Offsite SEO is an important element of any SEO campaign. There are many ways in which this can achieved and one of which is the very thing that you are reading right now - Blog Posts.

Many companies write and distribute blog posts as a way of getting anchor text links to a site that is being optimised for a particular keyword. A blog much like this one providing regular original content is more likely to be picked up by major search engines. Blog posts about relevant topics and themes that link out to related sites all reinforce what the website is about. For example if I wanted to use the keyword brilliant SEO Blog as a link you will find that if you click that link it takes you to the homepage of this blog. So hopefully when the search engines scan this page a see a link highlighting that a ‘brilliant SEO blog’ has been found then the search engines will identify this blog as a brilliant SEO blog. Obviously the more links you have that point to the site using that anchor text then the more likely that the search engines will find and index your site and the more clout you will have.

Visit our SEO Glossary if you need more information about some of the terms used.

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.