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.

Since the 1st of July Bing has been showing real time date from a few iconic Twitters based on their followers count and volume of Tweets as well as their influence in certain fields. The SEO field is represented by Danny Sullivan do a search for [Danny Sullivan Twitter] or [Danny Sullivan Tweets] or even [@dannysullivan] and you will get as the first result Danny’s latest tweets as well as link to see more tweets from him which will send you to his Twitter profile.

It is worth noting that Bing has no special relation or any kind of deal with Twitter and all data is coming from the Twitter API.

This new feature is not at its full potential yet, but we can expect innovations to roll out anytime soon as I’m certain Bing is not the only Search Engine looking into ways to integrate real time data to its SERPs.

All this makes me wonder, how long will it take to Google to respond to it? What are the search giant plans to deliver real time data in its SERPs? Will real time search results have any impact in search engine optimisation?

We want to hear from you now, what you have to say about this real time search trend? share you thoughts in our comments section.

“Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to”

If you are an SEO you know exactly where the above quote comes from, for those of you not familiar with it, that is a quote from Google Webmasters Guidelines, basically is saying that if link to bad neighbourhood sites, you could be penalised.

But apparently that doesn’t seem to apply to Google itself, a few months ago search experts noticed that Google was displaying fake ads for US Government Grants; it took a while but they removed it from their sponsored links section.

Now another type of fraudulent advertisement is polluting the SERPs, the “Get Paid by Google” ads from sites like Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com are being visited by millions of people each day, all offering a guide of how to make thousands with Google in the comfort of your own home.

Anyone with basic education could see that as a scam, but in times like this where unemployment is sky high and collapsing industries many people are falling for those kind of ads, but the million dollar questions is: Why don’t Google Ban those Site or even allow them to create an account with Adwords?

The answer is very simple, because Google makes lots of money with those sites, first they have to pay Google for the advertisement via their Adwords accounts and second these fraudulent ads increase the bid price of certain keywords making legitimate marketers pay more for their keywords.

What is more revolting is that for us SEOs and legitimate marketers, Google is always trying to make things harder, at least that is how I see things as an SEO, why don’t Google and its spam fighting team focus more on those “Scammers” and let us legitimate professionals carry on with our work.

Let’s face it, we are doing a service for our clients and the search engine as we make it quite clear what a site has to offer to the humans and the search engines, so they can accurately index each page accordingly.

What do you have to say about all this? Could scam ads lead web users to lose faith in online marketing and advertising? Share your thoughts in our comments section below.

What is PageRank Sculpting?

First of all, the only way to pass PageRank is via links on a given page. Now imagine a page with £10 of PageRank to spend, this page has 10 outbound links, these links could be to other pages inside the same site or to other sites, that doesn’t matter, the point is each link will receive £1.

Let’s say we used the nofollow tag on 5 of those links, till now it was believed that the other 5 links would get £2  instead of £1 each which would help those five pages rank a bit better. So let’s say there is a login page within your or less important pages that you don’t want to rank well, before you could nofollow the links to those pages and direct PageRank to more important pages, that is how PageRank Sculpting worked.

The Death of PageRank Sculpting

“What happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are no followed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”

The above is quote from Matt Cutts’ announcing the death of PageRank sculpting; well at least with the use of the nofollow tag. Basically what Matt is saying that, links with a nofollow tag still get no “PageRank money” at all and regular links continue to get £1 each.

What makes me laugh is the SEOs who have been quoting the benefits of their “PageRank Sculpting” over the past year, when Google changed the way PageRank flows over a year ago.

Conclusion

To sum things up on how Google assigns PageRank here is a quote from Danny Sullivan that explains the matter in a simple and easy to understand way:

“Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. In general, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Google might decide some links don’t deserve credit and give them no PageRank. The use of nofollow doesn’t ‘conserve’ PageRank for other links; it simply prevents those links from getting any PageRank that Google otherwise might have given them.”

First thing you need to know about a keyword is its search volume, the higher the better, Google Keywords Tool is showing local search volume now which is very useful for geo-targeted sites. Once you have the search volume you need to compare against the competition on that given keyword, here is a simple rule of thumb, higher search volume against low competition.

Ok, now you have the search volume and the competition of your keywords, but what if you wanted to know more about it, like how many sites are using your keywords on their title tags? For that you will need a special command when you perform a search just type intitle:keywordname to refine it use intitle:”keywordname” that will give an exact match.

What about how many sites have my keywords in their URLS? To find that out use inurl:keywordname again to refine it inurl:”keywordname”.

