What is more important in optimizing the internal linking

The first thing, to be considered, is the primary text for internal link must be those keywords which are actually related to the page they are linked with. It is considered as one of the primary tips for optimizing the internal links to improve the ranking of a website on any search engine results.

Tips that can bring favorable outcome

· To use the internal links; linking of bullet lists to all other pages of a specific website is a good option. This brings excellent results.

· It is very important to set a limit on the outgoing links of the site. This brings the opposite effect into action and may decrease the ranking of a website on search engine rather than increasing it.

· The footers as well as sitemaps must be considered because they bring lot more favorable circumstances for the internal linking.

· Generally blogs are highly considered as too useful for the navigation of topics that are there on a site. The quality of content on the blogs must be related with the products that are there on the website for which a blog is written.

· Building some useful pages for products as well as keywords is another option that can work well. While building them it is better that correct keywords must be selected.

Things to consider

Initial link on the page must be correct. Generally what happen is that the top link on any webpage is highly regarded as the only link that most of the search engine considers and just because of this reason in case a person link to any other page multiple times then it must be ensured that the top link on any page must have the essential keywords that can help in getting a better ranking on a search engine.

Why consider breadcrumb for sub web pages is important

There is no doubt that the breadcrumb navigation is something that is highly considered as excellent for all the sub web pages. Generally the sub web pages are probably linked from primary navigation of a specific site. When these breadcrumb navigational links are incorporated the search engines generally finds it lot simple to place all sub web pages in the context. Also one can show the location of the web pages to the search engines and especially to the visitors with the help of these breadcrumb navigational links.

Getting better ranking on the search engines is something that can easily be achieved by optimization of internal linking and this task brings huge traffic on a website without much issues.

About the author: Brianne is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. Recently an article on gizmo watch attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on cellphone beat.

It allows you to make your company more visible. Additionally, it lets you convey your sales pitch to a global audience.

Do you need more convincing? Check out these latest statistical facts.

• On average, a person spends around 7 hours and 45 minutes on his or her Facebook page each month. (Source Facebook statistics)

• If Facebook were a nation, it would rank third among the world’s largest countries. And, with around 901 million active users, as of April 2012, (source 3) it has a population twice bigger than that of the United States. (Source infographics)

• On the other hand, Twitter has over 140 million active users as of February 2012. (Source Mashable)

• There are over 340 million tweets in one day. (Source Mashable)

• YouTube has around 490 million active users generating an average of 92 billion page views every month (excluding those seen on other websites and on mobile phones). (Source Social Media Statistics)

• As of March 2012, Google+ has more than 100 million active members. (Source Larry Page)

Now, these are not the only amazing insights on social media. It would probably take several pages to list them all here. But, since we need to concentrate on the main topic – benefitting from it -, we have to continue with the next part…

Before anything else, you must be aware that you should not use any social media strategy as a substitute for online marketing. Instead, you have to consider it an addition to your existing methods. This way, you can put across your marketing message more effectively through targeted techniques. These usually include the following…

Social Media Optimisation for the Website

If you have an online business, you must also have a site, where you can promote your goods or services. While you can use search engine optimisation (SEO) to direct potential customers to it, you can take advantage of other means too. Since the idea is to combine social media marketing (SMM) and SEO, you can let a professional Web designer help integrate your webpages with buttons or icons (such as the ones on the image below), comment boxes, and rating icons (usually stars and thumbs).

Through these elements, you can encourage sharing and user engagement.

Social Media + Content Marketing

To carry out this strategy, the first thing you have to do is to come up with interesting and useful information through blog posts or e-newsletters. Then, urge your target audience to subscribe (to your newsletters) or comment (on your articles). You can also place buttons, which the users can click bringing them to your network profiles.

Social Media + SEO

One vital optimisation method fit for your social pages is keyword use. You can practise this by incorporating your profile bio, other important fields (space for additional information), and update posts with popular and relevant search terms. You can also link to your official website, blog site, and to authority sites or other social profiles.

