Wikipedia defines anchor text as:

“…the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the Anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.”

I have a simpler explanation to it, a hypertext link is any text placed between the <a> and </a> tag also known as anchor tags, therefore the term “anchor text”, here is how  a hypertext link looks like in a HTML document:

<a href=”/search-engine-marketing.php”>SEO Bedford</a>

Where <a is the beginning of the anchor tag, href is an attribute of <a> and refers to a specific location of the web or within a website and “SEO Bedford” is the anchor text.

Making use of the right anchor text puts you one step ahead of your competitors, my advice here is to use your most competitive keywords in the anchor texts of your inbound links, sometimes you don’t have control over those links due to the fact that they are in sites others control.

My suggestion here is to constantly monitor who is linking to your site and contact the site owners or webmasters and ask them if it is possible to modify the link to add the correct anchor text.

All this process is not as easy as it seems, nowadays getting an anchor text link from another website, specially an authority site, is worth much more than gold due to its value from a ranking standpoint.

My last piece of advice is, ensure you do your keyword research to optimise the anchor text to its full potential and try various link building tactics, then stick to them and create unique and link worthy on page content.

Time’s criteria to choose these sites is quite simple, they pick websites that help users improve their internet experience like yelp.com and its UK version yelp.co.uk – Yelp helps you find the best restaurant, pubs and other local services in your area.

Or another site that meets the selection criteria is Fora.tv; a site with a wide variety of videos in a variety of subjects that are piped in from the top leading conferences from around the world. Its a great site to visit when you are tired of watching cat videos on YouTube and you feel that your brain needs some intellectual stimulation.

Within Time’s 50 best websites for 2009 you will find a list of sites to help you surf the web better, enjoy yourself, shop or just kill time on the Web.

But the big surprise is that sites like Digg and MySpace were left out of this year’s list.

Digg, as most of you already know, is a leading social news site famous for driving tons of traffic when content is promoted to its front page.

MySpace needs no introduction, the second biggest social networking site on the web which over the past year or so lost its top spot to Facebook.

Over the past year both sites have encountered ups and downs which might explain why they were not included in this year’s list.

Do you know any site that should’ve been on that list, or do you not agree with some of sites you saw on it? Please leave your opinions in our comments section and maybe we can make our own top 50 websites list!

The politician is also planning to use social networking sites to try to get people involved in a global deal on climate change.

In his new role, Prescott is responsible for finding out the opinion of the public and reporting back to the Council before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The Copenhagen meeting will bring together more than 90 countries to find a way to keep global warming below two degrees C by 2050.

Mr Prescott is also launching a new website, New Earth Deal, designed to promote the idea of a fairer settlement on climate change by requiring bigger cuts in emissions by rich countries and financial help for developing countries.

Online Marketing is fast becoming the most effective way of promoting any kind of business or event and with the help of blogs and social media yours can now be found easier.

For more information on all of our online marketing services including blogging, website development and search engine optimisation please visit the THUK website.

Leading the pack we have Digg.com who launched the DiggBar and shortened URLs services. Unlike other short URL services, instead of redirecting to the long url version of the page it redirects users to a Digg page with an iframe wrapper with the DiggBar on the top. From there Digg users can Digg and comment on the story, very handy for Digg users, but not so much for site and blog owners especially from an SEO point of view.

With this Digg is keeping all the traffic and link credit within its own “ecosystem”. This did not go down very well with the Digg community and according to a post from search engine land and Digg’s official blog new implementations are scheduled for next week. Once again Digg’s community showed its power and forced Digg to rethink its strategies. Can you imagine the reaction if Google decided to do the same and frame all the content so users would visit the pages without leaving Google’s domain?

Meanwhile, in the Twitter realm, there is a competition going on to see who will be the first Twitter user to reach the mark of 1 million followers. Two users are fighting for the title, on the blue corner with 937,977 we have Ashton Kutcher and on the red corner with 957,274 followers we have CNN. Numbers could be higher now as their numbers still keep rising.

It all started with a video posted by Ashton Kutcher promising to “Punk” Ted Turner if he beats CNN to a million followers on Twitter. Since then things went mad in the “Twitterspheare” , Larry King posted a video in response to Ashton’s video. To aid Kutcher EA Games has upped the ante and tweeted out if Kutcher beats CNN it will put Kutcher’s 1 millionth follower in a future EA game. It certainly will be fun the watch the next days as both users are close the 1 million mark.

On the other side of the web, StumbleUpon has been bought out of Ebay by original founders and investors. Back in 2007, Ebay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million and that was the minimum bid Ebay was looking for but according to market specialists numbers could’ve been lower than the minimum asked.

That is it for now, hope you enjoyed this social media round up and feel free to add your thoughts below in our comments section.

P.S: Ashton Kutcher beat CNN and is the first Twitter user to reach 1 million followers, now one lucky Twitter will have his face featured on EA’s The Sims 3 which is due to release later this year!

The job of an Search Engine Optimiser it not only knowing how the Search Engines algorithms work, that in fact nobody knows, except the Search Engines themselves; a good SEO must have knowledge in a variety of subjects.

In my opinion, it is of great importance to the SEO to have basic to intermediate knowledge in coding, when I say coding I’m referring to HTML, PHP, CSS and other coding languages used to build websites, because the SEO needs to know how to identify and change tags in websites’ codes.

