The Management Consulting Group

Comparison of Google SEO vs. Yahoo SEO I’m certain webmasters have been debating Google vs. Yahoo SEO for some time now. It seems - at least to me anyways - that good positions on Yahoo usually net good positions on MSN as well. So one would think their ranking algorithms are somewhat similar.

I’m not sure that keeping good Google positions will benefit you on other engines. I’ve found - I can optimize for Yahoo & MSN - and they will not turn the tables on me at any given point. It may become so that in the future they are as dynamic as Google - but I have found Yahoo & MSN to contain more “static” results. By static, I mean that once you manage to get top positions on Yahoo & MSN (and especially for popular keywords) you usually are able to hold this rank for a while.

Other webmasters will agree, you either know the Google formula or you don’t. I have still not discovered the formula. I have had pages (and ones with good content too) rank well on Google for a short period of time, then disappear completely from those query results. Google is a strange creature indeed, and although I have been into Internet Marketing for over two years now (and it is my only income) I have a very hard time keeping up with Google and trying to optimize for it.

Quite frankly, I gave up after all that jibber-jabber about Update Florida and the “Sandbox Effect.” I figured such rapid changes, and such severe penalties for any given site - were uncharacteristic of Google. Google has a tendency to change their algorithms, and consequently their SERPS, almost overnight. If you’re able to hold a top position on Google for certain keywords, all the power to you. I wish I could myself - as I believe Google would supply more traffic to my site then Yahoo can.

But in the long run, optimizing for MSN & Yahoo is likely in your best interest. Unless you yourself can crack the Google code, or know someone who can/has, I would suggest sticking to optimizing for Inktomi. These old optimization methods posted for optimizing for Inktomi (a simple Google search will find them for you, I know, how ironic) actually still work very well for both Yahoo and MSN engines. I have been using them for a while now and am having no problems getting SERP listings for these keywords.

It does take a little bit of time what with link campaigns and all, but no empire was built overnight. For more information on link building, and other subjects, please read my other articles.

I am a young, aspiring computer engineer into Internet Marketing, hardware, software, web design, SEO and just about anything related to computers. Please come check out my growing PC forum at http://www.markspcforum.com

First of all, What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the art of making your pages efficient for search engine robots in order to get your site listed in the top of their results, preferrably on the first page and within the top 10. We can easily achieve this if we know how the search engine is reading our sites, so we can further tweak our pages and make it to the top.

There have been several SEO techniques but this one is a Brand New, unique method, I prefer call “The Small Screen SEO”. We will be using our mobile phone handset connected with GPRS to do this, if you don’t have a mobile phone you can use opera which has the capability to browse WAP sites, now the theory is that since mobile phones have very limited capabilities in terms of screen size and content support, the most important content will be given preference over all others.

And since we will be using our favorite search engine, Google to do it; the “Most important” thing will be decided by our very own Google. So you just have to launch Google’s mobile search page at: http://www.google.com/xhtml either from your mobile phone or the Opera web browser, and enter the search term or your website address and keep browsing to discover the insides of your website and how Google perceives it. The Google acts as a WAP proxy to visit your own site, you can then optimize different aspects of your website to get higher rankings in search engines.

This article was written by Deepesh Agarwal of http://www.freeware-alternative.uni.cc who is an expert in software development and internet related technologies. Deepesh has developed many Award-Wining Freeware Software’s which can be downloaded from his site.

Listen. Some make submitting pages to search engines sound like the fast track to search engine ranking nirvana. Not to mention you’ll see offers to submit your site to a scadzillion sites for some low nominal fee.

Yeah right. It’s enough to make Pinocchio’s nose grow!

Because it’s just not true. Basically there are really only three search engines that count. Google snags more than 60% of all searches. Yahoo 23%. While MSN search has less than 10%. Which leaves a bit over 5% for the remaining scadzillions to fight over.

So don’t fall for the line those snake oil salesmen would have you believe. You know? That submitting to all known search engines will have the bots lining up like addicts at a methadone clinic to get at your site. With traffic following your high search engine rankings shortly thereafter.

Besides it’s not even necessary. Since if you have just one link from a site already in Google or Yahoo those bots will find you. Sooner or later. Making it safe to keep your wallet securely in your pants or purse.

Now I tell you all this knowing there may be one exception. But only for those who insist on submitting out of some sense of leaving no stone unturned.