Want to know how many sites have your keywords in the anchor text of links point back to them? Use inanchor:keywordname and to find out how many sites use your keywords in their description tags use intext:keywordname

Always remember to refine results to an exact match just quote the term, this also works for a normal search query.

All these commands are very useful to tell how much competition a certain keyword has and to determine how hard it will be to rank for them.

You would think that if you were the owner of a company that has over 60% of market share that wouldn’t be enough to raise any eye brows, well that is not how Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin thinks.

According the NY Post, sources inside the search juggernaut said Sergey Brin assembled a team of his best search engineers to study Bing’s algorithm and determine how it differs from the one he created with his classmate Lary Page back in 1998, as well as work on urgent upgrades to his own.

Sergey’s move generated chaos in the search world as it is not common these days for Google founders to get their hands dirty in operations at the company anymore.

Speaking to the NY Post a Google insider said:

“New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,”

To deny such a move from the search behemoth a spokesman for Google stated:

“We always have a team working on improving search. We dedicate more time and energy to search than anything else in our company. Our algorithm is constantly evolving.”

If it is true or not that Google is studying Bing’s algorithm we will never know for sure, but one thing is certain you better treating a cancer while it’s on its early stages.

So, what say you? Is Bing really a threat to Google? Will this “urgent upgrade” ordered by Sergey Brin have any affect in search engine optimisation?

Leave your thought and opinions in our comments section below.

As Live.com is still live and users can currently opt to use either service, so far what we are seeing is the preview version of Bing. However as of today Microsoft will replace Live.com with Bing.

Bing has been live for only one day and there are already thousands of reviews of Microsoft’s newly improved search engine available on the net. Unfortunately people outside the US are seeing a local version of Bing without most of the new features. If you can’t wait to exploit and play around with Bing, select United States as your default region.

(found this tip on Techmeme)

These two videos perfectly describe and explain how Bing works, they are both being used as part of Microsoft multi-million marketing campaign to promote Bing’s services and capabilities.

Microsoft Bing Search – Product Tour of Bing.com

Microsoft Bing “Decision Engine” Launch

Have you tried Bing yet? If so we would like to hear your thoughts and opinions, so please leave them in our comments section.

What is Bing?

Bing is a new search engine that has been developed by Microsoft; with it Microsoft hopes to grab a bigger slice of the search market by providing a better search refinement.

To have better understanding of the proportions of Microsoft’s large-scale investment on the marketing of its new search engine, here is a quote from AdAge’s article:

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing; the search engine hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That’s a big campaign — big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign’s size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creative’s on the Microsoft business last week.

It won’t be the first time Microsoft launches an attacks ads campaign to try and grab a bigger slice of a market, the attack on Apple seems to be working as Apple’s value perception among 18-34 years old has dropped significantly.

One thing is certain, the group in charge of developing such Ad campaign have some rough times ahead of them as they devise a clever and convincing way to attack the search market (aka Google).

How would you do it? How would you convince searchers to switch search engines? Will this also change the search engine optimisation industry?

Share your thoughts in our comments sections.

There are hundreds maybe thousands of SEO companies out there, the intention of this article is to provide you the necessary information to help you choose the right SEO company and get the most out of its services.

The following has become common jargon in the SEO industry but it is worth re-emphasizing:

Avoid companies who guarantee first page rankings instantly, SEO results doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time for the search engines to pick up the changes and start indexing them, especially if the domain (URL) is not aged.

A professional SEO company should be able to explain each and every step of the optimisation process in a way that it is easily understandable by its prospects as well as provide a portfolio of previous and current works so you could evaluate its services.

Avoid SEO Companies that believe they can trick the search engine by  ‘Black Hat’ techniques, eventually your site will be caught and de-valued in the search engines – these techniques can be keyword stuffing and buying links without declaring them.

Now that you know what to look for in an SEO company it is time to learn how to get the most out of its services.

First you need to provide as much information as possible, your business and industry, who your targeted market is, your business objectives, industry highs and lows, trends, provide them with a list of clients and suppliers, where your domain is hosted, etc…

Compile a list of keywords you would like your site to rank for, if you are not sure about it, do not worry, the SEO company will conducted a keyword research and identify the best keywords to optimise your site with.

In order to provide the best service possible, the SEO Company will need full access to your site’s ftp server and backoffice (CMS), not providing this details could slow down the optimisation process.

Cutting a long story short, the secret to get most out of search engine optimisation services is a good relationship between client and company, the more you give SEOs to work with the better will be the service provided.

Please feel free to ask any further questions about Search Engine Optimisation via our comments section or by visiting our contact us page.

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!