Links and Link Anchor Text… Vital Info

Another gem from SEO guru Tony Roocroft, a mentor and friend.

Critical to SEO Success: Link Popularity and Link Relevancy.

  • Links: You need them.
  • Links: You need lots of them.
  • Links: You need lots of RELEVANT or RELATED links

Links on a web page enable the visitor to move around within and without a website easily.

A significant proportion of any website’s visitors will probably arrive at the site or page from a direct search query. By this I mean if a searcher types in good cheddar cheese he will be taken directly to a page about good cheddar cheese. On the other hand the searcher may have come from a link elsewhere maybe the searcher had been looking at a completely different site about English cheeses and saw a link to the site about good cheddar cheese.

When I review my own websites logs I find that about 60% of all page views come from search engines. The rest from other links or bookmarks.

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Incoming search terms:

Google Real Time Search Comes to Town

Once again without too much of a fanfare Google announced another significant change that will have a serious impact upon free SEO ranking as time roles out. Announcement made on Dec 7th. The new way of representing search results is to place up to date news content above the free results and just below the paid results.

For example I did a search for Julius Malema and the number 1 result was a news post as follows:

News results for Julius Malema…
Malema’s power diminishes? – 13 hours ago
Justice Malala: The booing of Julius Malema by the SA Communist Party and the … However, the truth is that the political death of Julius Malema has been …
Times LIVE – 230 related articles »
Nationalisation not fatal: Malema? – Times LIVE – 20 related articles »
We are not afraid of the IFP: Malema? – Independent Online – 10 related articles »

Notice how fresh the result was (13 hours ago)

I know it is not fashionable to point out that SEO is going to become more and more difficult but here is yet another example of how the optimised results (especially those optimised to get rankings without due consideration to great and outstanding content… ie vast majority of SEO’d sites)

I strongly suggest you read Google’s announcement on this important change

Here’s what was said on Webpro News…

Will Real-Time Search Results Drive PPC?

“Much like with Google‘s recently launched (for everyone) personalized search results, or any other universal search results for that matter, the addition of real-time results is just one more element that can add to the challenge of getting organic results to show up high on the page. As iEntry CEO and WebProNews Publisher Rich Ord noted when talking about personalized search, this could give marketers more cause to focus on PPC, where they have more control over their campaign. This notion seems to be becoming a more common theme.”

“I certainly think this will have a more profound impact on results sitting below the Twitter feed and those above,” says Peter Young of Holistic Search, as quoted by MediaPost. “The scramble for the top positions will become fiercer. That may mean more people invest in PPC to gain more control of their presence.”

Not yet completed the survey?

Here’s that bit of a bribe again to encourage you to complete the simple survey.
The Bribe is…

Every website with a need to achieve an outcome must measure the conversion rate to the outcome. Conversion rate is defined as Number of Conversions divided by Number of Times the offer or web page was seen. In the case of a PPC campaign conversion rate is number of conversions divided by the number of clicks. A conversion can be anything you like… the 2 most common are sales and web form (lead) completion.

I am often asked 3 questions about running an Adwords PPC campaign:

  1. What is a good conversion rate?
  2. What is amount I can spend on a click?
  3. What should my daily budget be?

There are no simple answers to these questions and all are interrelated anyway. BUT and this is important…

Click here to take short survey… thank you for your time

Tony Roocroft
Seoza.com
Tel +27114540105 or mailto:pondprof@gmail.com

Online public relations and top keywords

The Web will go down as one of the greatest equalisers in history. It allows small companies or even solo entrepreneurs like myself to compete with large and established companies. NETucation generates all it’s publicity through sending emails to over 500 journalists in South Africa. These journalists include everyone from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and online media.

No matter how big or small your company consider monitoring your public relations profile using Google News Alerts. I’ve been monitoring my own publicity and other important keywords that pop up in the news media using these alerts for the last few years. And it has proved to be one of the most effective ways of keeping track of what’s important to me.

Keywords are a mainstay of searching and search engines. And with the various specialised search engines now available the basic principles applies. So whether you are searching for websites, blogs, news articles or images certain keywords and tags are more effective. One of the best ways to determine those keywords is to use certain tools that ranks popular keywords.

