• Your navigation text links
• Your breadcrumb links
• Subject area links
• Individual page links

You can use all these links to strategically increase your keyword density and improve your search engine rankings.

Navigation links

Some people are dead against using images as your navigation links but if you use the ALT attribute of the image tags and use the right text, it’s same as using the anchor text. But the point is, you can use your navigation to create the right keyword density by using appropriate anchor text. Through your navigation, if you link to your web designing services page by using “Web Designing Services” as your anchor text it is much better than simply using an image without the ALT attribute.

Breadcrumb links

Breadcrumb links are navigation links that appear at the top of the page as your visitor first clicks in a category, then a sub-category and then a link. For example, view this breadcrumb navigation: Web Designing >> Free Web Templates >>  Template Name. All the expressions in the above mentioned breadcrumb navigation contain relevant keywords.

Subject area links

Content websites having information on varied subjects can use those subject names as anchor text and increase link-based SEO relevance. For instance a website publishing SEO information can have interlinking as a separate subject and then link to that section from various pages with interlinking as the anchor text.

Individual page links

These are the most important links in terms of interlinking because they directly link to the pages. These can be your main navigation pages being referred to from your inner pages, or some support pages that don’t need a place in the navigation scheme but supply small chunks of information as and when needed.

The interlinking helps the search engine spiders navigate your website and evaluate it in a realistic manner, according to the keywords and phrases you use as anchor texts.

Have great content

Your website content is the foremost element that affects your search engine rankings once the search engines start noticing your website. After all people come to your website to consume content, in whatever form it exists. Have quality content on your website and have plenty of it.

Do proper keyword research before developing your content

It helps you generate better content if you know what keywords you want to focus on. If after generating scores, or worse, hundreds of pages, you realise that you haven’t optimised your content for the right keywords you’ll need a major revamp, incurring you lots of expense, effort, and of course business loss. There are lots of free and commercial research tools available on the Internet that you can use to find the right keywords for your website.

Create SEO-friendly URLs

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-keywords-here.html is an SEO-friendly URL but http://www.yourdomain.com/page2.html is not. Although it is not necessary — it does help sometimes — to have your keywords in your domain name, the search engines do look for your keywords in your URL. Also, some people don’t insert their own anchor text and post your hyperlinked URL as it is, so even in that case your keywords automatically appear as the anchor text of an inbound link.

Use proper anchor texts in internal linking

Internal linking is very important because it creates a web of links under your domain and when the bots visit your website there is a less chance of any link being left uncrawled. Use your keywords and key phrases as anchor texts so the search engines know, one, that these keywords are important to warrant a dedicated link, and two, what is the context of the pages they are leading to.

Blog regularly

Blogging is not just an activity these days, it’s a necessity. It helps you build a dedicated community around your field. From an SEO point of view, most blog posts, if well-written, are very quickly indexed by the search engines. If you stick to your niche and write regularly, you soon begin to rank higher for your keywords. Once your blog is ranked higher, your business link on your blog too will get the benefit of being linked by a highly ranked website

Get links from other websites

Do not just depend on the search engines to get traffic: include other websites in your SEO strategy too. This will not only send you quality traffic from those websites, it’ll also give you an SEO boost, provided those websites are “respected” by the search engines. Make sure the incoming links from these websites carry your keywords as anchor text. Also try to see that all incoming links are voluntary, that they are there due to the overall quality of your content.

Commit yourself and be patient

SEO is a long drawn battle if you haven’t got hundreds of thousands of bucks to spend on it. It’s a slow process and the more attention you pay to the smaller things, the better are your chances of getting ranked higher by the search engines.

1. The SEO Consultant: The 5 most likely questions to be asked this week.
2. The Web Designer : The 5 most likely questions to be asked this week.
3. The SEO Content Writer: The 5 most likely questions to be asked this week.

Here is the first: The 5 most likely questions to be asked of an SEO consultant:

1] Are your SEO techniques Black Hat or White Hat and what do you think about the best SEO practices?

It is very crucial to know how your SEO consultant plans to get you the top rankings he or she promises you. Actually getting your web pages to the top 10 search engine results, to be frank, is not a big deal and there are numerous backdoor tactics to achieve this. The SEO consultants know these tactics as “black hat” tactics and most search engine companies have dedicated teams of search specialists to counter them. The black hat SEO tactics can get you good results very fast, but they also get your website banned by the search engines equally fast.