Social Media + Online Advertising

Though not several potential customers are fond of pay-per-click and display adverts, it pays to put any of your profile page’s URL to your pop-up ads. You can also place buttons, which tell the users to “Follow”, “Share”, “Retweet”, or “Become a Facebook fan”. This strategy may be hard selling but some people actually click on the icons or links.

Social Media + Market Research

Using management or Webmaster tools, you can obtain vital data such as the number of users visiting your profile pages. You can also monitor comments and send automated replies. However, you should not depend entirely on these functions because you can learn more about your target customers if you interact with them by responding to comments or queries personally.

In addition, you can check out your competitors’ social pages to discover their SMM methods and determine if these are effective. Then, you can get an idea from their campaign to help you have an edge against other businesses.

So, do you think these techniques are easy?

Hmm, these tasks may seem tough at first. But with practise and assistance from experts, it will not be too hard to grab the attention of your potential customers. With that said, start improving your Facebook or Google+ page today.

Do you have one already? If you do not have a profile or fan page yet, now is the best time to sign up.

About the Author: Emma Tomlinson is the Head of Retail at Smart Traffic, a UK-based specialist company delivering organic SEO solutions to several companies across the globe. Emma on G+

The truth is that there are a few websites that have been innocently hit by this update. I’ve had contact with a few of them and checked what they say – it would seem they are right and that actually this is not a “anti spam penalty” but rather “spam prevention update”. This is to say that rather than a website receiving a penalty (a few have, but only if its clear they bought thousands of commercial links) website ranking is being decreased because the websites that link to them have been downgraded in ranking and authority, thus removing authority and ranking from the given website.

So many directories have been hit, article website again (as with Panda), scraper websites (yay) and well generally low quality sites. Many small business websites had lots of links from those types of websites and so lots of niche markets are being shuck up by this update, hence the moaning from those SEO’s.

When I saw the below infographic over at submitinme, I knew I had to share it. It’s a great way to say this is what those SEO’s need to do to recover and in the future. Feel free to share it.

Do you have any tips on how to recover from Google Penguin?
Leave a comment and let us know!
_{Rockhopper Penguins by Unique Blog of Awesome}

In days gone by Search Engine submission was useful for new websites to give a little wave and say “hi, please take a look at me”, it then evolved to be used a little more towards look at this new page or “section I made, aren’t I great?” The answer was no, you are spamming search engines and crawlers.

Eventually, although the tool was and is still there it’s become near worthless, its a nice prod to search engines but pretty useless. Search engines will take into account your asking but it will also use what it normally does, search discovery.

Search Discovery is where a search engine spider / robot will follow a link from a website to a new or existing website – and then index that page. This is how modern search engines work and crawl the internet, spiders crawl across the links of the web to find content – thus making it a “web” of pages.

In addition to Search Discovery, search engine submission has been replaced by sitemaps. One of the first things a search engine will do is check your domain for a sitemap file. Once it’s found one it knows where your important pages are, when they were updated and about the architecture of your website. It can then decide which pages to crawl first, and move through your website indexing it over a period of time (relatively proportionate to the size of your website).

So, what’s my advice on search engine submission?

1. If you are a new website (new domain etc) then do a submission to Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu and a few directories.
2. If your website is not new, don’t bother submitting it again.
3. Ensure your sitemap is complete and up to date.
   Then submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing WT.
4. Go and learn how to link build.

The website has been designed to be as clean and elegant as possible, whilst fitting in with a recent brand design update. The colours around the website are chosen to reflect the high quality nature of Rhona’s jewellery. To complement this we’ve also used a brightly coloured background for product images, which draws the users attention and showcases the product itself.

Rhona Petrie is a jeweller and artist based in the East Lothian, near Edinburgh. Primarily working with Sterling Silver, Rhona is well known for her intricate jewellery designs and fantastic textured finished (such as this lovely silver brooch).

Rosslyn Chapel Motif Silver Brooch by Rhona Petrie

Get 10% Off – Now!!!

To celebrate the launch of RhonaPetrie.co.uk you can get 10% off everything on the website between May 10th and June 8th 2012.

To get 10% off simply enter the discount code “launch” at check out!

How to find the perfect gift

Whether you are looking to find the perfect birthday gift, Christmas present or anniversary gift, finding the perfect jewellery gift is simple on RhonaPetrie.co.uk.

