Link Building - the Importance of Anchor Text

This may seem like a really simple posting and some of you more advanced readers may want to skip this, but I think it's important to get the basic things right. I've already talked about a few strategies to link building for your website, BUT what's also equally important is how you get these links.

Anchor text basically just means the text you use for the link - the actual words that the url will direct you to. These typically would be your keywords that you have optimised for that particular page on your website. This is very often overlooked by many website owners - and there needs to be no more proof that this. That's an example of anchor text right there. I've used the word "this" but sent a completely different url in there. The link shows that the words "click here" give an organic number 1 listing in the SERPS to Adobe reader!



So anchor text linking is very important for gaining your links, but it's as equally important ON SITE. Avoid using links such as the words "next" or "following page" or "continue" - and try and really use the keywords on your website. If you have a natural web design and layout, you will be able to direct your users exactly where you want them to go, so it's just as easy to optimise your on-site links which will help slightly improve your position on the SERPs as well as letting the crawling robots know more about your site and it's structure.

Would you like to optimise your website? I offer affordable website optimisation in Barcelona and also Barcelona SEO Training in your company so you can take control of your website's destiny and start seeing improvements.

Link Building - Article Marketing

As I've mentioned on a few occasions, building links is one of the most important parts to a good SEO campaign.

One-way links to your site are also a great start to building your link arsenal, but can often be hard to attain. Link baiting is one clear way of going down this route, but if your site/blog is new then you can post something as controversial or challenging as you like but if next to no-one sees the post then it will never become viral. So there's a great way of obtaining one way links AND the possibility of generating even more from this source, too. Article marketing.



Article marketing is unique in that an article itself can become reprinted freely on any other website/blog, etc. BUT that you have two links to your site at the bottom of the article which always need to be re-printed along with the main body. So, if you write a good article about your niche, it might be re-printed on tens of other websites. If you write a great article, the viral aspect can earn you a lot of links - for free!

Now, some SEOs are announcing the early death of article marketing, with many sites allegedly using the nofollow attribute on your links. And there are now hundreds of article re-print sites offering this service. So my advice is to choose a handful of sites, and then track the links via your stats package (or Google Webmaster tools/Google analytics). Don't waste time writing an article and then trying to find all the possible sites you can - remember, google doesn't like duplicate content, so the vast amajority would be ignored anyway. The best idea is to write another article in that time, and build up your status as an expert in your field, which is great for branding and getting your name out there.

For more link building techniques and tips, contact me at Barcelona SEO - I'll be happy to discuss your website and help to plan a strategy together.

Google Website Optimiser

I've been fiddling around on a couple of sites with Google's Website Optimiser (or you might get "did you mean Google's website Optimizer") and thought I'd share a few findings.

First of all, I think it's a very, very valuable tool which can save you hundreds of Euros in testing and public opinion polls, etc. The idea is that you can create very similar pages to your website and then test them. You need to add a bit of javascript code to the test pages you want to run the tests on, and the website optimiser starts to compile a report.

There are 2 types of test you can do. A Simple A/B split test and Multi-variate testing which basically just means you test various different things on the page at the same time. The great thing about website optimiser is that you can test absolutely anything.

I'll give you an example of how an A/B split test can work. If you choose the goal page as your conversion page and make some drastic changes to your landing page from a Pay Per click campaign for example, you can track not only which ads are working for you, but which version of your home page is creating more conversions, too. It doesn't always have to be your home page either - you can literally fiddle around with any page on your website - even test run a completely new design.

Multi-variate tests are much more specific, and generally take a lot longer to give a good result. As with most experiments, it's important to be able to interpret the results. Google makes this very easy with a percentage of the possibility of beating the original test page. With the multi-variate testing, the interpretation of results is slightly more difficult but still great to see.

A small criticism which I've found. There must be something in the javascript that blocks the referrer stats in some of the website statistic programmes. I have a query open in Google groups and will post a fix if I get one!

