A Grounding Theory of Anchor text

Posted on November 28, 2008 by

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.

Exact Factor

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Geoffrey

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

Common Mythological Mistakes of the SEO Universe!

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Ash

Every specialised sector has its own set of myths. “Knowledge” that people within the SEO world take to be true is no different. Unfortunately we are more than likely to succumb to these myths as tactics that may have worked last year, month or week might not hold as much relevance today. Below we have a list of some of our Favourite SEO Myths:

1 – Submitting to the search engines is the only way to get your site listed.

2 – Meta tags are vital to SEO.

3 – Filling your alt text with keywords will ensure you decent ranking results.

4 – Search Engine Rankings are the only metric worth measuring.

5 – There’s a faultless keyword density that if you use on your site will result in excellent ranking results.

6 – Your home page has to contain every one of your keywords.

7 – You have to put keywords in your headline in order for your page to rank well.

8 – Not Using <H1> tags will prevent you from achieving top placement.

9 – More traffic always leads to sales.

10 – SEO executives are too expensive.

11 – SEO is all about secret tactics and tricks that only the “A list SEO’s” know about.

12 – The more links you have the better the ranking result.

13 – Google owes you a number 1 listing because you’ve followed their guidelines.

14 – Search Engine Optimization is a collection of tricks to fool search engines.

15 – SEO requires continual manipulation in order to keep up with changes in the search engines’ ranking algorithms.

16 – SEO is straightforward to learn.

17 – The only goal of SEO is to be number one in Google.

Congratulations Barack and the US

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Gerard

In light of Barack Obama being announced as the 44th US President I thought I would take a look at Google’s top 10 Search result listings for his name. So overall it looks like we have some good quality relevant results with no spammy sites jumping on the band wagon.

After some News posts we have the number one result, the official Campaign Page for Barack. Next up we have the wikipedia page for Barack where you can learn everything (well almost) you wanted to know about America’s next president. For the hipper voters, in the top 10 we have Obama’s Facebook, MySpace and Twitter feeds. It seems that Obama or his team are certainly up with current web trends and I truly believe that the Internet has played a substantial role in his Presidential win. These web 2.0 results are followed up by some good old fashioned News Outlets to keep you up to date with the role.

Im sure the McCain party tried to use the Internet to their advantage, but it just seemed during the presidential run that the Internet generally speaking had Obama’s back.

The only List of Directories you will ever need (well not really)

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Gerard

Paul Teitelman has come up with his top 25 paid directories which you can check out here on his website Search Engine People. We have shown the top 10 from his list, but please visit the site to read the rest. Paid directories are much debated issue at the moment. So think carefully about where to spend you money.

1.) Family Friendly Sites
2.) Incrawler
3.) Kahuki
4.) Greenstalk
5.) Rakcha
6.) Joeant
7.) Splash Directory
8.) Goguides
9.) Enquira
10.) ALS Links

Twitter: The pied piper of Social Media

Posted on November 3, 2008 by Gerard

I expect a fair few of you already use Twitter, but I have only just decided to try it out. Feel free to follow me here. It’s quite lonely so far as no one is following me, but im sure that will all change and I will become the Paris Hilton of Social Media (wait is that a good thing?)

Ranking Test

Posted on October 28, 2008 by Gerard

See below for updates

We are performing a little experiment to see if we can get this page ranking for Tom’s Fruity Mug and how quickly it takes. Keep an eye out on the results through this link .

Update:

So it’s a few hours later and the blog’s home page is appearing in the Google serps for Tom’s fruity mug

Update 2:

So we were fairly happy as we reached number 7 for all the web and number 1 for the Uk listings in Google. We could finally quit our job’s and start up our dream business around they keyword “Tom’s Fruity Mug” but alas Google has removed us from the top 100 for the term. Does this mean Google places temporary listings boosts for blog posts but then removes them after a certain period? It’s not like anyone is truely competing for that exact phrase, so why are we not the most relevant listing. Good job this was just a test and we didn’t want to start a mug business (looks around nervously)

Testing 1,2,3

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Greg

Just a little experiment here at South West SEO it see if two of our social bookmarking profiles will get indexed by Google and be of any use to us at all!

Matt Cutts: SEO’s friend

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Gerard

Over at Matt Cutt’s blog there is a new handy tip about getting some free links. Well these aren’t technically new links but sorting out dead links. You maybe asking how you find these broken links? Well through webmaster central, that’s how. Matt goes into more detail, but the gist of it is, that you use the diagnosis section of webmaster tools to find out who is linking to dead pages or pages that never existed. Then you can e-mail these websites and ask them to change the link to an active page. What a simple yet great link building idea.

Matt Cutts

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