1. Select a product from the homepage
   or
   Select Jewellery (or a category) from the top menu.
2. Use the “Price Filter” to refine the category.
3. Select an amazing piece of handcrafted jewellery.
4. If options are available, take your choice.
5. Add to Cart & Proceed to Checkout.
6. Don’t forget to use the discount code above.

From a Search Engine Optimisation view point the website contains Rhona’s Blog which will be updated on a regular basis, new jewellery products will be added on a regular basis, all product pages use “rich product formating” (for rich snippets), several social interaction points and product cross-selling (interlinking).

In addition to the above the website uses the All in One SEO Plugin and the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. The website also includes a twitter stream and will also shortly be integrated with Rhona’s Facebook Page. Finally, the website uses Google Analytics, is registered with GWT and BWT, as well as with Google Merchant Centre.

You can also follow Rhona on twitter @RhonaPetrie

—

Update: 14/5

Buy Handcrafted Jewellery on Facebook

We’ve now launched a section within Rhona’s Facebook Page which allows users to view the online store via facebook. You can view products, select options, add to cart, and go to check out. You are then transferred securely to the web store for checkout via paypal.

We’d be interested to know what you think of this addition in terms of how user friendly it is, how easy it is to find a product and whether you would actually buy through this kind of system. Also if you’ve any marketing thoughts based on this facebook app let us know.

Will ICO become the Cookie Monster?

Before we begin we need to consider the question…

What is a Cookie?

For most users of the web cookies go unnoticed, or are a nice snack alongside a brew. But in terms of the web a “cookie” is a small piece of code a website sends to a browser to store little snippets of data, it can be anything from what is in your shopping cart to which web pages you’ve visited to what you search for or which websites you are shown.

Now there are two types of cookie, first party and third party. First party are those dropped by the website itself, these are generally under this directive accepted as being fine. Third party are those which are used by the website but come from another service such as Google Analytics and NOT the website itself.

To understand the law we need to think about…

Where did the EU Cookie Directive start?

It appears that the EU Cookie Directive was born of user complaints about third party cookies being used to serve adverts across the web, the most popular service for this is Google Adsense.

To ensure that adverts are relevant Google (in this example) would use cookies about the website the advert is served on, it then classes the topic of that webpage as being a vote from your IP to that topic. Then when you visit another website or blog you may see an advert relating to that topic. It is this “cross pollination of cookies” which upsets some users across the web. It is not though cookies for adverts which some people are upset about, there are a few though, it is the other data which can be transferred via cookies and how this data is used. After all you are at the whim of the website owner and developer who installs the third party cookies (or first if not essential to the service) as to whether the cookies and services are reputable or otherwise.

And that is why the EU wants websites to collect permission for those non-essential cookies. Basically if your website can work without those cookies (analytics, adverts etc) then you must collect permission for those cookies being used.

But the website still works so…

What’s the problem with the EU Cookie Directive?

The problem comes in a few forms. First, how do you collect permission without hindering the website experience for your visitors? Second, can you get use implicit permission or do you need explicit permission, and is this for some or all types of cookie? Third, will this make for an uneven playing field in the UK, Europe and across the world for business, will your business suffer due to this directive?

The answers are fairly hard to come by. The reason for the failure to give a direct answer here is that we just don’t know the answer. The Cookie Law was written by what appear to be technically inept people, lawyers who don’t know what cookies really do. This means the law is so broad and unclear of “what you need to do to comply” that each country is approaching the law in a different way and some EU countries are ignoring the law. What is also unclear about the law is whether websites served from servers outside of the EU must comply directly, so for say Google.co.uk will that need permission for anything but search and then be impossible to collect info about which search you’ve used and therefore it will damage that business? If so that website will be served from US or other servers and may avoid the law giving it upper-hand on its competitors, as suddenly it doesn’t need to comply?

Using the above example it’s easy to see why lots of businesses are crying out for guidance on this matter, are businesses about to take a hit for implementing an explicit solution asking for permission whilst other businesses in that niche market are not implementing anything?