Ask your SEO consultant what practices he or she follows to improve your rankings. Are these practices standard, legitimate practices? Are these practices followed by all quality SEO consultants? Do all search engines endorse these practices?

2] What rankings can your SEO consultant guarantee?

Getting ranked well is a slow process and in fact, if you follow all legitimate SEO practices, it is a very slow process. If your SEO consultant can make all the right moves he or she can guarantee you a good placement because it’s all about creating the right design, creating the right content and creating the right buzz. But if an SEO company guarantees you a top ranking without all these, you must know that you should look somewhere else.

3] How does your SEO consultant get you incoming links?

The incoming links tell the search engines you have linkable content on your website and that means you have valuable content. The search engines use the incoming links for validation. Since they are a sign of validation, most links should be naturally gained and your SEO consultant should know that. He or she should know that simply exchanging links doesn’t work. To get quality incoming links you need to make your website link-worthy both in terms of presentation and content. If your SEO consultant tells you to create a link-exchange page, you can easily assume that he or she is not the right SEO consultant for you.

4] What level of reporting will your SEO consultant provide?

A proper reporting schedule helps both you and your SEO consultant because it gives you a time frame for every phase. Regular reporting keeps you abreast with the latest progress. How the website has been optimised, how the content is being generated and what changes are happening in the traffic trends; you should be able to know this as and when you want, or at a regular period.

5] What has been your SEO consultant’s previous performance?

Make sure your “experienced” SEO consultant is not starting his or her business with you as the first client. Although there is nothing wrong to be the first client (someone has to be) it helps if your SEO consultant has a good success track. Check for different keywords and phrases the previous websites were optimised for and see how they still fare. Not many will remain at the top forever, if the SEO practices were good, most websites remain on the first page or the second page and continue to be there.

I hope these questions will help you make up your mind before hiring a competent SEO consultant for your online business.

Next post: The Web Designer : The 5 most likely questions to be asked this week.

1] Does his or her content cater to search engines, human readers, or both?

If your SEO content writer is overly obsessed with getting your website to the first page of Google and doesn’t care much about what impact the content is going to make upon your human visitors, then your writer is not much of an SEO writer. Your SEO content writer must know that content is written for the humans. What’s the use of having nonsensical text and appearing among the top 10 search results if your visitors are going to leave within a few seconds? Well-written content automatically gets a higher ranking by the search engines.

2] Is your SEO content writer comfortable with your industry linguistics?

One needs a higher comfort level in order to use your keywords without seeming like using them repetitively. You can juggle six balls flawlessly only if you can comfortably juggle fewer balls. Ask your SEO content writer to provide you with a few writing samples where he or she can comfortably write your content using your keywords and key phrases and make sure the text doesn’t seem “spammy”.

3] Is your SEO content writer a good copywriter too?

You need content for your website because you want to convey your message and convey it compellingly, with conviction. You want people to do business with you after reading your content. Your SEO content writer, while keeping the search engines in good humor, should be able to write convincingly, using the right words and phrases. The writing should represent your business philosophy and approach and the language should be suitable for your target audience.

4] How much your SEO content writer charges for revisions?

You need constant revisions in order to keep your content up-to-date, especially if it is time sensitive. You’ll need new content, and you’ll need old content re-written and they’ll both have different rates. You can keep all your options open if you know how much your SEO content writer will cost for ongoing work.

5] How has the previously written SEO content performed?

Look how the previous projects of your SEO content writer fare on the search engines? Do the pages for target keywords appear on the first or the second search results page? What is the success rate? No SEO content writer can have a 100% success rate because it all depends on how much competition the targeted keywords face but you can arrive at an average after evaluating a few projects.

Choose your SEO content writer carefully because he or she has the ability to make or break your business.

1] What web design and development tools does he or she use?

It’s not about using the most hip and trendy tools, it’s about using the right tools. For instance, if your web designer still lives in the era of Front Page you immediately know he or she is not the right person for you. GUIs create bloated source code and all decent designers hand-code their websites and use the graphical user interfaces merely for creating the initial layouts. Then ask him or her about creating the CSS layouts and why CSS layouts are better, in terms of search engine optimisation, than conventional layouts. Your web designer should also know the importance of creating fast loading web pages and shouldn’t resort to image manipulations to implement even simple design features.

