Stay tuned for tips and hints for website owners to increase the targeted traffic to their sites, bringing more sales leads.

You won’t need to touch a line of code either, just fire up your web browser and a word processer, and get ready!

The problem for a small business owner considering employing a Search Engine Optimisation company to try to improve their search engine rankings is that there’s no instant results. The results take time (sometimes many months), which can be hard to swallow for a business which is hawkishly watching the bottom line.

There are, however, potentially great long term benefits to the small business-person to undertaking this sort of campaign versus traditional advertising. The most obvious benefit is the longevity of the results.

Most traditional advertising methods are one hit propositions. You buy ad space in the Advertiser newspaper, you’ll hit people who happen to be reading the paper that day, people who happen to read the page upon which your ad appears, and your ad is of benefit only to people within the above two groups who happen to want or need your products or services.

The same goes for television advertising, billboads, magazines, pretty much any advertising medium you care to think of. The obvious exception to this is the yellow pages, but even that is a one year only thing. Once your year is up, you need to pay (handsomely) again to have your ad placed in the directory the following year.

A search Engine Optimisation campaign, on the other hand, can have much more long-lasting results. Assuming that you business already has a website which can be easily modified, spending six or seven hundred dollars up-front, then a small monthly charge for ongoing tweaking, can see you ranking in the top ten for many terms related to your business.

The outstanding benefit of having high search engine rankings for the terms your customers are using to find your products or services, is that the people who come to your site via the search engines are actually searching for the products and services which you provide.

The minimum charge for a full colour ad in the Saturday Edition of Adelaide’s Advertiser is $1,100 (which only appears once, remember). Now of course you’d expect a boost in sales with this ad, but what about next week? Nada, Nothing, Zilch, if you don’t pay the $1,100 again.

Given the above scenario, that six or seven hundred dollars is looking awfully good. If your business makes $100 per sale of the products or services you offer, and you receive only one visitor per day to your website as a result of your Search Engine Optimisation campaign, and out of those one (extremely well targeted) visitors a day, one person buys from you per week, you’re making $100 a week you weren’t making before.

At $400 per month, you’ll recoup your cost in a couple of months once your website is ranking well, and making considerably more than the small monthly maintenance fee you’d be paying for the ongoing tweaking of your site.

Today, we’re going to talk about a way you can “juice up” the links you get from other sites, so that you achieve maximum benefit from those incoming links.

We’re going to be using something called anchor text to increase the value in the eyes of the search engines of the links we’re procuring. An example of this is the link above - see how I’ve made the link text (Anchor Text) the subject of the page that the link is pointing to? That’s what’s called using anchor text.

When a link which comes into your site uses anchor text relevant to the subject of the page it’s pointing to, the search engines give that link a little “boost” as far as ranking that page for the subject it’s about.

This is because the search engine realises that the link is relevant to the page it is linking to. A small part of me dies inside every time I see a link with the anchor text “Click Here”, all I see is a wasted opportunity to pass some valuable extra link juice to the site the person is linking to.

An example of the power of anchor text is in a practical joke carried out in 2003 by thousands of American University students. The students all linked to the Whitehouse web page of George W Bush, using the anchor text “Miserable Failure”, from their blogs and websites.

Even though the official Whitehouse Biography page of GWB did not contain the term “misarable failure”, that page shot to number one in the google rankings for that search term. This technique became known as Google Bombing, and was used to a lesser extent with other politicans and public figures.

Google has now fixed the problems in its algorythm which allowed this practical joke to take place, although it does underline the importance of anchor text in the Search Engines ranking arsenal.

So knowing that anchor text is important, how do we apply this to the last couple of articles we’ve read about link building?

Firstly, let’s look a how we can apply this to article submission. In the post about article submissions, I talked about the Resource Box which we are allowed to place at the bottom of our articles, which contains a quick Bio and a link to our website. in this case, we want to make sure we use anchor text in the Resource box when we link to our site. Take as an example the resource box I posted in the last article:

Stuart Drew is an Adelaide Based Search Engine Optimisation professional, with five years of industry experience helping clients improve their Search Engine Rankings. Stuart is the owner of ChilliCool Adelaide SEO and Website Design, an Australian firm which provides affordable premium internet services to small to medium  businesses.

