Affiliate Lounge » SEO

The power of the “ANCHOR TEXT”

Phillip van Coller — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:58:46 +0000

I never really realized the power in the anchor text in your backlinks until I was scooping round a bit. I used to run a website Secunda.co.za which is a local town website. One of my partners bought it in 1998 which is a real long time back…

In that time (the 90s) they started building websites for people all over (which is real ugly) and all the websites had a link back to this town website Secunda.co.za.

So the other day I was looking at a couple of websites built in that time and I saw the backlinks which were mostly images with “alt” in the image tags. All the links pointed to Secunda.co.za and another website and the anchor text was “club Internet” and “club Internet link”.

“Club Internet” you might think! Well it was in the 90s so to have internet was like being in a club, very small.

This is what shocked me:

The Secunda website ranks #1 – #2 in google south africa for this phrase and there is NO text like this inside the whole website! I mean none! No Club Internet here!

I was truly amazed with this, I have underestimated the power of the ANCHOR TEXT. I am now experimenting with anchor text to this blog, “affiliate marketing”. If all goes well I will be ranking #1 in google south africa with the next pagerank update.

Well, let’s see…

So how does Search Engines work?

Phillip van Coller — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:51:50 +0000

Since the start of the net search engines evolved from one type to another. Today there are a few types of search engines named:

Crawler Based Search Engines
Meta Search Engines
Human Powered Search Engines
Pay for Performance Search Engines

Crawler Based Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

Exactly what the word says, they crawl the web using what they call robots or spiders. They continually follow links from websites to other websites and then again links to other websites… When they visit a website they look for all the on-site links and saves it into an Index.

When a search is done using that search engine your pages that was indexed will be displayed in the search. The position/ranking of your pages is determined by a lot of factors including relevance, keywords, title, description, content and backlinks (links pointing from other websites to yours).

Meta Search Engines

Examples: www.metacrawler.com, www.dogpile.com

These are search engines that gathers listings from other search engines, rather than using its own resources and tools.

Human Powered Search Engines

Examples: Dmoz.org, www.sabest.co.za

These are typically directories where manual submitting is applied. You as the webmaster needs to select a category and enter all your website’s information manually. In most cases the directory editors validate and review websites before accepting, so in this case it does matter how professional and resources full your website is.

These directories is important for your pagerank and to get indexed when you start up a website. Crawler based engines such as Google.com regularly index these human powered directories and you need to get found.

Pay for Performance Search Engines

Examples: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn.com

This is typically a PPC (pay per click) module that is merged with most search engines. You can easily rank higher than your competitors without doing any Search Engine Optimization by paying a per click or flat fee.

For you as a website owner your main focus must be to get high ranking in crawler based sites. Why?

Cause the most users use them and it’s totally free!

Test your SEO skills…

Phillip van Coller — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:56:01 +0000

So how good are you with Search Engine Optimization?

Well SEOMOZ.org developed the mother of all SEO Expert Quizzes to determine your expertise in this area. Take some time and take the test at SEO Quiz and let us know what’s your results.

I will post my own results in the comments (Just need to get some time to do the quiz)

So how does Search Engines work?