2] How many websites has he or she previously designed?

It’s not necessary that your web designer should have had developed scores of websites prior to taking up your assignment, but it will help you a lot if you can go through a few websites previously created by your web designer. Professional work is a lot different from amateur work. His or her previous work helps you gauge his or her ability to create layouts and themes catering to different business branches. It matters what colors and typefaces are used to represent different emotions of the website.

3] Does your web designer publish a blog?

This doesn’t imply that all designers who publish blogs are great designers and those who don’t are lousy. To regularly publish a blog one has to interact a lot among the peer group, one has to keep abreast with the latest trends and technologies and one has to learn a lot. While blogging learning happens on its own. You simply cannot remain ignorant while blogging regularly about your profession. If your designer runs a successful blog, there is a great chance that he is a great designer too. But sometimes they are so busy blogging that they don’t have time for their professional commitments so yes, that can prove to be a downside.

4] Does your web designer search engine optimise the websites too?

This too is not necessary but your SEO efforts will get a big boost if your web designer has some SEO knowledge too, at least for the design phase. He or she should be aware that clean and light code is preferred by the search engines. The right tags should be present at the right places with the right information in them. He or she should know how to organise your website content so that your web pages are easily indexed by the search engines.

5] What’s the maintenance record?

A successful website is 1% design and development and 99% maintenance. Try to find out what is your web designer’s maintenance policy and how much it costs for regular maintenance. There are hundreds of tiny-winy things that can cut through a big chunk of your time and money if you don’t have someone to take care of your website. Whether it’s adding new content or changing the layout or altering the code of your online application it’s better that you have the same person or company that initially designed your website.

Choose your web designer as if you are choosing a construction company for your actual office. A bad web designing deal is a lot worse than not having a deal at all.

The last in this mini-series will be published tomorrow.

You can distribute articles for SEO purposes

I don’t mean to say you write articles only for SEO purposes: write articles to share knowledge. SEO is a just a beneficial by-product. Every website needs inbound links because search engines use the number of “valid” inbound links to evaluate your website and rank it accordingly. It is not the only factor but it is an important factor.

When people directly link to your website you cannot control what anchor text the other webmasters use. You can request them to change it but it is not practical to track every incoming link and then ask the webmaster to use the right anchor text. The best way is, submit articles that already have the right anchor text in the links.

Writing SEO articles

It goes without saying the articles should be highly useful and beneficial to the publisher — nobody is benevolent enough to publish your article just to show affection towards you. Although it depends on the publisher what HTML formatting he or she uses to publish your article, you should organise your article under various useful headings. Link to your pre-existing pages if only they add value (so you write your article in that way) to the current article and use the anchor text specific to your website or web page. At the end of the article use an interesting resource box text that makes people click on your link, and for that link use anchor text that is most apt for your website. Of course writing SEO articles deserves a complete, separate posts and I shall do that pretty soon.

Distributing SEO articles

You can distribute your SEO articles in many ways:

• Submit SEO articles to article directories: There are numerous SEO directories — free and commercial — where you can submit your articles. A good start is Ezine Articles. These directories then make these articles available to online publishers who are interested in publishing such article. Submit your articles under the most appropriate category so that you get the right exposure. Some of these article directories are highly ranked by the search engines and even if no other webmaster chooses your article, it’ll benefit you if the directory lists your article.
• Submit SEO articles to email lists: Email lists too are a good way of distributing your SEO articles although there you cannot customise your articles. Lots of duplicate content is generated, and theoretically it is not recommended that you have the same article on various websites. But I’ve observed it doesn’t really matter. Search on Google and among the top three-four places you often find the same article, written by the same author, appearing different websites and still ranking high.
• Submit SEO articles personally: This is the best way I think. If you think your article will add value to a publisher’s website, then you can write to him or her with some details about your article. Write a polite email, or submit the request through the contact form. You can even get just a small synopsis and let people come to your website to read the complete article.

Since low-quality article galore on the Internet, you can really have an advantage by writing highly relevant and useful articles and then getting them published on other websites, acquiring lots of quality incoming links in the process.

