The anchor text of a link is the readable portion; it only refers to the text you use, not the URL. For example, if you link to SEO SERVICES, you might write the link out as "SEO SERVICES" This makes “SEO SERVICES” the anchor text of the link. Search engine robots use anchor text to help determine what that page is about, and provide keywords to help other users find that page. As such, choosing specific anchor text is an important aspect of SEO.
First off let’s define anchor text. Anchor text is that portion of a hyperlink that is viewed by a user on a webpage (the clickable text). This is a most important off page factor to securing high rankings in Google is appropriate anchor text pointing to the specific page of your website that has been optimized to target that term for that keyword phrase.
SEO is
an ongoing process and, if you invest the necessary resources and time, it can
bring the expected benefits. You can grow your popularity and brand in the
online environment and, what’s most important for your business; it can increase
sales or obtain contracts for the services that you provide.
However,
this is not the only advantage that you can obtain through the SEO process. You
canmanage your online reputation,
a very important thing nowadays, considering the great development of social
networks and the amount of information you can learn about a person only by
searching their brand name on Google.
Here are 10 professional
tips for your online reputation management.
1. Create
A Presence On Any And All Relevant Web Properties
Your
company should already have Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts, at
minimum. If you’re in a highly competitive market and vertical, you may need to
be active on some additional social media sites, as well — there are dozens
available, some of which may be specific to your industry. For many B2B,
high-tech and/or professional types of businesses, having executives and
employees integrate with LinkedIn may be valuable. For visually-oriented
products, using Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr may be needed. And, most
businesses will benefit from some number of videos shared through sites such as
YouTube and Vimeo.
2. Don’t
Neglect Your Social Media Accounts
It’s
important to build out your social media accounts. Merely having a Twitter,
Facebook and Google+ account/page for your business is insufficient — you need
to develop your audience on them, too. With ongoing development, you can build
your social media accounts in order to interact with customers and to increase
your influence and engagement scores. If you don’t do this, those accounts may
not be strong enough to outrank the postings if someone begins to post negative
things. While we don’t know precisely how Google and Bing may assess the
strength of social media accounts, you can use some independent scoring
utilities to assess whether you’re achieving growth. Two of the better-known
ones are Klout and Kred.
3. Consider Your
Brands and Products
You
may need to build out online materials and social profiles for more than just
your company name. If you have brand and product names beyond your company
name, you likely ought to develop content to rank for those names as well. You
may need to develop websites, web pages, social media profiles and collateral
materials just to claim and reserve each brand name.
4. Protect
Individuals Associated With The Business
Develop
a strong social media presence for your founders’, owners’, or executives’ names,
particularly if they are distinctive. As I described above, keeping a low
online profile to preserve your privacy just leaves you wide open for any
drive-by defamers! There are quite a few businesses where the company’s
identity is fairly entangled with their executives, and a solid reputation
management strategy is vital for these. Consumers often search by name for
doctors, dentists, and lawyers (to name a few), so create collateral to rank
for these individuals if they don’t already have any.
5. Implement
Authorship Where Applicable
I
declared Authorship to be my top marketing tactic of 2013, and it’s still a
significant advantage when done properly. This is primarily for businesses
where a founder/proprietor is closely associated with the business’s identity.
Google requires authors to be individuals; thus, the author tag must be
associated with an individual Google+ profile, not with a business page. Using
the author tag assumes you’ll be doing some ongoing publishing of articles or
blog posts over time or else it’s not worthwhile — which leads us to the next
point.
6. Blog
I’m
serious! I’ve called blogging a secret weapon for local SEO because it helps
with a site’s rankings on good keywords (if done properly) and provides fodder
for one’s social media accounts. For reputation purposes, it not only can rank
for your name, it can give you a solid “home court” ground where you can
directly respond to any major assertions made about your company if necessary.
7. Listen
When
responding to online complaints or bad reviews, seriously consider that there
may be some weaknesses in your process that need to be addressed — particularly
if you get frequent negative feedback about a specific thing. Remember the
adage that “the customer is always right”? Don’t be inflexible; come up with a
creative way to give customers what they’re wanting without creating friction.
