I am going to discuss something that is usually seen as a big no no when it comes to SEO and have to point out at this point that what I discuss in this article is my own perspective and opinion, it is not the opinion of Branded3 or any of their associates.

Paid links is one of those really annoying subjects and my thoughts today are based on last week’s SEOmoz whiteboard Friday where Rand discusses how they purchased links, got higher rankings and then quickly took them down before Google came along and wiped them out!! Rand also reefer’s to another website that was band for buying a handful of links to rank better.

Now I hope by making this statement Google doesn’t come along and wipe my blog out but I think it’s important that people understand and know the truth;

Do High Ranking Websites Buy Links? Yes!

Do they only buy a couple to beef up their campaign? Depends…

Do paid links work? Yes!

Should I buy links? Depends….

Ok you’re no clearer than you were before right, let me have another go….

Over the last 6 years I have worked with all kinds of companies, brands and blogs all competing in different verticals, some massively competitive others not so.

Out of all those clients I have to say I have only ever come across a few that don’t actively engage in link buying, were not just talking about 1 or 2 links here were talking hundreds, if not thousands.

You get out your best link analysis tool and check out some of the link profiles of some of the biggest brands, see anything suspicious?? I am sure you will.

Ranking on top of Google is big business, people don’t want to take chances with their income therefore due to competition are forced into paying for links! It’s really that simple – competitive markets require companies to buy links to dominate and anyone that says anything else is plain lying.

Should I Buy Some Links

Well let’s start with the obvious questions ‘will I get banned by Google?’ and the truth is “I do not know”! The reason I don’t is because I have never seen a site get thrown out of the index for ‘buying’ links. I have seen sites penalised for spamming, linking to dodgy neighbourhoods, hiding content etc… But never seen anyone penalised for buying links.

I have seen websites that sell links suffer from a loss of PageRank (not lost rankings just the ability to pass PageRank) but have never seen a link buyer punished.

So the answer to will I get punished? Probably not, however, as always there are a few exceptions.

- If you go max out your text link ads account, you may raise question marks

- If you get some guy from digital point to buy you a thousand links for $50 this also might not be a good idea

- If you spam everyone in the UK with ‘I want to buy a link’ – not such a good idea

- If you buy thousands of links from irrelevant resources there is a good chance you’ll get slapped

- and if you hang around on digital point looking for sellers your putting your website at risk

All of the above are really stupid ways to go about link building/buying whatever….

How Do I Buy Links?

I am not going to go into specifics here as I don’t want to paint a target on my head. All I will say is if a link looks like it is bought then it will be penalised whether money passed hands or not, a natural looking link is never going to cause any issues.

The main issue with link buying comes with the acquisition technique, if your careless you may be punished.

I think Google generally deals with paid links by docking PR or preventing sites that sell links from passing as much.

Your competitors will be buying links and you’re not going to compete with them using viral content and article marketing, will they ever get found out? Who knows, but the truth is it doesn’t stop multi million pound organisations from doing it.

First of all apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of weeks, work has been busy and the World Cup has pretty much dominated my evenings

So now England have been dumped out shamefully I thought it might be a good idea to discuss something pretty positive that has happened to me over this World Cup period, I NOW RANK IN THE TOP 5 FOR ‘search engine optimisation’!!!

Now that I have gained a glory ranking I thought it might be a good idea to discuss how I got there. I work with clients daily that throw massive budgets at SEO and not surprisingly get results very quick, however my blog has had very little in terms of budget thrown at it and it goes to show you can make it to the top working cheap, the results will come a lot slower though.

Altogether it has taken me 18 months to position my website there; I did a lot of the work in the early stages and as my site has grown in trust the anchor text from article directories and blog carnivals have really started to count.

The truth is, in the last 3 months I have done very little link building with most of my links coming socially and none of them anchored with the target keyword (except maybe one site wide a fellow SEO kindly gave me).I genuinely believe working to a tight budget does not exclude you from achieving results as long as you’re consistent and gradually increase your investment.