Note the anchor text? I’m trying to get my website to rank highly for the terms “Adelaide SEO” and “Adelaide Website Design”, so my anchor text it perfect. (Well, nearly perfect - if it was perfect it would be something like “ChilliCool Adelaide SEO and Adelaide Website Design” - but from a readability point of view, that just looks ridiculous, and we should never sacrifice end-user usability for search engine optimisation.)

Now on to our other example - leaving comments on blogs.

This one’s a bit tricky, as we can fall foul of over-zealous blog owners if we don’t approach this the right way. If you read the article the other day about leaving comments on blogs, you would’ve seen that there are four sections we need to fill out when we leave a comment on a blog. They are:

• Your Name
• Your Email Address
• Your website address (Sometimes called URI or URL)
• Your Comment

We need to understand a little of how blogs work to get our comment link to use our preferred anchor text. The spot that you fill out with your name, will actually be the anchor text used once your comment is posted to the blog. So for example, if I were to use the name Stu, the anchor text for my link would be exactly that - Stu. Not great for search engine optimisation purposes (but far better than no link at all!)

What we don’t want to do when we leave a comment on a blog, is use a name like “Adelaide mortgage loans no doc low doc zero application fee loans“. That just looks spammy, and will more than likely get your comment deleted by the owner of the blog you’re commenting on.

We’re looking for something in the middle, we want our own name to appear, so that if we get into commenting conversations with other commenters on that blog, they know our name, but we want to get some anchor texty goodness in there as well.

So how do we do this? I’ve found the best way is to use something like this: Stu the Adelaide SEO. It says who I am, it says what I do, and I get my anchor text, all in four words. I’d suggest you try to keep to a five work maximum when using this method:

{Name} the {location} {keywords}

So you might be John the Noarlunga Brickie, Susan the Modbury Housing Conveyancer, etc etc

So there it is, a simple, yet extremely powerful way to juice up your incoming links. Remember though, a link with poor anchor text is still far better than no link at all. So if you have the opportunity to grab a link, but can’t get the anchor text you want, grab it anyway, they all count!

Blog commenting is not the only way you can get free backlinks to your site, there are actually quite a few, and today we’re going to talk about writing and submitting articles to free article directories.

Article directories are websites which accept articles from publishers, which they place on their site. Whilst at first this might seem like a one way street - you give them free content for their website, and you get nothing in return, this is not the case.

The great thing about article directories is that they allow you to place a “resource box” at the bottom of your article. Think of this resource box as a place to put a short biography of yourself or your business, with a link back to your website.

The other great thing about writing articles for article directories is they those articles find their way all over the web. Most article directories have terms of service which allow other website owners to republish their (your) articles as long as they leave the resource box intact.

This can happen in two ways. Other article directories pick up and republish your articles, or bloggers/website owners republish them with your link in the resource box.

First, let’s talk about writing the actual article. There are a couple of tracks you can take here - write the article yourself, or pay someone else to write it for you. Whilst it’s true that nobody knows your industry the way you do, so the best person to write the article is you, some people lack either the time, or writing skills to take on the task themselves.

To this end, you can contract the writing of your article out to a professional copy writer, from as little as $0.10 per word (a 500 word article (the minimum length for most article directories) will cost you around $50).

Once we have our beautifully crafted article in hand, we need to think about what we’re going to write in our Resource Box: We want to write a little about ourselves, a little about our business, and make sure to include a link back to our site. If I were to be writing a resource box for articles I was to submit promoting my Search Engine Optimisation business, I might write something like this:

Stuart Drew is an Adelaide Based Search Engine Optimisation professional, with five years of industry experience helping clients improve their Search Engine Rankings. Stuart is the owner of ChilliCool Adelaide SEO and Website Design, an Australian firm which provides affordable premium internet services to small to medium  businesses.

