in Google. This strategy allows you to keep a close eye on the competition and notice small differences that could make a huge difference in position, and is Exact Factor the answer to helping the team?

I am currently testing on a old website, and will let you know what the results are.

Tom