I’ve seen business processes that just seemed dumb, or service fees that just
made customers feel like they’ve been gouged. Just because you can pressure
people into paying more doesn’t mean that you should. Consider that you could
be driving existing or potential customers into the arms of your competitor.
The extra money you make on that annoying fee could be cancelled out by
business lost from those who see numerous complaints about it online.
8.
Apologize
If
you or your company messes up, fails or otherwise does something wrong, own up
to it — and make a genuine apology to those who have been affected. Being real
and transparent in apologizing can go far toward diffusing a situation and
moving the process along toward reconciliation or, at least, toward making a
crisis situation come to a close. If you do it, make sure the apology is
authentic — don’t do one of those weaselly, “I’m sorry you allowed my actions
to make you feel bad” statements that are disingenuous nonsense. Also, try to
make amends in some way, unconditionally.
9. Don’t
Get Into Online Arguments
It’s
very easy to get sucked into this — but even if you’re technically right, you
might lose out overall by just coming across as petty, harsh or unprofessional.
Worse yet, you might actually be wrong… and once you get emotionally riled up,
you could end up saying and doing things that damage your reputation. (For a
dramatic example, read about the epic Facebook meltdown of a husband-wife
restaurateur team.) The best approach is to diffuse situations and take
communications offline to try to reconcile. Be nicer in your online
interactions than you even think you need to be. Your professional responses
may win more customers than being “right” in an online disagreement. Feel
yourself getting drawn into escalating conflict? Walk away from your computer.
10. Make
The Investment
Reputation
development requires an investment, both in time and money. Most small, local
businesses are either ignoring proactive reputation management or they are
doing it themselves, on a shoestring, and on an as-needed and
as-they-have-time-to-do-it basis. I’d argue that social media and proactive
reputation management should be considered vital elements, not nice-to-haves.
Further, if you don’t have experience in interacting with online communities,
doing it yourself may not be good enough or may exacerbate any issues that can
arise. So, make the investment — and if you don’t have the time to do it, don’t
know how, or just aren’t getting the job done, hire someone to handle it for
you.
As marketers, helping search engines answer that basic question is one of our most important tasks. Search engines can't read pages like humans can, so we incorporatestructureandcluesas towhat our content means. This helps provide therelevanceelement of search engine optimization that matches queries to useful results.
Understanding the techniques used to capture this meaning helps to provide better signals as to what our content relates to, and ultimately helps it to rank higher in search results. This post explores a series ofon-page techniquesthat not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.
While Google doesn't reveal the exact details of its algorithm, over the years we've collected evidence from interviews, research papers, US patent filings and observations from hundreds of search marketers to be able to explore these processes. Special thanks to Bill Slawski, whose posts onSEO By the Sealed to much of the research for this work.
As you read, keep in mind these are onlysomeof the ways in which Google could determine on-page relevancy, and they aren't absolute law! Experimenting on your own is always the best policy.
We'll start with the simple, and move to the more advanced.
1. Keyword Usage
In the beginning, there were keywords. All over the page.
The concept was this: If your page focused on a certain topic, search engines would discover keywords in important areas. These locations included the title tag, headlines, alt attributes of images, and throughout in the text. SEOs helped their pages rank by placing keywords in these areas.
Even today, we start with keywords, and it remains the most basic form of on-page optimization.
Most on-page SEO tools still rely on keyword placement to grade pages, and while it remains a good place to start, research shows itsinfluence has fallen.
While it's important to ensure your page at a bare minimum contains the keywords you want to rank for, it is unlikely that keyword placement by itself will have much of an influence on your page's ranking potential.
2. TF-IDF
It's not keyword density, it'sterm frequency–inverse document frequency(TF-IDF).
Google researchersrecently describedTF-IDF as "long used to index web pages" and variations of TF-IDF appear as a component in several well-knownGoogle patents.