Now that we have our article and our resource box text in our hot little hand, we need to find some places to submit them.

Once again, you have two options here, you can hire a professional to do it for you (Submission to 200 article directories will cost less than $100), or do it yourself. If you choose to do the article submissions yourself, here’s a good list of article directories to start with:

1. EzineArticles

2. GoArticles

3. WebProNews

4. ArticleDashboard

5. SearchWarp

6. PubsACS

7. ArticleBase

8. Isnare

9. Buzzle

10. ArticleCity

11. IdeaMarketers

12. Site Reference

13. Article Alley

14. Web Source

15. Amazines

16. Submit Your Article

17. TheWhir

18. Excellent Guide

19. Directory Gold

20. Articles Factory

21. Content Desk

Keep in mind that submitting articles to article directories is not a quick fix ranking booster. It will take time for your articles to propagate across the web, and time for the search engines to take into account the new links when calculating your rankings.

If you have any questions, or would like help putting together an article submission plan, we’d love to hear from you to discuss your needs.

One of the things which will happen if you hire an SEO to help improve your search engine rankings will be that they will talk to you about getting links to your site (they should, anyway). They’ll talk about Organic Link Building, Reciprocal Links, Directory Submissions, and all sorts of stuff you’ve probably never heard about, nor need to know about.

Whilst I won’t go into judging the quality of sites as places you’d like to get links from here (that’s a post for another day), I’m going to talk about a really good way you can go hunt out places to put your link. The best thing about this kind of link is that you don’t even have to ask the other webmaster if you can have a link from his site. He wants you to put your link on his site, and here’s why:

I’m talking here about commenting on blogs relevant to your website’s subject. Blogs just like this one! (Links from relevant sites are looked upon more favourably by the search engines when determining the value of the links than links from irrelevant sites)

First, we’re going to work out what the main keyword of your site is. Let’s say for arguments sake that you are a Home Loan Broker in Adelaide (Shout out to Steve, who’s awesome new site will go live in a couple of days!). You main keyword might be “Home Loan”

Now we need to find blogs which are about Home Loans, we could just do a google search for Home Loan, but that doesn’t really give us what we want, as most of the top sites for those keywords won’t be blogs, so we can’t place a comment on them - we’re going to take advantage of what’s called a footprint. A footprint is something which a lot of sites have in common about their architecture.

Fortunately, the software that is by far the most popular blogging platform, Wordpress, has a built in footprint we can use to find Wordpress blogs.

If you look at the bottom of any Wordpress blog, you’ll generally see the following: “powered by WordPress”. We’re going to use this footprint to help google find relevant blogs for us.

Here’s what we’re going to type into google:

home loan “powered by wordpress”

Now we are going to sift through the results we get back from google, looking for blogs which allow us to leave comments.

Note (and this is important!) - Don’t spam these blogs. Don’t just leave a comment like “Great post, keep up the good work”. The owners of these sites are your peers, your site is about the same thing that theirs is about. You know their business - get involved in the conversation, in a productive way.

Now once we’ve found a blog which will allow us to leave comments, read the latest posts, and find something that you think that you can add to. You will see four boxes at the bottom of the comments - Enter your name, your email address, and your website address, then leave your comment.

Using this technique is a great way to build links from relevant sites, and it won’t cost you a cent. Who knows, you might even make some friends out of it.

Welcome to the Adelaide SEO blog. My name is Stuart, and I’ll be your host.

The Adelaide SEO Blog is the blog of ChilliCool Adelaide Search Engine Optimisation and Website Development.

The is the “less formal” side to the ChilliCool business… Here we’ll be talking about interesting things that are going on in the world of Search Engine Optimisation, who’s doing what, and most importantly, simple tips and tricks that you, as a website owner, can put into practice, which cahn help your rise your website in the search engines for the terms that people are actually using to search for your products or services.

So hang around, or subscribe to our RSS feed, and maybe, just maybe, we all might learn something!