Anyway enough bragging, what I want to do now is show you my exact approach to ranking SEO wizz where it currently is (4th ‘search engine optimisation’ 13th ‘seo’),

Quarter One

The first 3 months of any blog are painful, you spend 90% of your time writing and 10% reading, however there were a few fundamentals I wanted to achieve in the first Quarter, ones that I knew would see me well in the future;

- I wanted to create a hook, so I developed some tutorials, this would ensure a nice flow of natural links

- I wanted to have at least 20 posts optimised for long tail target keywords

- I made it a must to at least get one link back to each deep page/post

I knew things would be slow at first as I have created many affiliate blogs and they have all started the same way.

Quarter Two

My blog now had enough content and I could really let Google know it existed without risking the sandbox. The idea was to get as many links to the blog as possible with preferential anchor text.

- I decided to write 100 articles

- Submitted them through Article Marketer (Now content crooner)

- Mixed the anchor text between my main target keywords search engine optimisation, seo techniques, google seo, seo consultant, seo (All of which are now on the first page of Google bar ‘SEO’ however watch this space.)

This wasn’t about getting the blog to rank, it was more about building a bulk amount of links so that I could get new content indexed faster and give myself a little bit of an anchor text push.

Quarter Three

Traffic was now picking up; Google was beginning to give me a little authority so it was now time to turn up the heat. To do this I decided to write some posts that would ensure me a way of getting links in the long term, I am talking serious viral content.

There is an important definition to be made here, some people consider viral content as a way of driving masses of traffic, the problem is going viral on stumble (which I have done quite a few times) does not necessarily mean masses of links, in fact very often it doesn’t mean any. I wanted to create content that when people did find it they would link to it.

- I posted on Bing SEO vs Google and did a small case study (I rank no.1 for Bing SEO and gain new links every week with no effort)

- I posted about Link/Ranking correlation (Linked to by SEOmoz and has delivered 1000′s of visitors and recognition)

- I also completed a monster post on SEO content writing which ranks very highly and is still my third most visited page!!

This is the back bone of my website, the posts that give a return over the long period and not just an instant traffic boost. Every website should create this type of content/product/resource, something that is going to continually get new recognition.

Quarter Four

I was really beginning to rank well now but still needed more diverse links; I had some high quality links but needed a more diverse profile. To accomplish this I;

- Submitted to blog carnivals taking advantage of preferential anchor text

- Joined new forums adding my links in bio’s and signatures (not spamming, genuine forums)

- Attempted some cross linking with other bloggers (Didn’t particularly work)

The above gave me a better profile and pushed my PageRank to 4; however I was still sitting on the second page for some of my major terms.

Quarter Five

Now I had a diverse profile and some really good quality or high PageRank links, however it was time to bulk up the quantity, to do this I:

- Created some reciprocal link partners with good online buddies

- Commented on do follow blogs with ‘top commenter’ widgets (I stopped this as it didn’t really work)

The increase in the sheer quantity of links lifted me onto the first page of Google for a lot of terms; however I still needed to add something to the mix…

Quarter Six

I knew in order to reach the top five I need those ‘trusted’ links from websites long established on Google and the only way to do this was to grovel!

- I leveraged all my blogging connections and friends

- I offered links from my other sites in return for a link to SEO wizz

I only managed a few however these highly trusted links were very effective, pushing my website to the top of the tree!

You see??? No Magic, no ridiculous techniques just hard work and a smart well thought-out plan and anyone can do the same, given the right skills and commitment.

What’s my plan moving forward???

Well I can’t give everything away; however I will let you know when I’ve done it

Thanks to all who read, link to, promote and support SEO wizz, reaching the top wouldn’t have been possible without you guys.

Cheers

OK I know you will all have read about Google Caffeine going live and yes I realise this post is old news and I am never going to rank for the keyword, however even though I have read a lot about the new update there seems to be very little in terms of how it may affect our SEO efforts, so as well as talking about the update I also wanted to think about how this may affect rankings and general SEO efforts.

I think the best place to begin this is to summarise how Google was indexing pages and how caffeine improves on that process.

