Using Your Important Keywords in Static On-Page Text Links

Links should be the measure of importance, and authority carried by your web site. You will learn here the great importance of links to improve your chances of ranking highly on a Google search. Over the last 12 months I have seen more and more focus by SEOs and web marketers in general on links and their importance to achieving highly ranked SERPs. Almost certainly links are playing a larger role in SERPSs.

There is an ongoing daily debate in many newsgroups on this very subject. Almost all SEOs agree on one thing:

Word links are better than image links button links as far as the search engines are concerned. My first Front Page web pages had image links and buttons for the links ( I used their default templates and themes). Then I became convinced this was not good and went and took every single one off the web pages. There are no more pictures for links on any of my web pages.

II only do words could be a motto now.

An important aspect covered in more detail elsewhere is that as far as humanly possible use relevant keywords in all your links. For example if you have a link from your page dedicated to garden gnomes to another of your pages dedicated to selling garden fairies then make sure garden fairies appears in the link from the garden gnomes page.

Using keywords in alt tags (images)

An alt tag is a description used for a picture but you do not see the description unless the image does not show you have all seen these on the web (small empty box with red x) at some time or another. They come up when the designer has made an error in the page design or the surfer has switched off image display to get much faster browsing.

The above is an example of an image with an alt tag (Petes Pond Page) and one without any alt tag just the red cross.

Every image you place on your web page should have an alt tag and whilst the alt tag should describe the picture do try and include the keyword in it. It took some time again for me to learn this lesson and I am still updating my pictures in some cases. Do the alt tag when you first create the picture, thats what I learned the hard way.

There are 2 important reasons for including the alt tag:

Blind surfers use systems that read out alt tags no alt tag then no information for the blind surfer.

The alt tag carries some although it is believed minor advantage with the search engines.

Do try to remember to use alt tags I cannot tell you how to do it in your software. In Front Page you select picture properties and then general and just type the relevant words.

Chapter

13

Introducing the concept of links in relation to web marketing

You link to me and I will link to you so both of us can become more popular.

L

inks on a web page enable the visitor to move around within and without a web site easily. At least it should be easy and logical from your visitors point of view.

Search engines, as we know, are critical to web marketing success. It is believed that 50% of any web sites visitors will probably arrive at the site or page from a direct search query. By this I mean if a searcher types in good cheddar cheese he will be taken directly to a page about good cheddar cheese. On the other hand the searcher may have come from a link elsewhere maybe the searcher had been looking at a completely different site about English cheeses and saw a link to the site about good cheddar cheese.

When I review my own web sites logs I find that about 54% of all page views come from search engines directly, 25% from links outside my site, about 10% from links within the same domain and the rest from bookmarks and other means.

Assuming these results are typical then by focusing solely upon keyword usage to drive traffic to your site will limit the amount of traffic to your site. It is obvious that to maximize traffic a strategy of getting links to your web pages/web sites must be incorporated into your web marketing work.

It just so happens that this is how the search engines also think. Indeed their thinking appears to be leaning towards the quality web page linking approach for determining high rankings.

Take a look at this screen shot from Google for the search term garden ponds:

On the basis of keyword usage on the page alone none of these sites should have ranked so highly based upon my knowledge/beliefs. For example not one of the top 3 SERPs had a single bit of link text on the page returned with the keyword in it. Take a look at the use of keywords on the three home pages for the SERPs. The table below summarises the keyword information for each page. All three for example did have the words garden ponds in the Title.

Keywords information

URL in rank order (best to worst) Total inward links Total all words on page Total on page In Title In link text In actual link In header In body text

Patio-garden-ponds 20 99 5 1 0 1 2 0

Gardenponds 204 738 4 1 0 0 0 2

Pondmarket 224 1714 1 1 0 0 0 0

We will revisit this topic and table later when we talk about keyword density and link properties in general. One thing is certain about these sites they can all benefit from optimisation. It would probably be easy for gardenponds.com to get to number 1 position. So why not? The answer may be that the web designer does not know how to or no-one is paying attention to the SERPs.

Pondmarket.com could also overtake patio-garden-ponds.com in my opinion.

The probable reason at least two of these sites became top performers was almost certainly the amount of incoming links or high link popularity. This does not however explain why patio-garden-ponds.com ranked number 1 with only 10% of the quantity of links the web pages in positions 2 and 3 had. We will delve into this in more detail a bit later for the time being just take note that this kind of analysis is important to get a leg up the SERPs tables and therefore higher visitor numbers to your site.

Incoming links using the words of Google developers Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page indicate relevance and to a lesser degree quality of the web page. PageRank on the other hand indicates the quality of a web page. Googles main aim has always been to deliver quality results.

These two concepts are very important in our attempts to rank highly on a SERP.

In general on-page factors have an unknown but finite limit to their ranking value in terms of SERPs whilst PageRank does not. For this reason the best optimised page in the world will lose out to a high PageRank Page with large link numbers and only minimal attempts at optimisation for keyword use. This we know from reading the research paper published by Brin and Page in 1998.

We will leave PageRank until later and just discuss anchor links and anchor links text for the time being. Just bear in mind PageRanks critical importance especially for highly competitive searches as you read on. PageRank is a trade mark term of Google.