How to Not Get Penalized for Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual word that you see in a link. The code that makes it direct you to a web site is hidden from view. You may be aware of the importance of links when optimizing your site, but you may not be aware of possible search engine penalties associated with your anchor text.

Back in the day, search engines simply looked at meta tags and links to rank your web site. As soon as people figured it out, they started spamming the search engines and undeserving sites were getting top rankings. Google quickly figured it out and created a system of penalizing sites for trying to manipulate the rankings. They changed their rank criteria to give results based on a lot more than how many times you can squeeze your keyword into your homepage.

Now Google and other search engines look at everything from the relevance of your content to the web of links pointing to your site from all over the web. They even consider the reputation of the site that is linking to you. The result is a very true search result. When I type in a keyphrase, I know that I am getting rankings based on relevance, popularity and quality content.

Now the question is, "How do I build these links to my site without raising any red flags with Google?" There are a few guidelines for building quality anchor text that will keep you out of trouble.

Do not over optimize one general phrase. For example, if you sell sports equipment, you may believe that you should optimize for the keyphrase "sports". But truthfully, this is a very broad term with a lot of competition. You could work on it for years and barely rank. As far as anchor text goes, you will have a lot of links with the same anchor text, "sports". Search engines will see it as over-optimization and possibly penalize you, which can take a very long time to recover from. Optimizing for a broad term like this will also get a lot of people looking for all sorts of information relating to sports and not people looking to buy sports equipment.

Mix up your anchor text and the words that you are optimizing for. Instead of "sports" you may need to be a lot more specific and work with more specific keywords, like "soccer pads", "golf clubs", or "kids football cleats". Not only will you have less competition, but you will be targeting the people that are actually looking to buy sports equipment.

Work with your SEO company on an internet marketing strategy that uses specific keywords related to your content and your site. Use different combinations of words based on what your customers are typing in to find you. Avoid the over use of any one keyword and you should start to see some real results.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

How Does Your SEO Company Choose Keywords?

Keyword selection is possibly the most important part of your marketing strategy. Everything you do to your site or relating to your site hinges on how effective your keywords are. If chosen correctly and periodically updated, then the right keywords can really pay off.

You can do keyword research on your own, but using a reputable search engine marketing company that stays cutting edge will increase your chances of having the best keywords possible.

A good SEO company will use a lot of different programs and tools to determine what people are searching for when they could benefit by finding your site. You don't necessarily need keywords that are general or too broad to compete.

Competitive keywords are ones that will not only drive traffic to your site. Competitive keywords should drive people to your site that will actually benefit from being there. They will also not waste your time and money competing for a ranking that could take years to get and even then may not make you any money.

Another benefit of using an SEO company to do your keyword research is experience. This is their primary focus and there is a whole industry built around it. Don't assume that you can learn everything about keyword selection in one day! An SEO company will look for hidden keywords, or words that people are using to search for you and not finding anything useful. It is sometimes very hard to think like a layman when you are an expert in your field.

Your SEO company will help you with your web site content to make sure that each page has unique content centered around the keywords. The keywords really do need to be the focus of the page that you are targeting. There is also a lot of behind the scenes work that can be done to increase your chances of being found with the great keywords that you have chosen.

Once your SEO company has your keywords, they should ask you which ones you consider most relevant to your site. After all, you are the one who has centered a career around the subject, and you know better than anyone which subjects are most important to you.

Don't make the mistake of discounting the collected data, though. Some people are so convinced that they know what is most important, that they don't consider what their users are actually typing into the search engines to find them. The hierarchy, however, may be best decided by you. Ask for an explanation of the keyword order of importance when your search engine marketing company presents you with your keyword list before you decide to change things.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Is Trading Links Beneficial?

If you own a web site, you may get offers from other sites to trade links. This is essentially a link swap, where you put a link to their site somewhere on your page and they will put a link to your site on their page.

Building links around the web pointing to your site can be helpful in the search engine rankings and getting links on other pages can get new visitors coming to your site, but is there a downside? Well, it kind of depends.

Link trading can be beneficial to you. It is most beneficial if the site you are getting your link on is a reputable site that relates to your industry. If you do some research and figure out that the site is a good site to "advertise" on, then there are a couple of other things to consider.

Be picky about where they are going to put this link. If it is on the bottom of a page that does not have anything to do with you, then it will not be helpful at all, to the visitors or the search engines. If you will be on a page that is rarely visited, then it will not help. If you will be in a long list of other links or if there are already too many links on the page, then it may not help you either. Search engines and users are looking for links that are extremely relevant to the content on the page. So, make sure that you approve of the context and content that your link will be associated with.

If you do decide that this is a good site, they are going to relevantly use your link and it would actually be an "honor", so to speak, to be on this page and site, then there is the other side of things to consider before you jump into it. You will need to put a link for the other site on your page. Is linking to them going to look unnatural with your content? Would the link look relevant to your visitors? Would you be willing for your visitors to leave your page when they click on this link?