TF-IDF doesn't measure how often a keyword appears, but offers a measurement ofimportanceby comparing how often a keyword appearscompared to expectationsgathered from a larger set of documents.
If we compare the phrases "basket" to "basketball player" inGoogle's Ngram viewer, we see that "basketball player" is a more rare, while "basket" is more common. Based on this frequency, we might conclude that "basketball player" issignificanton a page that contains that term, while the threshold for "basket" remains much higher.
For SEO purposes, when we measure TF-IDF'scorrelation with higher rankings, it performs only moderately better than individual keyword usage. In other words, generating a high TF-IDF score by itself generally isn't enough to expect much of an SEO boost. Instead, we should think of TF-IDF as an important component of other more advanced on-page concepts.
3. Synonyms and Close Variants
With over 6 billion searches per day, Google has a wealth of information to determine what searchersactually meanwhen typing queries into a search box. Google's own research shows thatsynonymsactually play a role in up to70% of searches.
To solve this problem, search engines possess vast corpuses ofsynonymsandclose variantsfor billions of phrases, which allows them to match content to queries even when searchers use different words than your text. An example is the querydog pics,which can mean the same thing as:
• Dog Photos • Pictures of Dogs • Dog Pictures • Canine Photos • Dog Photographs
On the other hand, the queryDog Motion Picturemeans something else entirely, and it's important for search engines to know the difference.
From an SEO point of view, this means creating content usingnatural languageandvariations, instead of employing the same strict keywords over and over again.
Using variations of your main topics can also add deeper semantic meaning and help solve the problem ofdisambiguation, when the same keyword phrase can refer to more than one concept.Plantandfactorytogether might refer to a manufacturing plant, whereasplantandshrubrefer to vegetation.
Today, Google'sHummingbird algorithmalso uses co-occurrence to identify synonyms for query replacement.
Under Hummingbird, co-occurrence is used to identify words that may be synonyms of each other in certain contexts while following certain rules according to which, the selection of a certain page in response to a query where such a substitution has taken place has a heightened probability.
Whereyou place your words on a page is often as important as the words themselves.
Each web page is made up of different parts—headers, footers, sidebars, and more. Search engines have long worked to determine the most important part of a given page. Both Microsoft and Google holdseveralpatentssuggesting content in the more relevant sections of HTML carry more weight.
Content located in the main body text likely holds more importance than text placed in sidebars or alternative positions. Repeating text placed in boilerplate locations, or chrome, runs the risk of being discounted even more.
Page segmentation becomes significantly more important as we move toward mobile devices, which often hide portions of the page. Search engines want to serve users the portion of your pages that are visible and important, so text in these areas deserves the most focus.
To take it a step further,HTML5offers additionsemantic elementssuch as ,
5. Semantic Distance and Term Relationships
When talking about on-page optimization,semantic distancerefers to therelationshipsbetween different words and phrases in the text. This differs from thephysicaldistance between phrases, and focuses on how terms connect within sentences, paragraphs, and other HTML elements.
How do search engines know that "Labrador" relates to "dog breeds" when the two phrases aren't in the same sentence?
Search engines solve this problem by measuring thedistancebetween different words and phrases within different HTML elements. The closer the concepts are semantically, the closer the concepts may be related. Phrases located in thesame paragraphare closer semantically than phrases separated by several blocks of text.
Now is a good time to mention Schema.org.Schema markupprovides a way tosemantically structureportions of your text in a manner thatexplicitlydefine relationship between terms.
The great advantage schema offers is that it leaves no guesswork for the search engines. Relationships are clearly defined. The challenge is it requires webmasters to employ special markup. So far, studies showlow adoption. The rest of the concepts listed here can work onanypage containing text.
6. Co-occurrence and Phrase-Based Indexing
Up to this point, we've discussed individual keywords and relationships between them. Search engines also employ methods of indexing pages based oncomplete phrases, and also ranking pages on the relevance of those phrases.
