The Importance of Anchor Tags

Posted on Dec 26, 2007 by Rick to SEO

This blog entry will be a quick clean SEO tip that you can use going into 2008. Most people familiar with SEO already know the importance of link anchors when building links to and from your site, but those new to SEO may not be as familiar with the concept.

Anchor tags are simply the group of words that are used to link one page to another. In many cases of linking the links are simply hypertext url’s, however you will often see savvier internet users linking pieces of their actual sentences to other pages, making it work within the context of their writing without shoving in an out of place url.

These linked words and terms become important. As spiders index your pages they associate the words in your anchor tag with the pages they are linked to.

Thus to a spider code such as:

tells them that the page with the url http://www.thatagency.com is somehow related to Florida Web Design.

Knowledge of this simple concept and learning how to create basic html code can make your link building much more effective going into 2008, a year that is sure to see the importance of link building continue to increase.

Tags: anchor tags

SEO for Yahoo!

Posted on Dec 21, 2007 by Michelle to SEO

So everything you read about Search Engine Optimization, otherwise refered to as SEO, is always about how to optimize for Google. Well, in this post, I am going to talk about how to optimize for the 2nd largest Search Engine, Yahoo.

Yahoo’s algorithm is based on that of Inktomi, which Yahoo purchased back in 2002 as a plan to stop serving Google results in their search queries.

To properly optimize for Yahoo, the following are the key Factors that you must focus on:

1. Keyword Density
2. Site Structure
3. Backlinks
4. Aging

Keyword Density
While there is no exact science or exact keyword density for a website page, you should try and keep your keyword density between 3% – 5%. Keyword densities change on a regular basis. By keeping within the targeted range, you ensure that your site will always be optimized to the fullest extent.

Site Structure
Site Structure is perhaps most important to the Yahoo Search Engine Crawler. Your Site Structure determines the order in which your content gets seen by the crawlers, which in turn will give certain content a higher priority than other content. Secondly, a properly structured site will allow the crawler to read necessary content and will hide the ugly, excessive coding using CSS.

Backlinks
Having a solid backlink count from relevant sources with good anchor text is a good practice across all search engines, but it is a major factor on Yahoo. For backlinks, Yahoo factors in quality of site, anchor text and whether the site is a recpricol link or not.

Aging
One of the main factors that is out of a website optimizers control is the age of a site. New sites and links are not given the same weight as sites and links that have been around for some time. New sites can find it to be extremely difficult to rank for competitive phrases within 6 months.

Optimizing for Google is NOT all that you need to do in order to have a fully optimized site. Google only reaches a certain number of users. By optimizing for other Search Engines, your site will have more visibility across multiple Search Engines.

Tags: yahoo

Code to Text Ratio

Posted on Dec 13, 2007 by Rick to SEO

The importance of Code to Text ratio is often lost in SEO. Business owners are often not savvy enough to know to ask for a site with a good code to text ratio, or in some circumstances even the SEOs they hire do not understand the concept.

Basically the more code you have on a page, the less search engine spiders will be able to pick up on the important language in your text for rankings purposes. Your message gets lost in the code….

There are several things that can keep a code to text ratio too low:

1) Minimal Text on a Page
2) Placement of large amounts of Javascript on the page
3) Placement of CSS on the page
4) Table on Table development

All of these besides number 1 can be combated. If you only have one sentence of text on a page, obviously you are going to have a low Code to Text Ratio, but if not, you should be running around 50% code to 50% text or better.

Here are some ways to create a better code to text ratio:

1) Store Javascript in external file son your server and simply call for it in your code. There is not real need to place most Javascript directly on the page, save space and file it externally.
2) Create smooth tableless CSS pages. These are great pages from an optimization standpoint. First they create a better code to text ratio, and second they give the spiders a clear path through the entire page for indexing. Tables should only be used for tabular data.
3) Place all CSS in external CSS files. This makes is easier as you develop anyway, so you can simply call the entire CSS instead of rewriting it.

Tags: code to text ratio