Linking to other sites is tricky. Sometimes you do want to be associated with other sites, or you want to give someone else credit for some information that you are using on your site. But, you have to be willing to lose your visitors when they stumble upon this link. Sometimes it's not worth it. It just depends on the nature of your site. Plus, you are putting your site's reputation with visitors and search engines in their hands by linking to them from your site.

Consider all of these things before you decide to jump on the link trading bandwagon. If you are just uneasy with the idea but you are still interested in social marketing, which has become very important in the search engines, then contact a search engine marketing company about link building in the social world of the web.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Optimizing Images on Your Site

Images are a part of any good web site, but they can hurt you in the search engine rankings if they're not set up correctly. Also, you may have already noticed that you do not have to do an image search to pull up images in your search results. Images are becoming part of the normal search results on all of the search engines. Make sure your site is ready to rank with these important tips about optimizing the images on your web site.

File Name: The first step to optimizing the images on your site is to check the file names. Many, you may find, are titled things like "pic 1", "2.gif" or "3.jpg". You can rename the images so that the file names are actually descriptive of the image details. Avoid generic names that confuse search engine spiders and users alike.

Alt Attribute: Many people have security settings on their browsers to inhibit the display of images for one reason or another. Some may be to protect them from sites they do not trust while others do it just to increase their internet speed. The alt attribute is a message that displays in place of the image if it is blocked from view. The alt attribute should tell what the image is about. This message is also the anchor text for clickable images.

Clickable Images: Keep clickable images to a minimum. They can be confusing to search engines, especially if they are the only means of navigating around the site. This goes for images or graphics such as drop-down menus that are used for navigation. Use plain, organized text for navigation.

Robot blocked images: A lot of older sites and some of the newer ones with unaware webmasters are set up with the images blocked by their robots.txt files. These are useful for keeping certain things from being crawled and indexed on your site, but now that images are becoming important to search engine rankings, you may want to move your images to a new folder where they are not blocked from being ranked. Having your images all in one place helps the search engines to index them, as well.

You can use Web Analytics or Google Website Optimizer to see which image changes will do your site the most good. Since images are becoming more and more important on the search engines, you may want to work with a search engine marketing company to keep your images up to date.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Creating User-Friendly URL’s for Your Site

Improving the URL's of your site may be a daunting task, but the payoff could be great. Hard-to-remember or reproduce URL's are a big reason that a lot of visitors never make it to a lot of sites. They make navigation difficult for users and in turn, can affect your search engine positioning.

Long, complicated URL's can be very annoying to users. Long streams of numbers, punctuation and odd characters are virtually useless to most people. The potential for error in reproducing them is great and can result in a lot less traffic to your site. Partial URL copying is just about guaranteed for URL's that are too long. Bookmarking and linking to your site will be greatly reduced if your URL's don't make sense or are simply too long.

A simple way to structure your URL's is to make it obvious which page you are going to when you look at the URL. It should also make it obvious how important the page is and where it is located on your site. For example, "examplesite.com/home/furniture/kitchen/chairs/" tells you that you are in the kitchen area of furniture, looking at chairs. This can help to improve navigation for your users and simultaneously improve crawlability by search engines.

Make sure that anticipated links also work. If someone sees the above link and wants to go to the furniture section, can they simply leave out the "/kitchen/chairs/" portion of the URL and be directed to the furniture page?

Browsers like Google Chrome have made it a lot easier to type in URL's by hand, but not everyone uses browsers with URL self-correct. Work on making your URL's self-correcting. Consider common mistakes that people make when typing in your URL's. Capitalization, punctuation, synonyms, misspellings, partial URL’s and old URL's should automatically redirect users to the page that they intended to visit.

Breadcrumb links also improve navigation and cut down on people guessing what the URL's of certain pages are. For example, each page should have a breadcrumb navigation trail of links like this example:

Home < Furniture < Kitchen < Chairs

This makes it really easy for people to link to other pages in your site. You can also avoid drop down menus and images that aren’t easily followed by search engines. Two birds with one stone.

Improving your URL’s keeps your site really organized and user friendly. It should help increase the amount of bookmarking and sharing of your information as well. Easy to read and understand URL's make it obvious to search engines how important each page is and where it lies in your site. Improving your URL's is one of the things that your search engine marketing company will look at when optimizing your site.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Improving Your Site's Crawlability and Indexing

There are a few simple guidelines that you can follow to make your site more crawlable and more easily indexed by the search engines. In general, you need to focus on making your site as user-friendly as possible. Your second focus should be organization. Organizing your site so that it flows easily not only makes navigation easier to your visitors, but also makes more of your pages visible to the search engines.

Sitemaps can be an easy way to organize a site with a lot of pages. Your visitors can easily see where they are or need to go and search engines can tell which pages you intend to be most important. XML Sitemap pages are easily crawled by search engines and help the search engine to see all of the pages on your site.

Using links to help your visitors navigate the site is another good idea. Search engines have a hard time following image links like drop down menus. Text links are most easily followed. This is especially true if the text is short and to the point. You want it to be descriptive of the content on the page that you are linking to without being too lengthy. Links like "click here" are confusing to search engines, so stick to precise descriptive text for your internal links.