The Solution the the Cookie Question?

For now, in my opinion, the best solution is simple. Invest in your privacy policy.

My advice is to update, or write your first, Privacy Policy. Ensure you have a list of the cookies your website uses, from essential to non-essential. Explain where each cookie comes from and why it is used on your website and how it helps your user. Make clear how a user can access such data also. A good example of what standards you need to meet in your Privacy Policy is ICO.gov.uk, who also use the next possible solution for permission.

However the above solution does not gain permission of the user in an explicit way, alone.

The explicit permission is at the top of ICO.gov.uk where you will see a tick box asking for your permission to track you. This is one possible solution.

Another solution is a pop up box solution, the type used by AllAboutCookies.org (another great resource for further reading on this directive). There are others of a similar elk to AAC’s solution provided by Wolf Software, but that implementation is simple and fairly easy to follow.

There are other solutions also that are not pop up’s and not just like ICO’s. However, wolf software does display a few different ways you can implement explicit solutions. Do take a look, there is no real one-size solution to this problem.

Finally, I want to finish on a little tip. It is doubtful that ICO or DCMS will implement this law in all its power even once 26 May rolls around. The law became law in 2011 and ICO gave the UK 1 year to find a solution, since then the above solutions have appeared. Across Europe others have appeared but none as clear as the above. Also many EU countries as mentioned above have given grace or ignored the law.

What I believe ICO will likely do is ask the “big boys” to comply and find a way to is agreeable to all. In the web industry we hoped implicit would do for most websites using normal things like analytics and this could be a tick box in a browser during set up, problem solved, it would leave other “none normal” services to collect permission explicitly. The problem is that the browsers have not done this, and it’s doubtful they will and its really unclear as to whether it would meet the laws requirements. It too is unclear whether 2 computers from 1 IP, or even 2 browsers on one machine both need to say yes or not, and it’s further complicated by how mobile browsers will deal with the problem as they all in some way use javascript as a solution (with the exception of a browser solution). This is not a problem that will disappear and questions will be asked for a long time yet.

Final advice, get your privacy policy up to scratch and then watch what the big boys do.

So looking back how did the Lycos 30 day challenge go?

Well if you want more detail than this summary do pop over to read the full journal for the lycos 30 day challenge here. But if you want a quick summary and a quick breakdown of the results look no further than this post.

The one goal I wanted to achieve was to find out whether the Lycos search engine was actually any good and better than what people currently thought. The other aim was to talk with @Lycos to see whether some things could be improved. So…

Is Lycos A Good Search Engine?

The truth of the matter is that Lycos as a search engine is a mixed bag. It has some good results and some bad ones, that is pretty much because it is at the whim of the Yahoo Search API it uses. This updates their search index but are the same results that led to Yahoo turning to Bing powering search a while back. The search is heavily focused on the USA even when searching from .co.uk – this can be a little jarring until you remember to put “uk” at the end of each search, which seems to fix this issue a little.

The results are fairly accurate and digging into the top 10 results of each search it’s clear why they have good rankings and why some are better than others – but there are still some odd results in there and spammy websites appearing in 2nd or 3rd.

Once you get past the first page of results its a matter of chance whether you are going to get some good results or really bad ones, that said normally what you want as with most search engines is on the front search results page.

Looking beyond the search at the whole package is the best way to view Lycos, I must admit. The design is pretty clear and with a site built to modern standards which is responsive, serving the same site and not another site for mobile devices. It is quick loading and after some initial bugs in image search I can’t fault the mobile experience. Now…

Will I Keep Using Lycos?

The short answer is that Yes I will continue to use Lycos, but not as my default search engine. Lycos will become my secondary engine ahead of Bing and others. The results it gives are good enough to warrant a round of applause but need to be more focused on the UK for .co.uk searches really.

I love the mobile search being the exact same results, this is what I want and expect from Google in the future. I do not want to just be served mobile websites which actually look a little crap compared to normal sites which are well designed, when I use by smart phone. I sometimes think Google is blind to it’s own operations sometimes, search and android… not brother and sister I thinks.

Well done @Lycos and thanks for making this a real conversation.

