How to Use Anchor Text to Improve Site Rankings

Most of us see anchor text in just about everything we read online nowadays. It is that visible text on a page of content that has the hyperlink hooked to it. In the best case scenario, the anchor text will link to a page that is completely relevant to the text itself.

For instance, if you wanted to link the words, “Unity Sand”, ideally you would link them to a page on a web site that sells wedding sand. If you wanted to link, kitchen remodel Utah, then you would link it to the kitchen remodeling page of a Utah construction website.

Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, examine this text in order to determine what the subject of the linked-to document is. This makes it extremely important for your hyperlink to be an accurate description of the page it goes to.

Let’s say you want to write an article about mountain bike trips and you want to place some links in the article that will send users to your web site on mountain biking tours. The most effective way to do this is pick a page on your site…for instance, the page on White Rim mountain biking. Next, write a sentence or paragraph in the article that says something about mountain biking and link those words to the page.

As a bonus, the term “mountain bike trips” is on your list of keywords, so it will be doubly effective here.

When the google bots crawl your page they will determine that your web page on White Rim mountain biking is a relevant site for the link “mountain biking”. If they find that numerous sites believe a particular page is relevant to a set of terms, then the rankings for that page improve even more.

Warning: If the page is NOT relevant to mountain biking, then this can hurt your rankings. It’s very important to make sure it does seem relevant to both human visitors and search engine bots.

Your anchor text should give the reader an appropriate description of the content found at the link’s destination. Web site owners once used the words “click here” or something similar in their text. However, sites are moving away from that practice and using specific terms. Check out the two samples below:

Good:

“My business phone system works well and is affordable.”

The words “business phone system” link to a specific page on a web site that offers economical phone systems for small business.

Bad:

“We just got new chopper sunglasses for the whole bike club.”

The words “chopper sunglasses” link to a page on the company return policy.

In the above example, it would be much better to link the words “chopper sunglasses” to that specific web page. The more sites that believe the page is appropriate to the link, the higher the page will rank.

Remember that anchor text holds significant weight with search engines. It does affect your page and/or site rankings. It’s important to use anchor text correctly though or it can actually hurt your site rankings.

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The Effective Use of Meta Tags for SEO

Keyword meta tags are tags that are specifically written for search engines and are not visible to website users. It used to be an important aspect of SEO, where search engines based search results on the keyword tags. It was also used to direct users to the right webpage, even if they used misspelled search words.

However, keyword meta tags have fallen by the wayside in terms of their ability to affect rankings as search engine algorithms became more sophisticated. Nowadays, search engines can “know” the topic and coverage of the webpage just by looking at the contents. Search engines are also able to automatically correct any misspellings. Thus, you have the option of using them or simply doing away with meta tags.

Don’t:

• Use keywords that don’t appear in the page.
• Use the same meta keyword tag for all the webpages

Do:

• Decide whether to use them or not. If you decide not to, simply remove them from the website.
• Ensure that the meta tags used also appear somewhere in the webpage.
• When using meta tags, use 250 characters or less.
• Use unique keywords in the meta tags for each webpage. Use variations of a keyword.

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO needs

Maximize your Utah SEO or Salt Lake City SEO efforts by seeking help from experts. Adaptivity Pro provides great value services to help you strengthen your presence on the Internet. Adaptivity Pro specializes not only in Search Engine Optimization but also in web design and development, as well as in Pay-Per-Click Management, Social Media Marketing and E-Commerce Marketing. Adaptivity Pro has worked with numerous establishments in Salt Lake City and the rest of the Utah area to create great value services for your business.

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SEO Best Practices: Meta Description Tags that Generate Results

Meta Description tags do two things: give search engines an indication of a webpage’s contents and convince internet searchers to visit that specific webpage. Usually, the meta description tag is also what is shown in the search engine results page. This tag is located at HTML code’s Head area.

When a user makes a search which matches your keywords, the search engine results page will display the website tag (in bold) and then the first couple of sentences from your meta description tag. Google (as well as other search engines) usually displays the description with the matching keywords in bold.