What's most interesting about this process is not how Google determines the important phrases for a webpage, but how Google can use these phrases torank a webpage based on how relevant they are.
Using the concept ofco-occurrence, search engines know that certain phrases tend topredict other phrases. If your main topic targets "John Oliver," this phrase often co-occurs with other phrases like "late night comedian," "Daily Show," and "HBO." A page that contains these related terms is more likely to be about "John Oliver" than a page that doesn't contain related terms.
Add to thisincoming linksfrom pages with related, co-occurring phrases and you've given your page powerful contextual signals.
7. Entity Salience
Looking to the future, search engines are exploring ways of using relationships between entities, not just keywords, to determine topical relevance.
One technique, published as a Google research paper, describes assigning relevance throughentity salience.
Entity salience goes beyond traditional keyword techniques, like TF-IDF, for finding relevant terms in a document by leveragingknown relationshipsbetween entities. An entity is anything in the document that is distinct and well defined.
The stronger an entity's relationship to other entities on the page, the more significant that entity becomes.
In the diagram above, an article contains the topicsIron Man,Tony Stark,Pepper PottsandScience Fiction. The phrase"Marvel Comics"has a strong entity relationship to all these terms. Even it only appears once, it's likelysignificantin the document.
On the other hand, even though the phrase "Cinerama" appears multiple times (because the film showed there), this phrase has weaker entity relationships, and likely isn't as significant.
Practical tips for better on-page optimization
As we transition from keyword placement to more advanced practices of topic targeting, it's actually easy to incorporate these concepts into our content. While most of us don't have the means available to calculate semantic relationships and entity occurrences, there are a number of simple steps we can take when crafting optimized content:
Keyword research forms your base.Even though individual keywords themselves are no longer enough to form the foundation of your content, everything begins with good keyword research. You want to knowwhatterms you are targeting, therelative competitionaround those keywords, and thepopularityof those terms. Ultimately, your goal is to connect your content with the very keywords people type and speak into the search box.
Research around topics and themes.Resist researching single keywords, and instead move towards exploring yourkeyword themes. Examine the secondary keywordsrelatedto each keyword. When people talk about your topic, what words do they use to describe it? What are the properties of your subject? Use these supporting keyword phrases as cast members to build content around your central theme.
When crafting your content, answer as many questions as you can.Good content answers questions, and semantically relevant content reflects this. A top ranking for any search query means the search engine believes your content answers the question best. As you structure your content around topics and themes, make sure youdeservethe top ranking by answering the questions and offering a user experience better than the competition.
Use natural language and variations.During your keyword research process, it's helpful to identify other common ways searchers refer to your topic, and include these in your content when appropriate.Semantic keyword researchis often invaluable to this process.
Place your important content in the most important sections. Avoid footers and sidebars for important content. Don't try to fool search engines with fancy CSS or JavaScript tricks. Your most important content should go in the places where it is most visible and accessible to readers.
Structure your content appropriately.Headers, paragraphs, lists, and tables all provide structure to content so that search engines understand your topic targeting. A clear webpage contains structure similar to a good university paper. Employ proper introductions, conclusions, topics organized into paragraphs, spelling and grammar, and cite your sources properly.
At the end of the day, we don't need a super computer to make our content better, or easier to understand. If we writelike humans for humans, our content goes a long way in becoming optimized for search engines. What are your best tips for on-page SEO and topic targeting?
SEO can be split up into two separate categories; On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.
Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc.
In today’s post we will be looking specifically at Off-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways to increase your page rankings on search engines.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation
1. Social Networking Sites
Social Networking is bigger than ever these days! Sometimes known as “Online Reputation Management”,
getting involved with social media sites is the fundamental step with
which you begin to advertise, market and build your online reputation
within your niche.
You need to sign up to the most popular social networking sites, such as; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+,
etc., and create yourself a profile of your own. This allows you to
extend your online network of contacts, to connect and interact with
your friends, to share things with each other, and most importantly
promote your website/blog and help build your online reputation.