Influential Twitter users can be segmented into two categories:

• The rich, the famous, the popular – Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and celebrities worldwide. In this case, becoming influential is cakewalk. People find you and retweet your tweets. All you need to do is keep tweeting.
• You – blog owner, WAHM, entrepreneur, writer, startup etc.

This post is about you. Here are five steps that will help “you” become an influential Twitter user:

Have a niche

Ever heard the old proverb, “Jack of all trades, master of none”? Twitter has millions of users with different interests, ethnicities, and personas. It is impossible to reach out to every single one of them.

Instead, find a subject to discuss and promote. For example, let’s say you want to be an expert on cookies, but there are already a million Twitter users talking about cookies. Choose a niche like peanut butter cookies or sugar cookies.

Find influential users in your niche

Tools like List Atlas and Tweetfind help you find influential Twitter users in your niche. This in turn helps you build social engagement – take time to read their tweets, talk to them about their business, retweet their tweets, and send them links that will interest them.

Make an effort to learn about people you follow

The “suggested list” feature may provide a list of people Twitter thinks you should follow, but follow them only if you have something in common or if following them will increase your influence.

Always spend time in reading Twitter bios and a few tweets from people you’re planning to follow or want to tweet to. This helps in personalizing your tweets and increases your chances of receiving a reply.

Everyone likes it when you spend extra time understanding what they offer.

Invest time and effort in creating useful tweets

Don’t tweet about everything under the sun. Sure, it’s nice to know you’re going shopping this weekend, but how do you expect your Twitter followers to use this information? Unless you’re a fashionista, this bit of information doesn’t help anyone.
If you’ve run short of blog posts to share, start a conversation by asking your followers a question. Or even better, if you’re an expert at something, answer their questions. Doing this will get you more retweets and followers, thus increasing your influence.

Strike a conversation with your followers and people you follow

If you find an interesting tweet, retweet it and start a conversation around it. Not only will the original poster be thankful, they’ll make it a point to follow you!

Like any other social media channel, you can increase traffic to your blog and website with Twitter – all it needs is a little extra time and effort. Craft interesting tweets, retweet tweets from influential users, and provide valuable information to your followers.

About the author: Joe Linford writes on behalf of social shopping sites www.broadbandgenie.co.uk and www.crowdstorm.co.uk, who help consumers learn more about everything from iPhones to fridges!

Are they all just being a little stupid, jumping on the bandwagon and actually being the sheep of the web? Answer: Yes.

What is a Search Update?

Before I delve into this subject to deeply I want to explain what an update is, why it’s important to keep track of them and why they can get some SEO’s into a flap.

An Update is at it’s most basic form a change to the formula (or parts of said formula) used to give each webpage a search ranking. From this ranking you get listed on search results pages. If you want to know more about how SEO works check out this video.

Updates from Google and Bing are many and often, indeed its believed Google will roll out close to 500 updates each year. Occasionally though, a bunch of updates will form together to create a larger update and these often have names like Venice, Panda and now Penguin. More often than not the updates are named after someone in the Google search team, I am not sure about Penguin or Panda though.

When a Big update rolls out it can often cause a stir in the SEO communities across the web because in general a few % will be banished from search results, punished or just drop ranking – though it’s likely just as many will gain from a given update. The Panda Update in 2011 for example downgraded lots of article websites and the worth of the links they gave and so lots of websites lost decent rankings and so lots of moaning ensued. So there you have it, that is what an update is.

Meet Penguin, Google’s Latest Update

On April 24th Google rolled out Penguin, an update / tweak to the algorithm to cut down on what it called web spam. Note: this is not the “over-seo update” @mattcutts referred to at south by south west earlier in the month.

In this update the aim is simple: to removed spam websites which are being used to manipulate search rankings.

The idea is sound and has done well in cutting the web spam seen by many. I snook out of my Lycos 30 day challenge for 5 mins to try a few tests and found that sites with 50 links saying the same thing at the bottom of a page removed, I saw link directories gone and I saw scraper sites gone for the most part. For me this update has worked well, none of my seo clients have been hit by this and nor would I expect them to be.