If that’s you, do you know which one page might be the only possible exception to the “It Ain’t Necessary to Submit Your Site” rule?

Let me cue up the Final Jeopardy music while you ponder that.

Give up?

Okay, I’m talking about your site map. Reason being your site map points the bots to the promised land of all pages from your site. Or should.

Given that let me make this site map submission thing super quick and easy.

First to insure the bots can’t help but find yours, put a link to your site map in the footer of every page on your site. That’s right, EVERY page. This way no matter which page the bot lands on first it can’t miss your site map. And in turn follow it to all the pages of your site.

But wait. You gotta have a site map to submit a site map, right? Well then, here’s a nifty little site map generator that should be good enough to get you started.

http://www.netroglycerine.com/sitemap.html

It gets high marks from me because it works and it is available at no charge.

Here’s how it works.

Enter your URL. Click none of the check boxes. Then hit ENTER on your keyboard since there is no start or run key on the page. Then right before your very eyes, in seconds, one general issue site map will appear.

Next “View Source”. Cut and paste the code into your page template and away you go. One quick and dirty site map ready for submission. Or you can edit it a tad to clean it up a bit.

Oh and if you aren’t enamored with that approach here are some other suggestions. Both free and for fee.

• http://www.site-map.co.uk/build-a-site-map.html using Xenu Link Sleuth

• http://www.searchbliss.com/site-map-generator.htm

• http://www.sitemappro.com/

• http://www.xtreeme.com/sitexpert/

Finally submit your site map page to Yahoo, Google and sooner or later MSN search once it’s unveiled. To help with that here’s the links:

Yahoo http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Anyway, whether you use a tool to shave hours off the process or feel compelled to create your site map by hand, submitting a site map is a once and done deal. Do so and sooner or later a hapless search engine bot will be assigned to check out the page you submitted. When it does it will think it hit web pages paydirt and get busy indexing all pages in your site.

There. Now you know which page, if any, to submit where.

Copyright 2004 John Gergye

About The Author

John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook “Traffic From Google in 35 Days”. Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml. Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml/ and get the free special report “Coming Out On Top”.

Search engine optimization this and search engine optimization that. You read and hear about it all day, but what about your site? While there are plenty of articles providing useful information, this article shows you how a real world example met with success. The point of this article is to emphasize creativity when approaching tough optimization situations.

Problems for BusinessTaxRecovery.com

In November of 2004, our firm took on the seo marketing for BusinessTaxRecovery.com. The site was being promoted through offline activities and pay-per-click campaigns. No effort had been made to achieve high rankings in Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Keyword analysis revealed that combinations of the root keywords, “business” and “tax” were going to be difficult to attack. The primary problem concerned government agencies with web sites. The IRS site, for instance, had roughly 9,680 inbound links and an absolute ton of content. State agencies weren’t far behind. The California tax agency site had roughly 7,000 inbound links and, again, tons of content.

For a final nail in the coffin, the client informed us the business was cyclical with the busiest months being January through April when people focused on taxes. The site absolutely had to rank highly during this period. We had two months to achieve results.

Gulp!

The Solution for BusinessTaxRecovery.com - 140,000 Hits

After staring at a Salvador Dali painting for a few hours, we came up with a solution. It involved a combination of internal site page focus, meta tag optimization, link exchange and massive article promotion. The results produced 145,828 hits from January through April, with only 5,000 coming from the pay-per-click program.

The first step was to change the focus of the site from the home page to the article page. Jumping the tax agency sites on keywords such as business tax and taxes was impossible in two months, so we didn’t even try. Instead, we decided to focus on the keyword phrase “business tax articles” and bring people into the site through the article page. Meta tags were optimized and a link exchange program undertaken. The key to campaign, however, was a strong article promotion campaign.

Since taxes are confusing, it seemed obvious that an article campaign focusing on tax information would meet with success. Boy, did it. Approximately 35 articles were written, published and submitted to article directories. Since the articles were timely, they were snapped up and published. The articles produced direct traffic to the site as well as numerous inbound links because of the link created in the article byline.

As for the search engines, we focused on everything but Google. We expected nothing from Google because the major content and meta tag changes would take six to eight months to show results per the usual practices of Google. In reality, it didn’t matter. The Yahoo and MSN search engines produced big time.

In mid-January, the site went to number 1 on MSN under “business tax articles.” By the end of January, Yahoo was also listing it as number 1. MSN started listing it at number 1 for “tax articles” in February. The combination of these listings produced a significant amount of traffic, conversions and a very happy client.