Google in the Past

When you search Google you are only seeing the indexed part of the web. Google’s index was made up of layers, obviously there are layers that were indexed quicker than others probably based on PageRank, however to update what we see when we perform a search, Google would have to perform an entire crawl of the web before it could update the results, this obviously caused delays, even up to 2 weeks according to Google’s official blog.

This lag in refreshing the SERPS meant fresh stories and information were being missed, hence Google’s emphasis on up to date information using tweets, Google news and blog results.

I won’t go into this anymore, you can read more about the technicalities on the official blog and a nice little video from Google spokesman Matt Cutts.

Caffeine has Landed!!!

Now that caffeine is in place it means our fresh new content is indexed as a continual process, Google doesn’t have to go out and index the entire web before updating your new blog post, instead it can fire it into the main index as it finds it. ‘Caffeine’ means more alert, switched on and ready to pump out the freshest content on the web.

The update has meant we have a 50% fresher index and means users will be able to better find the most update content for their particular search query.

So caffeine is great for users but what could it potentially mean for SEO’s and Internet Marketers that rely on Google traffic?

Some Thoughts Going Forward

Now, the official word is that Google Caffeine does not affect ranking factors however there are suggestions that the data collected through caffeine could be used to optimise the results even further.

Quicker Content = Quicker Traffic

Yes it’s that longtail thing again……

The fact is if you are writing a lot of fresh content and optimising it for easy win longtail traffic, that traffic should come through much quicker than before. Of course there are a few proviso’s on this, caffeine won’t be picking your new content up if your website lacks authority, so don’t neglect your link building as this will ultimately decide how efficiently your content is picked up by Google.

The best ways to get your content indexed faster is by either submitting to Google news and/or submitting new blog/news entries to a handful of bookmarking websites (which you should be doing anyway).

Are older pages going to suffer?

The truth on this is nobody really knows, if ranking factors haven’t changed this surely means the best optimised page regardless of ‘freshness’ will win. However, we have seen some interesting results across all our clients keywords with ‘fresh’ news stories making it into the top 5 on Google almost instantly with very little in terms of links, however these are really authoritative websites such as the Independent.

Does this mean we need to refresh and update old content? Not too sure yet but one thing to keep in mind is, if you hold keyword positions for terms that are written about in the media often, expect wild ranking fluctuations.

Quicker insights into your link growth

What we have to remember is that when Google crawls your page it also analyses who you link to and who links to you. This information could now be gathered and applied even quicker than before, therefore those 1000 new links you bought 10 minutes ago could potentially be discovered by Google almost instantly and signals acted upon within minutes.

This can also work in a positive way as Google will be able to apply fresh links from a viral campaign even quicker than before. When we launch viral content we usually see the effects in rankings land a week or 2 later, with caffeine this gap could be significantly decreased.

I am not going to lie, this is all speculation, either way I think caffeine is a positive step in the right direction and shouldn’t affect your ‘ethical’ SEO efforts other than maybe putting more emphasis on fresh content than before, if that’s possible .

Any further insights are more than welcome.

If you are serious about SEO and increasing search traffic then it is important to track it, not just by logging into your analytics everyday but by keeping in depth records of which keywords are driving traffic and any abnormal fluctuations.

Working in an SEO agency it is important to track this for clients, you may increase a clients traffic tenfold but how are you going to prove the increase was due to your efforts?

One of the best ways to keep track of search traffic is to break it down into longtail and broad terms. At a glance you can quickly see any increases or decreases in traffic; this will help you to quickly jump on any opportunities or issues.

Using Google Analytics

In my experience there is no better traffic analysis tool than Google Analytics. It gives you so many ways to break down traffic and spot changes that it is literally a no brainer.

Using Google Analytics to track longtail traffic is fairly straight forward; however let’s just define what we mean by longtail;

Many people consider longtail traffic to be 3 words or more, however I and most experienced SEO’s I know consider longtail traffic to be any keyword that drives small amounts of traffic but has no real competition.

On that note let’s go over to analytics and break this down a little, the first thing you need to do is pull up the keywords your website was found on in the last month, then use the advanced filter at the bottom of the keywords to highlight any keywords that sent less than 5 visits.