Going back to the second paragraph, as nobody knows the exact formula to rank high in the SERPs, the job of a SEO is based on tests and experiments to understand the formula of these algorithms, not only the results to these experiments take time to show up, SEs (search engines) are regularly updating their algorithms, so what works today might not be so important tomorrow.

Writing skills are a must have, as SEOs are constantly creating new content by writing articles, blog posts, meta descriptions and new pages to their client’s websites, this takes us to another obstacle in a SEO’s career.

Most search engine optimisation agencies/companies have diverse clients in a variety of different fields which forces SEOs to be tuned in on the latest trends and news regarding their clients industry to write authoritative and appealing content to their client’s website or blog.

Blogs and social networking sites are becoming more and more popular, not to mention that SEs are giving more importance to links posted on these sites and the extremely high potential to drive traffic, the SEO that has or is building a reputation online will stand out in the crowd, to prove a point here there is already another faction of search engine optimisation called Social Media Optimisation.

All this is what makes search engine optimisation such an interesting, challenging an exciting career.

One of the first things on CEOs and Managing Directors minds is to reduce spending; this often includes their marketing campaigns. But this is exactly when marketing plays an important role to ensure a company is well known and easily found for economic growth.

Online Marketing is a great way of providing Local, National, even Global coverage to promote businesses. As the name already suggests – Online Marketing is any type of marketing via the Internet; email marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimisation campaigns, social media marketing, blog marketing social networking or any other form of promoting your business via Internet.

Four factors put online marketing ahead of any other marketing techniques during an economic downturn:

1 – Measurement

Traditional marketing campaigns often lack measurement. With online marketing and a good web analytics package, you are able to track, measure, document the effect, adjust and justify your marketing investments.

2 – Immediate Effect

It is almost impossible to know how effective a TV commercial or other type offline advertisement is. Online marketing methods have a direct value on sales; especially search engine marketing.

3 – Good ROI

The success of a marketing campaign is measured by its ROI (return over investment); the higher the better; and there are few things beating online marketing. For every dollar spent on online marketing, marketers are making more than a dollar through sales or other conversions on their sites.

4 – Small Budgets

Online marketing can start with a small budget and gradually increase it as it succeeds, then reduce to maintain success. Many multi-million dollar companies are basing their economic strategies around this simple principle nowadays.

The DMA estimates that expenditures with online marketing will maintain a significant growth in the coming year with more than 50% of U.S marketing dollars directed to Interactive marketing.

We would like to hear your opinion; with the computer screen rapidly becoming the shop window of the future, should companies prioritise their marketing budgets on online marketing? Add your view in our comments section below.

So does it not make sense to find strategic ways to get in front of your clients and teach them things from your business perspective? When you lecture or write authoritative articles to your prospective clients, you have instant credibility with them and become the “expert” in their eyes, gaining their trust.

You don’t have to be a teacher, just be creative and organize a function that your target market will enjoy reading about and want to come back to you for more.

How can you do this? How can you catch your target markets’ attention and promote your website and business at the same time? Easy – A BLOG.

A blog is a bolt on to your website, designed to incorporate an identical look and feel to the original website and the great thing is, you don’t have to be technically knowledgeable to use one. In-house training and 1 years support is included in the price, around 45 minutes training required to use the back office and a further 30 – 45 mins or so, for our SEO team to teach you how to use the Blog as a powerful marketing tool.

So go on, invest in the future. Get Blogging!

For more details, contact Julie Randlesome at THUK, BEDFORD

And not only did Obama use the internet, he used every online marketing tool there is, including blogging, search engine optimisation (SEO), social media and of course his website.

SEO:

When you search for the terms “Barack” and “Obama” in any of the four main search engines you will be amazed to find that the presidential campaign website of Barack Obama at the top of the list.

This will have been made possible by a very clever SEO team working for Obama, who carried out the correct techniques in optimising his website. For each page there is a different title tag, descriptive Alt tag descriptions are used on most of the images and the header tags have been written effectively.

Blogging:

The President’s team also realised the importance and growing popularity of the blog and how it would appeal to a wide audience of readers on the net.

Obama’s team made sure that the blog was always active and continuously posted relevant articles everyday. Sometimes posts received more than 325 comments within an hour of being posting. This reveals to what extent the blog is active and just how many people are going back to read it, which is clearly a lot!

Then of course there is the official website which is the core of the whole online marketing campaign. The Barack Obama site is designed well, easy to use and therefore appeals to the young as well as the old.

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post said this:

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.”

I think this could well be true!!

The key thing to know when writing blogs is that 1. search engines are looking for keywords not how much you’ve written 2. people will get bored reading an article that is 500 or more words long.

Ideally a blog should be between 200 and 250 words with plenty of interesting content and keywords.

The keywords should be hyperlinked back to the appropriate categories for the search engines to pick up.

It is also important for your blog to remain interesting to encourage visitors to come back and read other articles.

This will in time encourage visitors and search engines to trust your website, resulting in a higher search engine position and more people visiting your website!

Adrian had an idea to make an SEO plugin, this allowed him to track the traffic going through his own blog to enable him to analyse what was clicked, who clicked it, where and when they clicked from (using the IP address). All this information is valuable to many ‘Blog’ users to find a more advanced and scaled down statistics.

ClikStats is available for free download from wordpress.org or Adrian Callaghans Blog – www.adriancallaghan.co.uk clickstats