Although meta description tags do not factor into Google’s ranking algorithm (except for advanced searches), meta description tags are a great way of marketing your website in that you are enticing Internet searchers to click-through to the webpage. It is important that you write compelling and readable meta description tags so as to improve your click-through rates for a given webpage.

Here are some tips to remember to create meta description tags that produce results:

Don’t:

• Leave the description tag blank. All your webpages should have meta description tags.
• Use the same meta description tags for all your webpages.
• Have a meta description tag that only contains a string of keywords.
• Have a meta description tag that is not relevant to the contents of the webpage.
• Write a meta description tag only for search engines.
• Use non-alpha/numeric characters, especially double quotation marks, as these may cut off the description in the search engine results page.

Do:

• Use complete and easy to read sentences.
• Place your description tag directly under the <head> and <title> tags.
• Incorporate the keywords naturally.
• Write for both search engines and human readers. This will improve click-throughs as you interest readers with your content.
• Keep your description under 250 characters. In fact, 150 to 160 characters would be ideal.
• Accurately describe the webpage.
• Keep descriptions unique for every webpage and add variations to the keywords.
• Include brand and product names as well as services you provide.
• Use the 3^rd person form (they, them, their, etc.)

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO needs

Let Adaptivity Pro help you create meta description tags that produce results. Adaptivity Pro is made up of Utah SEO and Salt Lake City SEO experts who have copywriting experience. Adaptivity Pro also specializes Utah Web design and other great-value services such as Pay-Per-Click Management, Social Media Marketing and E-Commerce Marketing.

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HTML Coding Cleanup: Maximizing your Visibility

Keep it simple, sweetheart!

That piece of advice has done a lot of people good. And it may also prove helpful to you as you consider cleaning up the HTML coding for your website. Although HTML code is “behind the scenes”, never seen by your readers, it still has an effect on the way your website works. You see, you will need to do periodic clean-ups of your HTML codes, as these tend to get cluttered over time due to updates and changes made to a web page. As a result, page load times slow down, the webpage becomes less efficient, and ultimately, it can drive down your search results ranking.

The more ungainly and cluttered your website HTML is (where it is bloated with unnecessary or even sloppy HTML code), the harder the time a search engine spider will have “looking” at the content on your webpages. The search engine spiders may decide that they have gone far enough and stop looking at your page. This can cause you to lose precious points towards your site ranking.

Having clean HTML helps in drastically improving your ranking in Search Engine Results Pages. Clean and uncluttered HTML makes the search engine spiders find and index your webpages more easily. It also gives them an easier time to navigate between webpages of your site. Search engines look into text, keywords (with keywords up to a certain density percentage), links and link titles or tags (title tags, alt tags and H1-5 tags).

Below are a few pointers on keeping your HTML in good working order:

Don’t:

• Have unnecessary HTML comments.
• Have browser errors in your HTML code.
• Have files or graphics that are missing.
• Have dead links.

Do:

• Keep all css code in external .cs files.
• Keep all javascript in external .js files.
• Keep all javascript in external .js files.
• Validate your website against w3c standards and fix critical errors.
• Ensure you are using valid css code.
• Use div tags instead of tables if possible.
• Use server-side include files rather than browser based scripts for repeating HTML.

For a quick fix on HTML code and CSS code, try using http://validator.w3.org. Although not all errors (with regards to SEO or online marketing) will be discovered, some 10% of these will appear so that you can make the necessary fixes.

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO needs

Adaptivity Pro is your partners in helping you formulate and implement SEO strategies that will help improve your search engine results ranking. Adaptivity Pro specializes in Utah SEO and Utah Web design (particularly in ensuring clean and efficient HTML coding). It also provides valued Internet marketing services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing, Pay-Per-Click Management and much more.

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Copywriting for SEO

The information highway zooms by at breakneck speed! Really, there is relevant (and sometimes non-relevant) content to be had for almost every topic under the sun! Type your keywords in Google or any other search engine and you will find myriads of things people have to say about every imaginable topic.

It’s because more and more, people are realizing the importance of web copy in Search Engine Optimization. If you want to strengthen your website’s presence on the Internet, if you want people to find you more easily, providing good copy for the web is one key strategy.