However, for a tiny proportion of websites (as with Panda) the update has caused update due to lowering of rank. In an even smaller amount of cases these are genuine websites and Google’s Matt Cutts admits that. Matt issues a tweet (below) which links to a form where you can tell @Google why you think you’ve wrongly been hit by the update, it will be reviewed and you could see the update reversed for your site or at least ranking restored.

If you know a site affected by algo update that you don’t think should be affected, we made a form to provide feedback: goo.gl/nt3Pz

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 26, 2012

But be warned such a link could also trap you if you are a spammer. Using the form would mean a manual review and if it’s decided you are spam or a spammer you could end up even worse off. You’ve been warned.

Moving the Goal Posts

If you’ve owned a website for sometime or are an SEO who has been in the field for sometime you will know that Google is forever moving the goal posts. You will also know lots of SEO’s are likely to moan across the web about how they were hit by this or that, but actually if you look into what they say it was fair they were hit by the update.

The solution to not being knocked down by these updates from Google, Bing or even Facebook is to “be good”. Do not go building stupid numbers of links on bad websites, crap forums, doing vast amounts of pointless commenting on blogs, buying links etc. But you should build great content, build a great website structure, build good solid links that will last and of course interact with consumers on social media.

What are your thoughts on Google Panda?

Building Solid Links - img src Small World, Flickr

Although in an ideal situation, everything should be organic – purely based on the slow and steady growth of your website’s popularity, but in reality one needs to leverage the opportunity to the optimal level. There is no harm in projecting your brand in such a manner that it works best to enhance your presence and increase back linking. This, in other words, shall be termed as your Link Building strategy.

So, besides factors like:

1. Basic awareness of market, norms, and practices
2. Analysis of competitor strategy
3. Regular analysis of your strategy

- There are other major sections that are very important.

Broadly Speaking – The Linked Content And The Quality Of Back Links.

The Linked Content is the content to which the back links are pointed at. Things to keep in mind are:

1. You Must Vary Your Anchor Text

Which are the terms that the user is using to search for information on the internet? On a more professional note, is your keyword target correct? As professionals, it’s important to keep this information in mind. The anchor text is what links your content to other pages and plays an important role in building your back link network. So, look for the right terms and ink to them; don’t just link to one anchor text.

2. You Must Not Vary Your Anchor Text Too Much

Taking it further form the above point, be careful not over do the number of keywords that can link to. Over linking to a varied number of anchor texts can lead to a dilution of your efforts in a way that you don’t appear on top SERPs for any of the keywords that you’re targeting. Hence, depending on your needs, targeting a limited but focused set of anchor texts is the best approach.

Also, some strategists suggest, after the business grows, one can begin to increase the number of keywords and make such strategic changes.

3. Create Great Quality Content Which Gets Good Organic Support Too

And the most important, create content that people would love to read and share. The social media networks are on their high and this is the best time to get people to be your brand ambassadors! As long as you give them great content, they’ll go ahead and do that; in an entirely organic manner.

Good quality content pulls a lot of backlink simply based on its nature!

The Quality If Back Links

After content comes the quality of the links that come to your site.
What are the sources of links? Authenticity? Value?

4. Don’t build too many No-Follow links

The problem here is as evident in the title. The bots read ‘Nofollow’ as no recommendation; which means they turn a blind eye to the mention. What’s the point of connecting like this? You might have a 1001 such associations and still no ranking on SERP because they do not count in the web rankings.

5. Good Links

This is simply the relevant links. The links that add value to your content and that have a significant presence.

6. Bad Neighborhoods – Keep Away

Porn sites, spam sites, illegal drugs, websites with pirated content – if they are linking to you, there’s a problem.

The search engines are very smart. They view these sites as ‘bad neighborhoods’ or zones; the fact that bad zones are linking to you is not a good sign. Your website will also be categorized as one with in appropriate content. Site penalization is possible. So, try not to fall into the trap.

7. Avoid Paid Links

Firstly, this isn’t a right practice. And secondly, the link quality suffers beating the very purpose for which the linking has been done.

You might end up being associated to irrelevant sites; at the end of the day, it’s not just numbers, it’s also quality that matters.