The Rank Magic Blog

SEO Tip: Anchor Text On Internal Links

February 22, 2009 ::: First some quick definitions:

• Internal Links = links that take a visitor to other pages on your own web site.
• Anchor text = the words someone can click on to go to another place or another web site, often blue and underlined, but not necessarily.

It's well-known that the anchor text on external links pointing to your web pages helps you to rank more highly for those terms in the search engines. But what about internal links? Does it help there, too?

Bill Hartzer explains that we don't know exactly how much weight the search engines give to this factor, but it does seem to be something that factor into their ranking calculations. Why have a link say Click Here when instead it can say Buy Your Widget Now?

Make the text in your internal links indicative of what the user will find at the other end of that link. And if you can incorporate one of the keywords that page is optimized for, so much the better!

Find Broken Inbound Links

February 15, 2009 ::: Inbound links to your web site from others are wonderful things. They usually constitute an endorsement by someone else. They attract potential customers to click over to your web site where they may just buy what you're selling. And the help your site to rank higher in search engine results, which is just icing on the cake.

Sometimes those links go bad, though. They may link to a page you've deleted or moved. They may have formatted the link incorrectly. Whatever the cause, when someone clicks on the link, they get a "404 error" -- the one that says "Not Found" in big black letters. That makes your web site look bad, and annoys a potential customer.

Finding those bad links, then, is a worthwhile ting to do. Until now it's been very hard to do. But Google has a new tool that let's you find these bad links -- what Google calls "crawl errors". That helps you identify the web site and web page that has a link to your site that's broken. Then you can contact the site owner and ask them to change the link.

Finding the source of these broken links is like finding little nuggets of gold. Here's Google's explanation of how to use this new webmaster tool.

Never Ignore The User Experience

February 9, 2009 ::: User experience, often abbreviated as UX or UE) describes what happens to people as they visit and interact with your web site. One essential component of a good user experience is getting the right people to your web site. If you're optimizing for the wrong keyword phrases, you may bring lots of visitors to your site who aren't in your target market. If they're not interested in your product or service, then they have a poor user experience with your site and they don't become customers.

Another component is your web site's navigation. Do users have an easy time finding the product or service they need? Does your site answer their questions? Does it make the buying action (or calling for an appointment, or whatever your desired action is) easy? Is everything on your site obvious to a new visitor? If the answers to any of those questions is "no", then you're turning away customers.

Shari Thurow explains why you may need to watch actual users interact with your web site to make sure it's not driving away customers.

Search is Not Enough

February 2, 2009 ::: Marketing has grown very sophisticated, and search marketing, both paid search and organic SEO, should be only one component of your marketing plan. William Flaiz of Search Engine Watch describes the "marketing funnel" which leads consumers from awareness of a product or service through buying that product or service to the desired end result of loyalty to brand loyalty.

Other blogs of interest

The Computer Lady