The first one I used was the still free Overture Keyword Selector Tool. There is also the Google AdWord Keyword Tool which does not give the same kind of information but helps to determine trends. The best however is Wordtracker, a commercial service and by far the best.

Anyway Wordtracker offers a superb newsletter. And this month published a superb article on optimising press releases with top keywords for news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! News.

SEO All-stars Rank Top 10 Algorythm Factors

This is based on a project by Rand Fishken, founder of SEOMoz where he pulled together 37 of the greatest minds in the Search Engine Optimization business. You may also be interested in this excellent podcast interview on Marketing Voices with him.

Google Algorithm’s Top 10  (Assumed) Positive Factors

1.    Keyword Use In Title Tags –  “Notice number one – that you have HTML title tags that reflect the key terms you want your page to be found for. That’s been the advice since I first starting writing about SEO back in 1996. Eleven years later – and even in the age of it’s all about links — it remains the top ranked tip by so many experts. – Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land.

2.    Global Link Popularity of Site (The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web – both link quality and quantity) – “Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.” – Lucas Ng (a.k.a. shor), Fairfax Digital online marketing analyst.

3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link – “Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is ‘about’.” – Mike McDonald, WebProNews

4. Link Popularity within Site’s Internal Link Structure (Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page) – “As mentioned on my blog, you can pulse a page’s rankings by including and excluding links to it from your home page.” – Russ Jones, Virante CTO.

5. Age of Site (Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines) – “We have seen new sites flourish as long as they have a clear connection to the ‘parent’ site that has already gained trust.” – Chris Boggs, Search Engine Land Associate Editor.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site (The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword) – “We seem to have moved from analysis of simply anchor text, to including surrounding text and probably even page theme.” – Caveman, SEO/SEM Consultant.

7. Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community (The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world) – ” I’ve seen one of my sites goes from #39 to #1 right after I got 1 link… from the #1 spot on the keyword I was trying to get” – Guillaume Bouchard, CEO NVI Solutions.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text (Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page) – “If you are writing about ‘dogs’ then you should naturally use keywords related to ‘dogs’ within your content. If you don’t have keywords within your content it can become hard to rank for those terms.” – Neil Patel, Pronet Advertising.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site – “This is why people bought PageRank 7 site links for lots more than PageRank 6 links. The links were very valuable, and the information on how strong they were was very valuable (this is why it’s also very hard to GET an accurate read on anymore without an SEO shaman). – Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl SEO Consulting.

10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site (The frequency and timing of external sites linking to given domain) – “I don’t think getting fifty links overnight will kill you. Especially if those links are bringing traffic and from quality sites. Getting 100K links overnight and having no visitors or search queries as a result smells abit fishy no matter how you look at it.” – Rae Hoffman, Principal, Sugarrae SEO Consulting.

Read the full article here…

How to take control of your online profile

Have ever searched your own name on Google? I do it all the time and the results have become very familiar to me. When you search for “Ramon Thomas” on Google.com this is what you will see:

My own blog and my Amazon.com profile shows up twice making the 10 results displayed at a time on search engine results page (SERP). Why is this important? It wasn’t always like this. Up until about a year ago there were a few other “Ramon Thomas” characters who shared the first page of results with me.

The first thing I do these days when I engage with a new person is I Google them. I want to see how much they have taken control of their online profile. In most cases its none at all or maybe one page. Now what is the value of controlling your online profile? I will be exploring this in a series of articles on this blog where I delve deeper into each one of the above mentioned services.

What I want to stress at this point it that you must remember that the Internet is a one-to-one communication medium. Yes, thousands or even millions of people can be reading your blog or your website but they are doing it one at a time. In this sense you have to cater for that individual when you are writing. And each time someone is search for your name – that is one person at a time

Google wins MySpace deal

I’ve been on MySpace for a while now and you can connect with me on my profile if you are also on MySpace. MySpace is the biggest phenomenon in the last two or three years and its growth is increasing at levels not seen since the early days of the Web (circa 1996). And now that Google has clinched the deal to provide search and advertising on the Newscorp websites MySpace and IGN, it has entrenching its position as the leader in online advertising. You can read the full announcement here with all the details.

Google added to Standard & Poor 500

This is a really big vote of confidence in Google as a business because the Standard & Poor 500 has been a index that has stood the test of time. Google’s current share price is $365.80! Read the full article on Reuters here.

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