Can we go on cruise control now? No! With the end of the tax season, the traffic to the articles page of the site has dropped by 75%. Nobody is looking for tax information after April 15th, so this is hardly surprising. The promotion of the article page was simply a short-term solution to a difficult situation. While it should produce traffic during the first quarter of each subsequent year, it is not a year-around solution.

Over the next six months, we will focus on the long-term goal of jumping over the tax agency sites for keywords such as “business taxes”, etc. It is going to take a lot of patience, but will eventually produce a significant amount of business for the client.

Creativity is often the key to conquering seo situations. Blindly slapping up new meta tags and links isn’t always the best answer. Sometimes, a little pre-emptive consideration can yield amazing results. It did in this case.

Halstatt Pires is a search engine optimization specialist with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company providing internet marketing services in San Diego, California.

As soon as you register your domain name, submit it to Google!

Even if you haven’t built your site, or written an copy, or even thought about your content, submit your domain name to Google. In fact, even if you haven’t fully articulated your business plan and marketing plan, submit your domain name to Google.

Don’t wait!

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, getting on the search engines has always taken a long time for a new site. Even assuming you do everything right, it takes months before your site is even indexed, and more months before it starts to rank well. As a rule of thumb, never expect to rank highly within 6 months of submitting your site to Google.

The second reason is a recent phenomenon called ‘Google Sandbox’. Many SEO experts believe that Google ‘sandboxes’ new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site).

By submitting your domain name to Google as soon as you register it, you’re establishing a site history even if the site has no content. By the time you’ve built your site, written your copy, and developed the rest of your content (and written your business and marketing plans), Google will probably see no need to sandbox you.

If you wait until launch day to submit your site, you’ll spend a month or two (maybe more) sitting in the sandbox watching potential customers spend their money elsewhere.

How to submit your site to Google

Don’t waste money by paying someone else to submit your site to Google. It’s easy!

Simply go to http://www.google.com.au/addurl.html, enter your URL (domain name) and a few comments or keywords to describe your site. Then click ‘Submit’. That’s all there is to it. You only have to do it once, and only for your top level page (i.e. Home page).

Google’s robots will then crawl your website the next time they’re out and about. Of course, they don’t guarantee that you’ll be included in their results.

IMPORTANT: As mentioned above, it takes quite a while for your site to appear in the search engines. This is partly because the search engines are big and slow – especially when it comes to new sites. It will take a minimum of 6-8 weeks before your site is indexed.

How to submit your site to other search engines

There are hundreds of search engines on the Internet. It’s a lucrative business, after all! But don’t panic; studies suggest that the top 11 search engines account for about 90% of web traffic. In other words, if you have the top 11 covered, there’s no need to submit to the rest.

What’s more, at the time of writing, most of the top 11 don’t actually accept submissions. The only ones that do are Google (described above), Yahoo, and MSN. Here’s a list of the available submit pages.

• Yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (offers free submission)
• MSN – http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 (offers free submission)
• Alta Vista – covered by Yahoo submission
• Netscape – covered by Google submission
• Fast / All the Web – covered by Yahoo submission
• Ask Jeeves / Teoma – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Hotbot – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Lycos – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• AOL – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Looksmart – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions

TIP: My SEO copywriting and advertising copywriting website, http://www.divinewrite.com, reached page 1 of Google.com for my primary keyword, “copywriter”, without a dollar being spent on search engine submission. I only ever submitted my site to the engines that offer free submission.

Do I need to submit my site to other search engines?

As a rule, no.

With an estimated 8.8 billion pages indexed (approximately 76% of the Internet), Google is number 1 when it comes to search engines. It’s argued that once Google has indexed your site, the other search engines will follow. Theoretically, you don’t actually need to submit your site to Google either because it’s always on the lookout for new content and will eventually find your site of its own accord. Google actually states, “Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it’s likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form.” (“Google Information for Webmasters” - http://www.google.com.au/webmasters/1.html#A1) Personally, I wouldn’t like to take the risk.)

Having said that, it certainly doesn’t hurt to submit your site to other search engines (especially if you haven’t developed any content for it yet).

Conclusion

You don’t need to be an SEO expert or an SEO copywriter to submit your site to Google and the other search engines. And you don’t need to pay anything to do it. You just need to do it. And if your domain name is new, you need to do it NOW!