For more details about SEO in Barcelona, or in-house SEO training in Barcelona please contact me.

Google's New Idea for Duplicate Content

Quite a lot of SEO's were getting excited about the news of Google's new canonical attribute. As far as I can work out, it's basically a way to tell the search engines about the origin of content which could be reproduced on your website, so as not to be penalised by duplicating content.

A strip of code is placed in the head of the html document to "re-direct" any messy urls (those with session id's, tracking info, or other figures and numbers) to a clean url. I think the idea around it, is to try and tidy up the web a little and stop producing duplicate content in SERPs.

I'm not exactly sure of the implications and long term benefits or disadvantages this might have, as it's obviously something very new, and can only be used within the same domain - you can't re-direct a page to another website. I'd be happy to hear any comments or ideas, too, regarding this move, so feel free to post.

For Website Optimisation in Barcelona and other online marketing, please contact me at Barcelona SEO

Follow Me or Not?

As I've previously mentioned, gaining links to your website is probably the most important off-site SEO strategy you can impliment to improve your rankings on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). However, simply adding a load of links to your site isn't the way to go.

SEO used to be simply the number of links or "votes" to your site would improve rankings, but with increased intricacies in the algorithms used by the search engines, this is now not only a possible waste of time, but also could be actually detrimental to your position.

The rise of vertical search means that links need to be chosen carefully, and if at all possible be relevant to your site or niche - what's the point of adding that link to the Thailand guest house if your website is all about London fashion? You get the point. This is all about "link juice" and every link from your site dilutes your authority and quality within the world wide web. Basically the more links you have leaving your site, the less quality the search engines assume it has - you're passing your "link juice" to another site. And if your site doesn't have many inbound links, then it's even worse, and your site is viewed as even less of an authority and could be labelled a "link farm" and even be excluded from search results. This would have to be on a huge scale and is not meant to scare any readers, it's just a big example to explain a little thing.

Google needed a way to fight these spam attacks on their algorithm, and so their Spam team decided in 2005 to introduce the nofollow attribute. This was originally introduced as a measure against blog spam, but was embraced by the whole web within a very short time and is now common. The basic idea is that you can add the no follow attribute to a link on your website, and the search engine will ignore any possible benefit to that site from yours. It doesn't ignore the link, but just does not pass on the "link juice" from your site.

So when do need to use nofollow? Well, maybe you have important information on your site to external pages, such as a list of books on amazon, for example. Well, you can nofollow the amazon links (they don't need your publicity) and you're still providing a service for your clients visiting your web.

I can offer you Barcelona SEO services for your company and website. Also, if you prefer, I can offer in-house SEO training in Barcelona. Contact me for more details.

How Many Googlebots Does it Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

After the recent Barcelona Search Congress in January, anyone would think that Barcelona is becoming the hub of all things Search!

Yesterday saw the start of WSDM 2009 - apparently we're supposed to read it "wisdom" guys - which is only the second, but hugely important ACM (Association for Computer Machinery) International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. OK, sorry for all those acronyms, there

Although very small scale as opposed tothe search congress, and held in the Auditorium of the Imagina Building, there were some fascinating things discussed on just day one.

Google's Jeff Dean kicked off the show (ok, well after the typical Spanish coffees, etc.) and literally wow-ed the audience with details of Google's infrastructure with regards search compared to 1999 and 2009.

Google now has 1000 times more search queries now than in 1999, so they also now have 1000 more computers, processors, etc. to tackle the problem. This has resulted in speedier repsonses (down to 200 miliseconds from 1000) and it's amazing to think that up to 1000 machines are consulted for a single search string!Perhaps the most important and impressive thing to note was that the new machines also crawl content much much faster (like 10,000 times faster) meaning that often SERPs change order within minutes of being shown - your position is never absolute until another full day or update, which is amazing.

For more information on website optimisation in Barcelona, please contact me at Barcelona SEO and I'll be happy to chat with you about your website.