SEO – Anchor Text

Anchor text in a web page is a gateway to yet another page in the website. It reflects what you can expect from the page, which you are about the view. So, anchor text is an important entity in web design and search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO experts have come up with various ways to write the anchor text in a standard website. They feel that if you optimize the anchor text, you will be able to attract more customers and increase search engine ranking.

Anchor Text is important for both internal website structure and external linking.

Internally it is wise to use anchor text with your keywords when you link between pages in your website.

To use an Anchor Text Hyperlink view code example here:

Your anchor text

When you discuss a topic in the content of your web page and mention a keyword that is covered on its own page, you should use a hyper linked anchor text to that page. Anchor text is a factor that can increase your Search Engine Results for keywords and are assumed to be part of Google’s algorithm to determine search engine results.

A prime place to have anchor test is also in the footer section of your website where copyright information is placed.

Example:

2005 Copywrite- All rights reserved “Keyword” www.yoursitename.com

(Hyper Linking the word “keyword” to the url for the page where this Keyword prominent)

External Linking should also utilize the anchor text hyper linking method.

Your anchor text

From articles, to forum signatures, to reciprocal links or, link to us directions, all should include your Major Keyword as a descriptive anchor text hyper link.

It is smart to utilize several different keyword anchor text hyperlinks for various different backlinks. Make a list of all your major keyword phrases and create the anchor link code. Each time you link to a different site, attempt to place a different anchor text link on each site. If you have five major keyword Phrases, you should have multiple links for each of those anchor text hyperlinks.

Watch your search engine results and traffic increase when you utilize the power of anchor text hyper linking.

SEO – Articles create Backlinks

Submitting Articles are Important for SEO and Traffic. Articles Create Backlinks!

Backlink creates traffic, help out SERPs, and improve Page Rank.

You should be able to write 250 words on a subject in which you are familiar.

It doesn’t really matter on what the topic or subject, as long as the article is not about illegal activity, is unsafe or blasphemous.

Create your article in a word processing program so that you can easily edit, spell check and format. Don’t worry about font sizes, bold, italics etc., because most submission services won’t keep that original formatting and then Copy your article into a text file for easy copy and paste when it is time to submit.

An author’s bio section for each article is available on each article submission service. The bio section allows you to insert an html hyperlink. Write one or two sentences referencing your website and include your name. Make sure you use proper hyper linking for your URL.

It is of utmost importance that you do create the proper true HTML hyperlink in the bio section of your article; otherwise the article will be re-published without a true live link to your main site.

Proper codes:

Your Target Keyword Phrase – www.yoursitename

This will show the words, Your Target Keyword Phrase – www.yoursitename .com with the entire line a live hyperlink.

Submit your Article to several article submission websites.

Here is a List of a few good ones:

http://www.articlefinders.com

http://webpronews.com

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.articlecentral.com

http://www.certificate.net

Most Article submission sites have RSS feed capability. This allows your article to be shown on multiple websites that utilize the RSS feeds. In addition many webmasters retrieve articles from article submission sites to add content article to their own sites. Every occurrence of your article “re-published” on a website, creates a free one-way back link to your site.

As time goes by, your articles will be re-published on multiple sites. An article even on a non-popular topic can still be re-published on 75 or more sites. Popular category topical articles will be published on 100 to 1000’s of websites. Every instance of a republished article creates a back link if the hyperlinked URL was correctly inserted in the original bio section area of the individual article.

Additional tip for checking your back links.

Do a Google, Yahoo, or MSN search using quotations marks around the name of the article, For example search for “My article title”, you will find all the results for that name that will consist of mainly the article that you have submitted. Daily you can easily see with a simple search the amount of back links you are gaining through the simple re-publishing of your article. You should check to make sure that the back link is Live on the new site republishing your article. Also check over time the Page Rank of those new back links.

Most sites that abode articles allow the option to make comments. You can then make a comment on your article and include a simple phrase to seek more information by going to the same site referenced in the bio while including another hyperlink. If you do make a comment, make sure you reference by name you are the author and don’t attempt to include a hyperlink not already in your article.

In a few months when the next Google Page Rank update occurs, all your articles should have page rank of their own, all passing Page rank back to your main site.

As your articles age on the re-published sites, and the re-publisher work on their own SEO and Page Rank, your article on their site increases in Page Rank as well.

SEO – File Sizes

You should consider the size of your website files both for the benefit of search engines and your visitors.

Obviously, you want your visitors to be able to get your website to load fast, but you need to help the search engines as well.