2. Blogging
Blogging is one of the best ways to
promote your website online! By writing a blog for your website, you
give a reason for visitors to keep returning to your site and keep up to
date with your latest posts. It also helps search engines to crawl
your site more frequently, as they have to update your latest blog post
entries, which ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine
results pages (SERPs).
You need to produce and include lots of unique content for your blog, such as; Infographics, Top Lists, How To…Tutorials, Viral Videos,
etc. Try to remember to be clear and concise in what you are trying to
convey to your readers within your blog posts, don’t waffle.
To help you promote your blog, submit it to niche blog directories and blog search engines. (See below)
If you’re not very good at writing content for your blog, then you could always hire a guest blogger
for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so
that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view.
3. Blog Marketing
Post comments on other blogs within the
same niche as yours, which allow you to add a link in the comments
section. These links can then be crawled by search engines, helping to
point them towards your site. These blogs are commonly referred to as “Do-Follow” Blogs (Just like ours, where you can comment below!).
4. Forum Marketing
Find forums online that are related to
your sites niche and get involved within that community. Reply to
threads, answer peoples questions, offer advice, etc. This all helps to
build up your reputation as someone who is an expert within that niche.
Try to use “Do-Follow” Forums so that you can include a link to your site within your signature, which helps search engines crawl your site.
5. Search Engine Submission
Search engines will eventually find your
site online, but that can take a while. To speed everything up, you
should submit your website to the most popular search engines like
Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
6. Directory Submission
Many people may say that directory
submission is dead! I believe that it isn’t as you are increasing the
likely hood of people seeing your website. It is purely based on how
effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we
are choosing the category for submission. You could submit to general
directories, but for maximum effect, you are better off submitting to niche directories. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it.
7. Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is another great way
of promoting your website. Submit your latest blog posts and pages to
the most popular bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious,
Reddit, etc. Search engines really like these types of sites because the
content on these sites is updated very frequently.
You should be very careful while doing
this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to
broadcast your news on a wide area network. This may increase your
website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.
8. Link Baiting
Link baiting is another popular way of
promoting your site. If you produce a really popular unique post for
your site, then other people may want to link to it. Perhaps you have
copied/published another website’s content on your site, don’t forget to
place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your
content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to
increase your link popularity.
9. Photo Sharing
If you have used any of your own photos
or images on your site, then you can share then on many of the major
photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc. Other
people will be able to see them and comment on them, hopefully following
a link to your site.
10. Video Marketing
Just like photo sharing, if you have any
videos that you have used on your site, then you can submit them to
sites like; YouTube, Vimeo, etc. allowing people to find your content in
other ways.
11. Business Reviews
Write reviews about others businesses or
ask your friends/clients to write a review of your business in major
business review sites like RateitAll, Shvoong, Kaboodle, Stylefeeder,
etc.
12. Local Listings
Depending on your site’s niche, you might
find that listing in local directories may be useful. You may have a
website promoting your local business, therefore instead of going global
and facing huge competition, listing your website locally, so that
search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content, will
be much better. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit
your website to sites like; Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow
Pages, etc.
13. Article Submission
If you write your articles yourself, then you can submit them to popular article directory
sites like; Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, etc. This can help drive
traffic to your site, whilst you can also gain some links to your site
from other people (though it’s usually a slower process).
14. Social Shopping Network
If you run an e-commerce website, then a good strategy for advertising and branding your products for free is to submit then to online shopping networks.
By submitting your products to sites like; Google Product Search, Yahoo
Online Shopping, MSN Online Shopping, and other major social shopping
network sites like Kaboodle, Style Feeder, etc. then you increase the
likelihood of people finding the products that you are selling.
15. Answer Questions
You can actively participate in answering
questions on sites like Yahoo Answers. By answering and asking relevant
questions on your site niche, you help to build up your reputation as
someone that is an expert in your chosen field. You can place a link to
your website in the source section if necessary so that people can
easily find your site. If you don’t spam, this is another great way to
increase your link popularity.