Done properly, you can enjoy increases in your search engine results, in your website traffic, as well as in the number of people calling or e-mailing you about your products or services.

Here are some guidelines when drafting copy for SEO purposes:

Don’t:

• Write overly long articles that are only made up of text bunched together into paragraphs. (Who wants to read that?)
• Write only for search engines, where your content is not only uninteresting to read but is barely coherent for human readers.
• Make a claim without evidence. Saying that “we’re the best” without showing how provides your website with no value whatsoever.
• Limit yourself with a particular schema. Just because a particularly relevant topic does not fit into your existing topics/subtopics does not mean you don’t have to write about it. Do write about topics that are valid for your industry.
• Use technical jargon that the average reader won’t understand. When you are using an Acronym for the first time, give its complete name.

Do:

• Incorporate keywords so that they read naturally in the article.
• Do some branding. Incorporate product names, the services you provide, manufacturer names, etc. in your content.
• Back-up your claims with the truth. Provide evidence of research, or specific examples.
• Write using bullet points, subheadings and graphics. Remember, people don’t read your articles word for word. More likely, they will just scan through the article. Make your articles easier on the eyes with the use of the above elements.
• Use the write length – 1 to 2 pages will suffice.
• Write for human readers, as well as for search engines. You should have calls to action that readers will be invited to follow.
• Write on a personal level. Avoid writing in the third person, instead, use “you”, “your” or “we”, “ours”.
• Point your readers to other pages on your website if a particular topic is mentioned in the main text.
• Keep your content relevant and interesting – make people want to read what you have to say. Don’t just write corporate “fluff”.
• Be sure to make regular updates with your content. (Update at least once or twice a year, or more often, if possible.)
• Appeal to your reader’s interest and emotions, rather than logic.
• Use your content to provide solutions to a client’s or a reader’s problem. Give the “how-tos”; do not simply say you are the solution.

One way of enriching your Internet presence is by starting a blog about your website. Be sure that this blog is not just about “praise releases” of your business can also use your blogger identity to create networks within the blogging community., but should have interesting, relevant and readable content for your readers. You

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO Copywriting needs

Quality content does not come easily. It may take a lot of hard work, so we suggest that you let professional wordsmiths do the hard work for you. Adaptivity Pro is your premier source of Utah SEO and Utah Copywriting Services. Adaptivity Pro also specializes in Utah Web Design, Pay-Per-Click Management, E-mail Marketing and other valuable services for your business.

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Writing SEO-Friendly Press Releases

One excellent way to provide regular updates to your website is to have press releases about key events in your company. You can also distribute these press releases to other online PR distribution channels.

When writing press releases submitted online, it is important to remember to integrate keywords that are relevant to the press release. Second, you should be able to use the proper internal linking methods to maximize your SEO results.

Well-written and SEO-friendly press releases provide the following benefits:

-          Increased visibility on the Internet

-          The opportunity to get backlinks from credible news sites. Links from these sites are considered valuable as it has an impact on your search results ranking.

-          The opportunity to rank in Google or Yahoo News (for the keywords used)

-          Potential to have media coverage (if your story is interesting enough)

-          Give readers information about yourself

When writing SEO-friendly press releases, remember the following tips:

Don’t:

• Use technical jargon.
• Write boring, uninteresting copy. Who would want to read it?
• Link the press release only to your front page. Instead, link important keywords to relevant pages within your website.

Do:

• Use keywords that people use to search for your products or services online. For one, this will make your press release more relevant to readers and editors (who may be thinking about distributing your release). It can also make your press release more SEO-friendly.
• For online versions of your press release, be sure to use links. Link a relevant sentence (covering a particular product or service) directly to a page in your website. Readers can click on this link to know more about the product or service.
• Distribute your press release to multiple online outlets.
• Put your keywords in bold.
• Work to capture the reader’s interest in the first 250 words.
• Write your press release in the third person.
• Provide newsworthy content.

