The ‘anchor text’ of inbound links has been one of the key tenets of SEO for many years now. In a nutshell: the text that people use in the actual link when linking to you, is seen as an indicator of the relevance of your page for that phrase.
For example: if someone links to your page about ‘personalised baby blankets‘, and they use the words personalised baby blankets as the link itself, Google receive a strong indication that your page may actually be about that topic.
Of course, ‘savvy’ (ahem) webmasters and SEOs have abused this relevancy signal for almost as long, tending to generate very similar anchor text over and over again when building links.
Google are now very publicly tweaking their algorithm to devalue over-zealous and unnatural link anchor text, in the ongoing attempt to improve search results quality.
It’s easy to drown in numbers when looking at all the available data in Google Analytics. Therefore setting up a useful, usable dashboard for the key performance metrics for your business is essential.
The guys at Portent have a great post on the perfect Google Analytics dashboard. Not only info on how to set it up and what kind of data you should have in there, but also a couple of instant downloads of such dashboards, already set up and ready to use in your Google Analytics account.
The new design certainly has more impact, with larger photos and a generally more engaging feel. The navigation is now customisable too.
Dare we say it looks more Facebook…?
Find out more on the Google blog. Expect to see the new design rolled out across all Google+ accounts over the next few days. We can see the new design in several of our Google+ accounts already.
You’ll likely have seen ‘rich snippets’ in Google’s search results before. These are extra bits of information that Google pop into search results to provide more information about each result.
For example:
If the search result is an article, there might be a photo of the author, with a link to his/her Google Profile.
If the search result is a product, there might be a 5-star rating with an indication of how many reviews it’s had.
If the search result is for a local business, it might feature their location and a link to Google Maps and their Google Places listing page.
Rich snippets don’t appear without some work on the part of your developer though. In most cases extra code is required to get these rich snippets to appear.
However, it’s well worth the effort. Searchers are much more likely to click on search results that feature these extra ‘rich snippets’ of information. An article, for example, that features a photo of the author next to it stands out a great deal more than the other results without a photo. It appears to have more authority and therefore trust.
Here’s an example from a client of ours, Mike Thomas from DebtWizard:
Whether booking a holiday or buying a cooker, we all at some point or another have turned to Google or an appropriate review website to find out what others think. After all, the social proof provided by other people is often the strongest influence on deciding to buy.
Some of our clients have actively courted customer reviews, by signing up for third party customer review sites such as Trustpilot. Trustpilot particularly encourages customers to leave reviews, and our clients’ experiences of the service (and others like it) has been entirely positive.
On the odd occasion a customer has left a slightly negative review, it’s been a great chance to dive straight in, apologise for the issue and publicly offer to put the issue right. The response to this has been fantastic, with the same customer usually replying back with great glee about the personal service they’ve just received. The beauty of this, of course, is that other potential customers see.
We’re big fans of SEOMoz. Their blog is always chock full of industry leading advice, and their suite of tools (the keyword difficulty tool and the Open Site Explorer) see some particularly heavy usage at Woof Towers.
Always pushing forward, they’ve just announced the addition of a new Social Analytics component to their Pro tools for subscribers. Looking forward to giving this a run out today.
The words ‘duplicate content’ are bandied about with, well, gay abandon in SEO circles it seems. It seems to be one topic that is often totally misunderstood, even by SEO professionals. Rumours about the ‘penalties’ of duplicate content are particularly rife. We spend a great deal of our time as consultants debunking these myths.
If you’re confused about duplicate content (on your site and outside of your site), you could do worse than read SEOMoz’s in-depth resource on the subject: what it is, how it happens, how to diagnose it and how to fix it.
We’re big fans of Raven’s SEO tools here at Woof. The whole suite is really useful for a whole raft of SEO tasks: research, monitoring, tracking, etc.
Raven already boasts a nice suite of research tools but if I’m honest, I’ve always found them just a little lacking. They always seemed to fall slightly short of being really useful.
We’ve been having a play with the beta and have to say: it’s very impressive and more than fills the gaps we’d previously found with their research tools.
