What is anchor text?

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Anchor text is the text within a hyperlink. This is important, as the search engines analyse this. For example www.marketingcompass.co.uk  …or…  The Marketing Compass small business marketing advice. Search engines examine anchor text, in order to figure out what the destination web page is about. They are doing their best to be helpful to the searcher. Think of it this way - Google would like to know as much as possible about the subject of the page to which the link points. Therefore, inserting keywords into anchor text helps search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to do a better job. Have you noticed how Wikipedia uses anchor text? One topic leads to another and yet another. Wikipedia is at the top page 1 for millions of items and I have no doubt that its extensive use of anchor text has helped it to get there. Here is a tip: if someone wants to link to your website, send them a pre-prepared...
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Is Google PageRank still important and are backlinks still a good idea?

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
Is Google PageRank still important and are backlinks still a good idea? This is a question that is still often asked. PageRank was the first algorithm used by Google. It is a link analysis system that gives a 0 - 10 score. It figured out the relative importance of a website, based on the number of in-bound links. The name comes from Larry Page, one of Google's founders. Google stated: "PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites." At the time of writing (May 2015) PageRank would appear to be still used by Google itself. However, the thinking behind backlinks has moved on as they are far less important than they used to be. Personally, I have always thought that backlinks are a poor indication of page quality because it is relatively...
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YouTube meta data and SEO

By David StrelitzNo Comments
It wasn’t so long ago that what was known as 'web video' tended to be simple graphics messages, or single person presentations to camera with or without some extra enhancements. The image size you saw was quite small, by today's standards. However, the advent of higher speed broadband and sophisticated servers, that allow more data to be delivered to our devices, means that today nothing is off limits, with even Hollywood movies being delivered on the web. At one time, YouTube was only for Skateboarding Cats - but now household name companies not only use YouTube for announcements, promotions and product demonstrations, but they also reinforce their brand by producing short instructional 'How To' programmes. Ironically, just as I was writing this, an email came in from Machine Mart promoting their web videos on a range of products. With YouTube offering the same opportunities for inserting meta data (i.e. Tags) as can be used within a website and being part of Google,...
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Content marketing and search engine rankings

By Nigel TempleNo Comments
In a digital economy, much of what you know can probably be found for free on the internet. On this basis, you may as well share a reasonable proportion of your knowledge on the web. Google will love you and so will prospective customers. For many years, it has been said that 'content is king'. This is now more true than ever - due to changes in search engine algorithms.  Content marketing and search engine rankings walk hand in hand. Therefore, the more you write, the more you sell....
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