Happy submitting!

You’re welcome to publish this article free of charge provided:

- you include the byline

- byline includes a functioning link to http://www.divinewrite.com

- you don’t change the article in any way

- you provide a courtesy copy once published

- in doing so you agree to indemnify Divine Write and its directors, officers, employees and agents from and against all losses, claims, damages and liabilities which arise out of its use

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.DivineWrite.com or www.ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

The latest news to hit the Internet’s ‘water cooler’ is that Lycos and Ask Jeeves are to begin their own SEO services..

Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is any practice related to the end goal of improving your website’s positioning in the search engines.

The brief history of SEO is that it first started out solely as the remit of the developers themselves. This was back in the day when one person designed, built, maintained, hosted and marketed a website.

The Ever-Changing Internet Landscape

During the past few years, however, the entire Internet industry has divided up into a myriad divisions to such an extent that SEO is now a booming sector in its own right. Entering the term “seo” on Google returns nearly 20 million results!

Now businesses recognise that it is no longer possible to expect one individual or company to possess all the necessary skills ‘under one roof’ to be able to achieve great results on the graphic design, technical construction AND marketing of their website.

This has led to the trend of bringing in specialist search engine marketing consultants or companies to assist.

As Google and the like are spending millions every year on developing their tools to accurately sift through the billions of web pages that exist it really is a full time occupation just keeping track of what has an effect on search engine ranking and which strategies work best.

Everyone Wants ‘Organic’ Nowadays!

Ask Jeeves and Lycos are now offering their SEO service to help companies get found in the ‘organic’ results of search engines.

‘Organic’ results are those results in a search engine listing that are non-paid. Almost all search engines now offer businesses the shortcut of simply paying to get an ad listed whereas as a latest study indicates that only 28% of searchers will click on an advertisement as opposed to one of the ‘organic’ results (on Google).

This is the reason we’re all fighting for high rankings in the ‘organic’ results. This demand from businesses is also presumably the main driving factor behind Ask Jeeves and Lycos starting to offer their own Search Engine Optimisation services.

Money Well Spent?

In short - I’m not sure.

If you have a 50 page website, getting Lycos to provide you with SEO services will cost you a tidy $10,000. They also include the questionable tactic of re-submitting your website over and over to search engines which is both pointless and risky as some will act against those that submit more than once.

$10,000 sounds like a lot to me for a service that is only dealing with search engines and which talks of ‘recommendations’ that you then have to implement yourself.

Really though - it comes down to what you are trying to achieve with your website.

My two cents on this is that the Lycos service doesn’t devote enough attention to links - your money may be better spent on getting more high quality in-bound links or on a well-managed Pay Per Click Campaign.

Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com

Lycos’ SEO Service
http://ranking.lycos.com/sitesidemore.html

Search Engine Users Survey
http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/software/article.php/3348071

Michael Cheney is Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM. Take the Free 7-Part Course “Internet Marketing Made Easy” and get your free sampler of ‘The Bible’ here: http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/

Everyone packs their website with keywords in order to feed those keyword-hungry search engines spiders.

Just do not starve your potential customers by forgetting to have the food they like:

• ample helpings of benefits

• tips rich in protein (practical)

• automatic weekly feedings (like a newsletter)

If you (affectionately) look upon your potential customers as if they are WIIFM monsters, and understand how to care for and feed them, there will be no scary nightmares (unprofitable websites).

A WIIFM monster is someone that is only interested in: what is in it for them.

It would take days to describe everything you need to know about these monsters. In the end you will see that those monsters are actually cute, cuddly, likeable monsters.

Just by observing these monsters (from a safe distance) you can learn so much …

The moment one of these monsters arrive on your website, you need to start feeding them - immediately. It is best to have many automatic feeders at your website, those monsters are hungry - they must have food, NOW.

An automatic feeder used often is an autoresponder feeder. These monsters can pick what auto-feeder they want to feed from, and start receiving food in minutes. These automatic feeders feed the monster for days, one easy-to-digest helping per day. The monster has the option to at any time stop the feeder.

I MUST warn you about something here. If you do not have a facility for the monster to stop the feeding, the monster will explode. This is NEVER a pretty sight. Humans get their websites taken away, their email privileges revoked and so on.