You can reduce the file size in a couple of ways:

1.) Use External Style Sheets

2.) Use Validated Code

3.) Cut out all the junk

Most search engines spiders don’t read JavaScript unless you include it from another page, so consider making all your menus real hyperlinks with anchor text. Your pages will load faster and the SE’s will be happier.

Reducing the size of your pages will help with your overall search engine optimization.

SEO – Keyword Density

keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for, i.e. the keyword, against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. If your keyword occurs only once or twice in a page of 500 or more words, obviously it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur six or seven times in a page of similar length.

The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters/SEO’s achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms/keywords.

As far as search engines are concerned, if a particular keyword has a higher density on that particular web page, then the chances of that page obtaining a much better search engine ranking increases almost exponentially.

Keyword density is important since search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms this site is relevant to — the perfect keyword density will help archive higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for ‘keyword-spamming’).

Keyword’s should be chosen with care and you should use those keywords as often as you can ,and still “read” well. The amount of times your keyword comes up in your copy compared to other words is called keyword density.

Depending on who you ask, what search engine you are dealing with, or the phase of the moon, you will get a different answer from every SEO expert on what the right density should be.

Don’t try and “trick” the search engines. You almost always loose out in the end. Real content, written for real content usually ends up outranking sites that try and cheat the search engines.

Decide right now to play by the rules and when your competition begins to get banned, you will be up and running.

Improving the keyword density on your website is one of the fastest and simplest ways to increase your site’s visibility in the search engine results pages.

SEO – Alt Tags

The HTML tags describing an image that appears when the mouse is rolled over the image on a Web page. Helpful for people who view pages in text-only mode. Some search engines look for keywords in ALT tags.

If you use images in your Web pages, its good practice to include Alt text for every image that a visitor to your site will see. ALT tags filled with keywords can also be used to boost your keyword frequency and help you achieve better rankings.

ALT tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your Website is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content.

The overall impact of using ALT tags, in terms of search engine optimization, is low. As they have become abused by webmasters who fill alt tags with streams of keywords, the major search engines have lowered the importance of ALT tags in their algorithms. However, ALT tags are a required element for standards-based HTML coding. Every image must have an ALT tag, and each ALT tag must be properly implemented.

It’s great news for SEO though, because as long as you don’t “stuff” your images full of keywords, it’s a great way to add targeted keywords to your pages content.

Spiders eat alt tags up because while they can’t “read” an image, they sure can read an alt tag.

A great example of an alt tag is if there was a picture of a brown dog with spots, you would have alt tags for it that said “brown dog with spots”.

ALT tags serve the following functions in seo and web design.

* Make sites accessible to the visually disabled.

*Describe images so that search engines and the disabled can see them.

*Allow keywords to be added to your pages with out cluttering them up.

*They should be used for every image on your site, within reason.

SEO – Italicizing

We aren’t going to take too much time up on this, but many SEO experts feel that Italicizing your text also causes the Search engines to pay more attention to those words.

These experts also suggest that you should use Italicizing at least once on every page for your keywords

The code looks like this:

Italicizing

It’s easy to do, and of course since you are doing SEO for people instead of machines, only do it when it fits into your overall plan.

Bolding Text falls under the same rules, but should probably be used a little more often.

SEO – BOLDING

Some keywords should be bolded to point the search engines in the right direction.

When you are writing your web pages you will probably want to give importance to a certain word or two. Unlike header tags, using the option in your html code to make a word stand out doesn’t carry as much weight with the search engines. Don’t discount it though because it does matter.

Many WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) programs do this for you on the fly, but make sure you end up with clean website code.

SEO – Header Tags

Header tags are HTML tags that help outline a web page or draw attention to important information. Keywords located inside header tags can provide a rankings boost in the search engines. Keywords in header tags are much like the head lines on a news paper.

Using Header tags tells the search engine what words are important in the context of your page.

Consider

,

,

, etc.. to be the way that you highlight important keywords.

Different browsers interpret the Header tags in different ways. The format for them is always the same though:

Header tags and your rankings.

There are several different pre-set sizes for header text using tags. They range from H1, to H6. You should use them to highlight your chosen keywords, and try to avoid fluff words – remember, you are writing for people not machines, so if you need a pronoun — use it.

Using Header tag optimization will help you boost your website in search engines.

Your rankings will suffer with out the proper use of Header tags, so don’t leave them out of your planning stages of search engine optimization.