These will all be longtail keywords, however in order to get an idea of growth and how they’re performing you need to see data from previous months;

Analytics allows you to view a direct comparison to previous months and allows you to see how your traffic is growing, or not.

It will also allow you to quickly see which keywords underperformed compared to previous months;

http://www.seowizz.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/comparisonkeyword.png

Now because I am a little bit of a geek and an obsessive SEO I like to keep track of this on a month to month basis, this allows me to see how my site has performed over a longer period of time and I use excel to help me track monthly increases and decreases with regards to search traffic on all levels;

The graph works by calculating the increases and decreases in traffic based on the amount of searches a particular keyword receives on a month by month basis.

From the above graph (which is based on SEO wizz) we can see that traffic was down in December all round with every type of keyword taking a hit, we can also see an increase in traffic in March on the keywords driving 200 or more searches a month, this correlates well with my first page rankings for “SEO” and “Search engine optimisation”, I no longer rank first page for SEO but when I did it drove a lot of traffic.

More importantly and for no apparent reason I saw a massive drop off in longtail terms or terms bringing 10 or less visits per month, this is in line with the longtail drop off reported by SEOmoz a couple of weeks ago.

Breaking down your traffic month by month noticing differences in search traffic on all levels will help you understand what part of your SEO strategy is working and highlight algorithm changes, like the one reported by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget.

If you’re serious about SEO this is a must, how you monitor it is up to you but it is vital that you break down the different keyword levels.

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about sitewide links or links in footers. Many experienced SEO’s and internet marketers have openly slammed them as being spammy and carrying little in terms of link juice and authority; however the truth is they are very effective links in terms of both ranking and building up your overall website authority.

Now from what we can see at Branded3 Search there has definitely been an update in terms of sitewide link profiles with many major players losing rankings because of their “sitewide” heavy profile. You only have to look at the SERPS for ‘SEO’ and ‘search engine optimisation’, the top ten are 60% different from what they were 3 months ago, in the UK at least.

Despite what seems to be an obvious attack on sitewide links they still remain effective if used properly and in moderation. SEO wizz has around 600 domains linking in and I can honestly say only 5 or 6 are sitewide links, if I was advising a client I would never want more than 1 in 30 links being a sitewide, this is just my opinion, SEO has never been an exact science, all I would say is use sitewide links intelligently.

So now we have the introduction out of the way, what is the best way to use these types of links for maximum impact?

The Homepage

Your homepage is always going to be the strongest page of your website, however overloading it with sitewide links isn’t going to help your rankings or traffic in the long run. Everyone knows anchor text is key to high rankings but what they don’t realise is the rules that apply to anchor text don’t apply to link profiles.

For example….

Your link profile needs to be diverse with lots of unique domains pointing back to your pages.

Anchor text does not need to be diverse – If you had 400 links pointing to your homepage passing massive juice but with the anchor text as your domain name, the chances are you’re not going to rank, however throw a couple of anchor optimised sitewide links into the mix and you could well see yourself in the top 5.

I demonstrated this a month ago, I haven’t really targeted the keyword ‘SEO consultant’ in my anchor text, my site has good authority so I switched my title tag to include it, this got me to the second page with very little anchor text links, however when I placed just 1 sitewide link optimised for the keyword, this was enough to push me into the top 3.

So…. Concentrate on building a diverse link profile and use sitewide links smartly to boost your anchor text.

Deeper Pages

Many do not realise yet or understand the power of strong links to deep pages. Many of the posts we write or guides we put together are filled with longtail search queries, low hanging fruit that’s just waiting to be plucked.

I have blogged before on how to optimise our posts to target these but a healthy sitewide link can make all the difference.

Now these are very hard to achieve but let me explain a little, if you can get just 1 quality sitewide link to a deep page of your website you will rank in the top 5 for every longtail keyword on the page. I have been fortunate enough to work with clients who have huge amounts of traffic (6 million uniques a month) and something that is key to success is the sheer amount of external links they have pointing to the deep pages of their websites.

I had a client who built 2 sitewide links to all their ‘listing’ pages and in 1 year they were receiving 250,000 unique visitors from Google every month.