Here are some PR distribution channels you can use to distribute your press release:

-          http://www.prweb.com

-          http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

-          http://www.prleap.com

-          http://www.webwire.com

-          http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

-          http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml

-          http://www.przoom.com

-          http://www.marketwire.com

-          http://www.prnewswire.com

-          http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home

-          http://www.express-press-release.com

-          http://www.pr.com/press-releases

Some of these are free sites while some are paid ones.

Adaptivity Pro: Your Press Release Copywriter

Adaptivity Pro has a team of expert copywriters at your disposal to help you craft SEO-friendly press releases. Adaptivity Pro also specializes in Utah SEO, Utah Web design and other web services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing and Pay-Per-Click Management.

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Key Analytic Metrics for Title Tags

Are your SLC SEO efforts working? One important SEO item that has the biggest impact with the shortest amount of time would be title tags.  Title tags give search engines an indication of the contents of a particular webpage. When the search engines “read” this page, they will make a comparison between the title tag and the page’s content (including headings and meta data). This is to ensure that the title tag is indeed relevant to the page and is an accurate representation of the webpage’s content and theme.

From the reader’s point of view, title tags are also important since this is the first thing that the users see in the search engine results. It will help them decide whether to click on to your webpage or move on to the next entry.

To measure the effectiveness of your title tags, here are six metrics to track:

1. 1. Conversions. How many people are filling out your online requests/calls to action? How many people are making phone calls to inquire about your products or services? How many people are subscribing to your newsletter or invitation for content downloads? Conversions give a good indication of how well your campaign is working. Tracking conversions will also help you identify the specific demographic of people who are responding to you.
2. 2. Visitors. How many people are coming to your website? This not only gives an indication of your online marketing efforts, but also your overall marketing efforts (advertising, going on tradeshows, distributing press releases, etc.).
3. 3. Bounce rate. How many people are going to your site and leave without clicking the other pages? This can give a strong indication of the quality of the traffic you get. If your website is not interesting enough for them to want to know more or if your website does not actually give them what they’re looking for, the readers who visit your website will immediately leave. Thus, having a lower bounce rate is good news.
4. 4. Time on site. How much time are people spending on your site, on the average? It indicates the interest level of your visitors and whether they find the information you present relevant to their needs. If they are “sticking” to your website, chances are, they are reading about information that is interesting and important to them. (However, this can also indicate that the user is having trouble finding the information he needs.). One factor that turns off readers is a slow site load time. People get frustrated about slow loading times and leave the page (sometimes, even without getting to see the landing page).
5. 5. Top Content. This provides you the information of what visitors are looking for in your website, which webpages they are reading and what webpages are more likely to elicit calls or contact from your readers.
6. 6. Keywords. This shows you the keywords your readers used to find your website. This will give you more insight on your customers or visitors as you learn the phrases they are using, the things they are looking for, and so on.

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO needs

Adaptivity Pro has a team of expert copywriters at your disposal to help you craft SEO-friendly press releases. Adaptivity Pro also specializes in Utah SEO, Utah Web design and other web services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing and Pay-Per-Click Management.

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The Three Main Components of SEO

There are really three main core components to SEO that are easily categorized and have their own unique difficulties, challenges, and strategies.  Those who understand these three core components well can begin on basic seo projects inching their way up to advanced seo strategies.

1.  SEO Friendly HTML

The html of your website is very important for search engines.  Editing HTML is the most ‘easy’ of the three components in my opinion, takes  the least amount of time, and is the only seo component that actually has some closure at some point in time.  The key focus on the HTML is to make sure it is SEO-friendly; but what does that mean?  More often than not it means fixing HTML items that are actually hurting your SEO strategy rather than helping.  The most common issues I see are too much javascript, a flash-only site, weak title tags and meta descriptions, use of graphical text in headers rather than HTML text, poor setup of navigation elements, empty alt-tags, spamming or trying to trick the search engines, very slow load time (large graphics are usually the culprit), and more.  The good thing with ‘fixing’ your HTML for SEO purposes is that once its done you don’t have to worry about it too much except for a few extra minutes when you add new pages to your website.  This step usually requires an SEO expert who has HTML knowledge and maybe a specified HTML programmer or web developer if necessary.