Another food source is eBooks. They can chew on this for days, before they come back for more. The tastier (valuable, practical content) your ebooks, the better the chance that they will come back to YOU for more. Always have a footpath (link) in the eBook that the monster can find you again in the big jungle where everyone shouts to them: feed here for free, FREE: feed here …

There are many different types of monsters that every website must have food for, but for now I will just tell you about the WIIFM monster.

This is the biggest monster of all. If it is not fed well, feeding all the other little monsters is of no use (like the freebie monsters).

The what-is-in-it-for-me monster is also sometimes ‘affectionately’ called the WIIFM monster. It only wants to know what it can get from a website.

If it is clear to this monster that you have no tasty food, it leaves immediately.

This monster has a pair of very well developed eyes. It can see within 3 seconds if a website has its favourite food (WIIFM content).

These eyes are so well developed that it totally ignores banners. These eyes only go for the real tasty food (quality, practical content).

The monster also has a very, very fast click-claw. If those well-developed eyes do not see food in 3 seconds, that FAST click-claw reacts with a speed that make the speed of light seem like a snail crawl … off goes the monster to find other more worthwhile feeding grounds.

The more favourite, favourite food you give for the WIIFM monster, the happier it gets. This causes this monster to quickly tell all its other monster buddies about this amazing source of WIIFM food. Yours.

These might be monsters, but they are not too stupid. They know that no matter how much of this WIIFM food they eat, their buddies can eat this food too, without the food ever being eaten up.

The food is not actually eaten, it is food for thought!

So, the more your feed these monsters, the friendlier they become. So friendly that they start sending you email and soon after that they start sending you money.

(Things sure have progressed tremendously since those dark ages - monsters can now send email too. That is how that spam-monster was born, but believe me, you do not want to hear THAT story …)

To attract more of these monsters, you build a monster-habitat for them.

What they really like in such a habitat is things like …

• a WIIFM discussion

• weekly fresh WIIFM food at the website

• a weekly newsletter, also with fresh content

• links to other worthwhile food sources

No matter to how many other WIIFM websites you send them to, they will always come back to you - if you really care about them and want to feed them.

You become a sort of a leader of the pack for them. You lead them to worthwhile food sources.

These monsters are very willing to buy food from you. If this food is tasty, they will also tell their monster buddies too. These buddies will also buy this tasty food. You will be amazed at how quickly this good news can spread. For some reason, these monsters are efficient at telling everyone very quickly if you tricked them, so be fair in all your dealings with them.

There are so many stories I want to tell you about these monsters, their different types of food sources, their enemy monsters, how to become their friends, and so on, but my time is up (for now). Time waits for no monster, not even the WIIFM monster …

To sum up the story so far, let us listen to one of the monsters I like best:

Sumarus - he likes to eat lots of tasty food (value content) and then summarize it, oh so brilliantly …

Sumarus (after clearing his throat):

So, to summarize (he always starts just like that)

The sole purpose of a website is to be the feeding ground of WIIFM monsters. The more WIIFM food you dish up in the form of articles, ebooks, newsletters and links to other worthwhile food sources, the more WIIFM monsters you can attract.

Your primary role is in providing tasty food to attract as many WIIFM monsters as you possibly can. The tastier your food, the more you can ask them to pay for your commercial food. If WIIFM monsters see you have no food, they leave - immediately, sometimes sooner !

WIIFM monsters HATE vomited food. They LOVE fresh food you prepared just for them.

If WIIFM monsters and website owners get to know each other very well, this can lead to lifelong, beneficial partnerships for everyone involved.

Sumarus might be too theoretical and philosophical for most humans, so this is what I think he means:

The better you can cater for the daily, practical needs of your website visitors, the better the chance that they will stay with you and continue being a newsletter subscriber.

You should only recommend other worthwhile websites.

Even if there are lots of sources of free worthwhile content, you must add value to what you give your website visitors and newsletter readers.

Initially you must provide value content up front, but will benefit from this later in the form of sales.

Sumarus also suggests that you reread this article to see how many other not-so-obvious tips you can find hidden in it.

About The Author

Article by Alwyn Botha of http://www.leveragedsuccess.com. Leveraged Internet Success website contains: Discussions, eBooks, articles, a weekly newsletter, and email courses. Leveraged = your maximum, exponential Internet success

Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we’ve got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we’re mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

Here is a list of the best tools I’ve found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:

Areas search engines look at:

1)Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: I’m told that most search engines don’t consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags).