So if you can, go for it, hit those deep pages with a sitewide and your traffic will rocket on that particular post.

To round up then, sitewide links are not evil, they aren’t going to get you penalised, however if your link profile is made up of hundreds of them expect Google to devalue some. If you or your company are in the business of adding a footer link in your clients websites, optimised with the anchor text of your choice, expect that to stop working real soon, those days are over.

I always worry about posting new found research as some clever dick always pops up to tell you they discovered it in 1999, however I have noticed something in the rankings recently that has made me re think Google rankings.

The Story

OK so I decided a couple of weeks ago to rank for “SEO consultant”, just something I fancied really, not the most competitive term.

Anyway….. I have obviously been keeping an eye on the rankings over the past few weeks on this particular keyword and a few more as well and there has been some pretty dramatic trends in the rankings.

One day I checked and I was 7th for “seo consultant” refreshed and I was 15th, refreshed again and I was 4th!!!

It’s not just that keyword either, I searched “search engine optimisation” I was 11th, refreshed and I was 26th and again and I was 7th.

Now rankings have always been up and down but this was a little crazier than usual.

Webmaster Tools Update

So…. Google announce the webmaster tools up date only a few days ago which explains that they are now tracking click through rates in the keyword sections of webmaster tools.

Now I don’t know how accurate these figures are and they seem to differ quite a bit to Google analytics, however the data it presents is interesting.

Just take a look at the below screen shot;

Now I am only using “bing SEO” as the example but the data establishes a few things across multiple keywords.

The first thing you notice is that out of 320 impressions I only ranked first 260 times (these impressions figures aren’t accurate as I usually receive around 600 visitors on this keyword a month), this means I don’t rank number one, I only rank there around 70% of the time.

The Old Theory

The old SEO theory determines your rank based on page optimisation and the number of links your page/domain has, the only thing affecting rankings would be competition in Google’s algorithm. I now think this is outdated and wrong, over the last 6 months I and other SEO’s have seen massive fluctuations in rankings suggesting a new way of ranking sites and determining traffic.

My Theory

Well, this is what I suspect, Google have confirmed nothing yet or any other SEO authority but the evidence I have seen strongly suggests rotational rankings.

Let me explain…. You do a search in Google on your main key term and you rank 4th, so you rank 4th??? Wrong you may rank 4th in that instance but you could complete the same search 10 seconds later and you rank 10th, a huge difference not only in ranking but the traffic too.

So… Google determines the rank of your site determined on page factors and links and then ranks you in a range of positions could be 5 – 10 or it could be position 2 to 4 pages back, depending on the person searching, there location, personalised search, time of day.

Ultimately how well optimised your site is determines how often you rank in a top position.

So your aim is not to rank in the top 5, which is now impossible, your aim should be to rank their most of the time.

What Does This Mean?

It means quite a lot.

1 – Determining traffic in a certain position is now impossible

2 – Your ranking position can change every second even if you’re searching on the same IP using an incognito window on chrome

3 – You can never say I rank number one, but only I rank number one most of the time

You see there are so many websites competing for the same space that Google has no choice but to use a rotational system like this and for all we know they may use the click through rate to decide whether your ranking gets better or worse, maybe.

I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts on this and if anyone has noticed these changes.

Testing keyword difficulty has never been a straight forward task, what do you test with? Links in? Links to domain? Search Volume? Awords Competition?

The truth is that all of them contribute toward the ‘keyword difficulty’ factor.

This is another post when I am going to sing the praises of the SEOmoz crewe, since they stopped delivering SEO services I have noticed a huge investment in their tools, mostly in making linkscape data more reliable but also tweaking the current tool box.

A tool that was announced this week was the new keyword difficulty tool, it breaks down all the metrics for you, so if your an SEO professional there is no better visualisation tool for client proposals, in my opinion.

Just check out some of the features:-

Adwords Data

Not only does the tool give you a difficulty factor in the form of a percentage (the higher it is the harder it is to rank) but it also gives you the relevant Adwords search including broad and exact match.