Work on your page titles and descriptions. Page titles should be descriptive of the actual information on that page. Each page should have a unique title. Avoid naming every page the title of your site. Also, avoid page titles like "Page 1", or lengthy titles that stuff in a lot of keywords. Be precise and to the point. Keep in mind that the page title will show up in search results when people are looking for your site. The goal of the page title is to inform the person looking if this is the exact page they are looking for or not.

The next thing that will show up in a search is the page description. This is the description meta tag under the header of your site. This should broaden the title of the page without repeating it. This is usually a couple of sentences. They can be a teaser to entice visitors to become curious about the page. Two or three sentences are plenty. Avoid using lists of keywords here. This is more a summary than a place to squeeze in keywords. Each page should have its own unique description.

These few tips can help you to make your site more user friendly and crawlable by the search engines. Indexing will be more efficient and search results will be more understandable and usable by visitors. A search engine marketing company will be able to go a lot more in depth with your optimization, but this is a starting point for you to start improving your site.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

What Exactly is Social Media? SMO Basics

Social media is a new frontier and many business owners are discovering a need to understand it. If you have found yourself swimming in an ocean of marketing and search engine optimization jargon trying to figure it out, then you will probably benefit from this easy-to-understand tutorial.

Definition: Social media is referred to as "word of mouth" advertising. Although it isn't the actual "mouth" we're talking about, it basically is defined as what people are saying about you online or through mobile and hand-held devices.

What Social Media Does: Social discussions between actual human beings integrate you across boundaries of video, blogs, bookmarking, images, communities, etc. As people talk about you, discuss you, send links to your site or your blog, bookmark you and follow you, you become more and more "popular".

Why is Social Media Important for Search Engine Optimization?: Search engines highly value this popularity because it represents not how much you paid for your advertising, but how much current, quality, information you are providing. For example, if you never updated or provided any new information, then people would soon have nothing to talk about. So, by ranking you based on social media findings, search engines can keep their results fresh and relevant, reflecting the opinions of the users.

What does SEO do for Social Media? : Going through an organic search engine optimization company is a consistent way to keep up with social media demands. They should offer a huge range of services to keep your company in the eye of users that follow blogs and bookmark them, use discussion boards and forums, making you more visible to the internet community.

Why can't I just blog and be done? : Social media is beginning to include podcasts, video, images and mobile or hand-held device communications. SEO companies are evolving as the search engines do to keep you up to date with what's important. You also need your postings and your site to be search engine friendly. SEO's are aware of all the details and do extensive work beyond blogging. Concentration is put into social news, opinions, bookmarking, networking and blogging.

The bottom line is that Social Marketing utilizes the virtual community to make your site more popular with the search engines. If the search engines are weighing it heavily, then you should too. Your reputation can take a long time to build, so getting started with a competent search engine marketing company early in the game can help you to become more and more popular over time.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

SEO for 2009

Search engines have really been leaning towards localizing their rankings and considering social media to make each user's experience a more personal one. This basically means that you may not see the same results as someone else for many searches, depending on your location. You can also depend on user feedback driven results in the rankings.

Something else to expect for 2009 is the emergence of other media such as mobile, video, podcasts and images. Is your site ready to rank?

SEO is a constantly evolving industry in which SEO professionals are forced to keep up with the marketing demands of the search engines. SEO’s are no longer simply optimizing a web page for a certain phrase. They are now moving into more specific areas such as videos, blogs, mobile media and images. This makes SEO companies valuable assets to those who utilize their services, ensuring that their web sites can keep up with the changing rank criteria.

These changes are turning SEO firms into web marketing providers. SEO companies are really trying to create a reputation for your site online. Building this reputation with actual users is going to help you come up higher in the universal rankings, and more importantly, come up more often with localized individuals that may actually benefit from visiting your site. These types of results not only give you high visibility, but also place you where you need to be to popularize your site for social media efforts.

Organic SEO firms have always been interested in building your online reputation, seeking long-term results and staying away from underhanded methods just to get a quick ranking boost. Now that the search engines have evolved, the organic method of SEO is really paying off. Search engines are giving results based on your outreach, your popularity and the quality of the information that you are providing.
Building your reputation as an expert in your field with all types of users can take some time. Mobile marketing, informative video, podcasts, imaging and social blogging are soon to be basic categories of SEO. Many of us have already been utilizing or venturing into these areas in anticipation of these changes. Companies that are in on the ground floor of such progressions are going to have a better stronghold on their field of competitors, making SEO a more important facet in your web marketing plan than ever before.

Real results can take time so getting started early is your best bet. Mobile and social media are becoming the norm in qualifying sites for rankings, and you need to be ready. Visibility in the social world of online media can really take a while, even years, and search engines weigh it heavily. Some search engines have even been created to only give socially motivated results, and they are becoming more and more popular. Make sure you are getting good representation in all these areas when choosing your search engine marketing company.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.