2)Body text of the site

3)Headlines

4)Alternate text behind the graphics

5)Links, and link text

How do you choose the right keywords?

Here’s a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for “small business help” than for my company name, The Leader’s Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this:

Link Popularity

Search engines tend to give websites that have more external links from other websites pointing at them a higher search engine ranking. Here are a couple of free tools to track your link popularity, and to check our competition as well. www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com
http://www.marketleap.com (this one shows a graph if your history)

Alan Boyer, President/CEO of The Leader’s Perspective, LLC is considered one of the world’s leading breakthrough specialists. He has worked with some of the worlds largest companies, on projects in the multi-billion dollar area, and with single proprietor companies. He has worked on many hundreds of projects with companies that have resulted in multi-$100 million savings or gains.

With over 35 years of business, quality, and process experience, he has catapulted businesses lightyears ahead in weeks. Some have doubled and some have jumped 10 times. He claims the key to that is:

Anchor Text (also called phrase linking) can significantly improve your web pages relevance in the search engines. Optimized or keyword rich anchor text can help your web site gain positioning in the search engines as well as help drive better targeted search traffic.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text that you see on the page, here is an example:

To read more about search engine optimization techniques, check out my Search Engine Optimization blog.

Here the words “search engine optimization” are hyperlinked to the hidden URL of http://seogirl.blogspot.com/. The words, visible, “search engine marketing blog” is the anchor text.

Anchor text should be used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. If you use the example above, “Search Engine Optimization Blog” indicates to visitors that they can expect to find information pertaining to search engine optimization if they click on that link.

Why is Anchor Text Important?

Anchor text is one of the more important elements in influencing a Web site’s position in search engine result pages (SERPS). Your anchor text should include important keywords.

If the anchor text technique is used properly it will enhance the relevance of the targeted page. The page containing the anchor text will also be enhanced to some degree because you will be using relative keywords.

Optimizing Anchor Text of Inbound/External Links

Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your website from other websites. (Inbound links) If you are working on a link building campaign, it is suggested that you have several title and description options for the link pointing to your website.

If you supply a webmaster with something to copy and paste they are able to set your link up within a few minutes and you get exactly what you want as far as anchor text.

2005 NMS

Nicole St. Martin is a professional search engine optimization consultant currently working in the legal industry.

View My Blog:http://seogirl.blogspot.com

Everyone knows that if your website has a high Google Pagerank, you have all chances to reach good search engine positions, to get serious partners, or simply get more money selling text links.

But how to get a high Pagerank? (Let’s clarify: saying ‘high Pagerank’, we mean at least PR6)

Of course there are many different ways. You may start exchanging links with PR1-2 websites, then with PR2-3, then with PR3-4 etc… and after a year of this madness you’ll probably get a result. But till that time, your mailbox will burst from tons of “link exchange proposals” and your website will look more like a free-for-all directory. Or you may start writing articles adding your website URL in the bottom, but not everyone can do this, and it’ll also require many months of efforts.

But here’s the better way!

There are many websites with strong search engine positions and high Pagerank, where you can buy text links for a certain fee. Depending on the strength of a website and the value of its links, it may cost from $10 to $3000 (and more) for a ROS (run-of-site) text link. Everything will depend on your budget and goals. If your goal is PR6 - it may cost for example $200 per month to reach it. Yes, it’s not cheap, but it’s only the first step…

So, you go ahead and buy the link(s); and after the next Pagerank update (generally once a month), you get your fair PR6 (let’s suppose that it takes 1 month and $200).

During the second month you need to hurry up, and to organize several link exchange campaigns with other PR6 (or even PR7) websites. Remember: you’re not a newbie any more - you’re “PR6 website”.

3-5 campaigns should be enough. This month will also cost you $200… BUT… after the end of the month, when you have several working link exchange campaigns, you simply stop buying text links and wait for the next update.

If you made everything correctly, you will not loose your Pagerank (maybe even increase it).

So here’s the simple way to reach PR6 for quite reasonable price. Or course $400 may be a big amount for a young webmaster or a newbie. But it’ll save you from many months of exhausting work, from headaches; and it’ll save your time. Finally, you’ll also be able to sell your own text links in order to return your investments.

Good luck.

About The Author

Olga Rose - webmaster of Dedicated Hosting Directory (http://www.DedicatedHostingDirectory.com).

The website offers you full information about dedicated hosting, plus the review of top dedicated servers.

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the “Author” section and weblinks are kept intact.