This is all the information you really need when trying to determine the potential of target keywords however, it doesn’t stop there.

Page / Domain Authority Metrics

The tool nicely shows the page and domain authority of the top ten sites, letting you see exactly what you’re up against.

Page authority is the SEO metric for the overall authority of any given page on the web based on link juice and authority, domain authority is based on the entire links to the domain as a whole.

Break Down Of Links

As we should know now, all links are not equal and we need to be aware of how many links our competition have, also how much authority those links are passing.

On top of that we now know that the amount of links to a domain is almost as strong a determining factor as the amount of links to a particular page.

As we can see the tool nicely breaks down the link data showing how many unique domains are linking to each of the top ten results.

Now if you’re not an SEO or internet marketer your probably not going to pay for the tool, however if you are an SEO professional, in my opinion the tools are the best on the market.

This particular tool can be used for more than just helping clients visualise their competition within their niche, it can also be used for mass research on the SERPS for multiple keywords.

Before you begin any SEO campaign there are a few things you really need to think about, one of them is “who are my competition?”.

If you intend to compete in a certain market you need to firstly be clear about your keywords and secondly clear about your competition, or more importantly what your competition are doing right.

There are many different aspects to look at both on and off page however, I would like to show you a really simple way of collecting your competitor’s links so that you can have a full spreadsheet of all the links that are helping those topping Google rank where they rank.

Now before I go into this I’d like to come clean, the tool you need to use is a paid tool, I am not promoting it but just to let you know at this point you may need to invest a little.

SEOmoz

I really do hate sounding like a fan boy but the truth is when it comes to SEO tools SEOmoz have it licked, yes there are plenty of decent analysis tools out there but the sheer amount of the web SEOmoz are able to crawl makes their service unbeatable in my opinion.

Open Site Explorer

One of the tools that makes up part of their package is Open Site Explorer, it is like Yahoo’s site explorer on steroids!

Anyway enough of the promotion, how do we use this tool to really strip down our competitors link profile?

Well here is what I would do…..

Get Those Links!!

First you want to head over to the tool, then simply input the page you want to investigate.

Yes I am using SEOmoz as the tester but they won’t mind

Once you have input your details this will bring you up a nice list of links, your competitors links, but it is not quite the finished product yet and we need to play around with it.

OK….

Just under the main nav you have various drop down menus, this allows you to filter out certain links…

At this point I would suggest filtering out no follow links and filtering out any internal links.

You can use internal links to see how your competition link to their high ranking pages, can be insightful, but that’s for another post.

So….

Now you have your list of links it is time to export them into an excel spreadsheet using the option below the drop downs.

(If you are downloading a particularly large link profile then this may take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.)

OK so we have all the details in a lovely excel spreadsheet, but were not done…..

Let’s neaten it up a little

So you have a spreadsheet looking something like this?

OK…

Firstly get rid of the nonsense at the top, check.

Now there are plenty of things in this spreadsheet we don’t need.

• Highlight the ‘URL’ column and filter out all duplicate cells using the ‘Data’ and Advanced filter options in excel.
• Secondly delete the title, followable, 301, origin and target url columns.

Now sort the columns in order of page authority and you have a list of your competitors links in the order of the most powerful.

Neaten up the spreadsheet a little and go ahead and download more of your competitor’s links!!

You are never going to beat those at the top unless you can get the same links, no you don’t have to and shouldn’t mimic the entire profile just pick out the best ones.

With all the focus clearly on links and link building in the search engine optimisation field it easy to forget about the importance of focused keyword content and a clean site architecture.

On page optimisation often gets left behind in the online marketing discussions but thankfully Google have given a huge and in my opinion very effective reminder.

Google have recently released an SEO report card based on improving the optimisation of their product pages.

Within the report are some vital insights and reminders to us all about page optimisation and URL structure.

If you want to read the report please download it here: Google SEO Report Card

I thought it would be a good idea to run through some of the points within the report as they are useful to both bloggers and webmasters in general.