2.  Content for Search Engines AND Visitors

After you have patched up your HTML the next step is to ensure you have enough useful information/content/copy on your website.  You should note the emphasis on ‘enough’ and ‘useful’.  If you only have a three page website with a few paragraphs yet you offer hundreds of different products or services how would you expect the search engines to really understand what your website is about?  Once you have identified the core content your targe audience is seeking make sure it is put up on your website.  After that stage the door opens up uto endless possibilities of methods you can produce relevant and useful information for your current and future clients.  Some simple ideas are adding a blog to your website, adding a press release or news section, setting up a FAQ, having a client testimonials page, have a photo gallery with a description of each photo, post reviews of other products or services that are relevant to the industry you are in, setup a monthly industry newsletter, and more.  Content development should never really end unless you start to get thousands upon thousands of pages which most people do not achieve easily. This stage will involve an SEO expert and some good copywriters or strategists.

3.  Link Building

Link building is probably the most critical and overlooked strategy of SEO.  It is also the most difficult and avoided because of its difficulty to achieve.  You have total control over your HTML and copy on your website; you can update and add those to your hearts content.  However this is not the case with incoming links to your website.  You have no control over who links to you and how they link to you; unless you happen to own some other websites.  There are  many different strategies to gain links to your website and the most successful is link baiting; but also the most difficult to attain.  Link baiting is creating something so noteworthy, sought after, or impressive that other people link to it from their websites or blogs naturally – without you even knowing it.  Other methods of link building include directory submissions, viral  video distribution, commenting on blogs, buying links, link trading, social media bookmarking, etc.  This is the most difficult stage of SEO and  also never seems to end, I have not found a website yet that has ‘too’ many links (unless they are bad ones)~

SEO Components Summary

Remember to focus on HTML, Content, and Link Building and your SEO campaign should be successful.  Ignoring one of these three components can hold you back from your true potential to success.  I recommend tackling them in that order (easiest to hardest) and focusing on seo copywriting and link building on a regular basis after the HTML is squared away.

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Podcast Transcription Services Reviewed

Getting your podcasts transcribed into text can work out well for SEO and for those readers who don’t want to have audio enabled on their computer and would prefer reading. We found three lower-cost transcription services and tried them out with three different podcasts from my work. The purpose of us putting the podcasts on our blog in text format was strictly for search engine optimization purposes. As a sidenote the first day we put up our first podcast the traffic to our blog increased by 20% over the next week for searches landing on that podcast transcription.

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SEO Friendly Footers

This is an SEO strategy I used last week that takes less than five minutes to implement and can have a very positive result in regards to rankings in search engines.

The footer on my employer’s company website contained a copyright statement and sometimes some other links. Some websites have a two line footer where one line has links and the other has only to the copyright. Adding a company description to your footer is an easy way to implement an seo strategy that is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. Here is the example:

Previous footer: © 2007 Twelve Horses

New SEO-Friendly Footer: © Copyright 2007 Twelve Horses – A Web Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization Company in Reno & Utah

It usually works best when you have the text-only portion of the footer fit on one line. Here is why this is useful to SEO:

1. Our website is focused on providing web design, web development, seo or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services. Although this is a very long list sometimes you have to pick and choose what you can fit in a footer. The above example ensures that every single page of the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This will help the search engines recognize that our website is related to those keywords since they appear on every webpage. This SEO strategy not only assists search engines in recognizing the services we provide but also educates human web visitors as well. If a website visitor can not determine what our website offers they general do one of two actions: leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this company description in the footer ensures that if they do glance at the footer they will be able to know what the website is about without having to click to another page.

2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah‘ in the description. We have our main office in Reno, Nevada with a secondary office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets the search engines know what geographic area our website provides web services in. You may be wondering why the footer contains Reno (a city) and Utah (a state). Through some keyword research it was discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]’ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]’, possibly because Salt Lake City is too long and time-consuming to type and ‘Utah’ only has one major metropolitan area which is Salt Lake City. On the other hand the state of Nevada has several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are spread out from each other. From keyword research we discovered citizens of Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are in compared to just ‘Nevada [keyword]’. This also provides website visitors information on the geographic area the company is based in by glancing at the footer.

I hope this information was useful.

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