Title Tags

I know you have heard it all before but here are few things you may not have heard of:

• Only the first 60 characters of a title tag give any real ranking benefit
• Sometimes users click links based on brand, so use your brand name in the title tag
• Google wants you to use keywords users will search

I know the last point is a little lame, but there are still some ‘keep it natural’ fundamentalists out there. Just write it for users, don’t use keyword tools. Keep it natural.

News flash! Google wants you to use searched keywords. This is not writing for engines because who ultimately invents these terms?

Google go through the usual reminders about being descriptive and keeping the title tag accurate and to the point, but you’ve heard all that before.

As it’s only the first 60 characters that count it is important when writing blog posts to make your first 6 – 9 words as optimised as possible, or if you use thesis you can customise the title tag of each post.

Meta Descriptions/Keywords

Google made it official that META keywords don’t count at the end of last year, however they have now confirmed that the description is also a waste of time for ranking purposes. However, I and many other SEO’s always recommend using your main keywords in the description tag as they are bolded and this increases the chances of clicks.

Site links

These are the little links that appear below your main link in Google like so;

Please note that your site will only get these once Google trusts the domain and classes the info as authoritative

Google gives us some nice suggestions for optimising the type of site links we have appear in Google;

• Use a strong hierachial Structure
• Make use of descriptive anchor text
• Avoid deep directories

Let’s talk about each of these points a little;

Structure

This is fairly straight forward, if you want an important/relevant page to appear as a site link in Google then you need to link to the page from your strongest pages, normally this means your top level domain. An ecommerce site should look to optimise their best selling product pages in the site links.

If you still find low quality pages are being used as site links, you can remove them directly from webmaster tools.

Descriptive anchor text

I have been shouting about this for years but it always gets brushed under the carpet, probably because it has a low ranking value.

The fact is that internal descriptive anchor text may not pass link juice but still pass relevance. I spoke some months ago about using descriptive internal linking to create indented listings and proved it with my ‘bing seo‘ page.

Don’t go silly with these and stuff target keywords in but try to use them whenever appropriate, Google clearly clarifies that “read more” and “click here” links are worthless and this is something the search giants do not recommend.

Deep Directories

Very simple don’t bury your best content in a deep file.

/file1/file2/file3/file4/my-great-content/ – Never going to be a site link

301′s vs 302′s

Ok if you have ever got in the world of redirects you will know there are a few different ways to do it.

301 = Permanent Redirect

302 = Temporary Redirect

You should always try to use permanent redirects, if not and you use a temporary redirect Google will consider both URL’s to be of use and index both. This can provide a bad user experience and cause duplicate content issues.

There is a load more detail in the report including advice on;

Alt tags = Yes they are still important, keep it descriptive and keyword rich

Canonical = Use the rel=”canonical” link to help Google know your main URL’s and also make sure internal links point to the canonical URL, this helps stop duplicate URL issues and content from arising.

If you find 30 minutes you should definitely read through the report, very interesting.

Just a quick post before the weekend to impart some trends I have noticed across multiple websites over the last month.

I work with a number of clients who are sitting in 8th 9th position on Google, they are desperate to move up and the frustrating part is they have a better link profile than the sites in the top 3.

So what is causing this lull? Why are they not seeing top rankings?

As an SEO’s all we can do is compare on page factors and link profiles, we could go into social mentions but it would be a waste of time as the clients I have been dealing with are large commercial companies who struggle to get social mentions.

After looking through 5 or 6 websites 1 thing kept cropping up;

The websites with better anchor text variation were ranking higher; let me explain.

The sites that were struggling to get in the top 5 had 50-60% of their links targeted at the keyword they wanted to rank for…..

The top ranking sites were around the 25% mark.

Plus on top of this the higher ranking sites had an average of 36 anchor variations pointing to the page, the sites struggling only had an average of 23.

What Does This Show Us?

Well it’s simple, just don’t overdo it with the anchor text, as I have stated many times before use 7-10 variations of the main keyword and make sure you build at least 30% of your links using the domain name.

Progress up the SERPS may be slower using this method, however it protects you against anchor text filters and penalties, because trust me when I say they exist even for the biggest of businesses.

You have always had to be careful when it came to anchor text, but I think now is the time to get a little more natural.