Don’t Spam

Spamming doesn’t only connote sending unsolicited, shady emails to harass people and clog the servers. Stuffing your web pages and meta tags with your keywords and key phrases too is tantamount to spamming. Leaving your links, needlessly, without content, in comments and messages on other blogs and forums is called spamming too. Both such tactics prove counter-productive. Since search engines take some time to detect and curb such errant behavior people think such actions work so they not only implement, but they also recommend them. Such SEO techniques get your website blacklisted sooner or later.

Create a website that genuinely deserves to get a good ranking: this is not only good for your rankings it is also good for your business because you get focused traffic to your website and this will give you opportunities for more business.

Don’t submit to search engines

Since all major search engines are perpetually crawling all over the Internet to find and index new and newly-updated web pages there is no need to manually submitting your website to them. Just focus on creating quality content regularly and the search engines will sooner or later find your website and rank it accordingly.

Don’t hire an SEO company in a hurry and keep a strict watch on whomever you hire

Since search engine optimisation is extremely crucial to the survival of your website you shouldn’t choose your SEO company in a hurry. Definitely do not respond to the SEO companies that solicit business by sending you emails without you asking for them. It shows they themselves don’t follow decent business practices and you cannot trust them with legitimate work.

Even once you have hired a company, don’t think you are done with your SEO work. Keep yourself in the know and remain aware of what practices they are following. If they execute shady steps to increase your rankings you’ll have to pay the price later on.

Don’t invest in many domains for a single business

This is important because your content is valuable and you should better keep it concentrated. Having niche domains doesn’t harm and in fact it is good, but if you are spreading your content without generating new content for them none will do better in the search engine. The best would be, to have all the related content under one domain.

Don’t have the same title for every page

Since every page is distinct, why have the same title on every page? Many websites just have the company name, or the name of the service they provide. For instance, if they provide web designing services, on every page they have XYZ Web Designing Services which doesn’t make any sense. Every page should have a unique title, and if you want the name of your company on every page, then let it be a part of that unique title. In fact, since the search engines use your title to index your page it is important that you have unique titles for all pages and these titles contain page specific keywords in them.

Don’t worry about Google PageRank

Since Google PageRank is updated only 3 or 4 times a year you cannot do much about what PageRank you’ve got. Just focus on generating great content so that people link to you and your PageRank will improve automatically.

Avoid these mistakes and follow legitimate methods to search engine optimise your website. It is a long process but worth investing your money and time in.

• Link exchange actually improves your rankings if the websites compliment each other and both the websites are relevant in their respective niches.
• Link exchange gets you direct, highly targeted traffic. Since people on the website linking to you are already interested in the related service, if they click on your link from, there, there is greater possibility of such leads turning into business.
• Link exchange gets your pages indexed fast. Since your links exist on many websites, there are many ways the search engine spiders can reach your web pages and then index them.

So how should you initiate and manage your link exchange program?

Requesting a webmaster for a link exchange can be a sensitive issue because many webmasters don’t like the idea of people approaching them for exchanging links just like that. If you come across a website that seems like a good link exchange partner look if they have a page mentioning their link exchange policies and preferences. In case you cannot locate the page (a good indication they don’t take link exchange seriously) look for the sitemap and this page should have some page on link exchanging.

After you have decided that you are going to approach a particular webmaster for a link exchange request, make sure you have already put his or her link on your website. Show a genuine interest by not only putting the link on your website, but also explaining in the requesting email or contact form submission why you are doing that. Also mention that although you’ll be thrilled if your link is put on their website, if they decide not to do it, their link will remain on your website as long as it adds value to your website.

Keep track of all the link exchange requests you make and try not to approach a webmaster more than once.

So how do you find websites that may be interested in exchanging links with you?

You can use a search engine to find websites that are being linked to and that are linking. For instance, go to Google and search for “link:www.somedomain.com” (no need for quotes). This will show you all the websites linking to your chosen website. Then one by one you can start visiting these websites and send them link exchange requests.

The best links are earned, not exchanged or bought, so the best way to encourage people to link to your website is by providing them great content. Don’t make link exchanging as an important ingredient of your overall search engine optimisation and marketing. Just keep it as a value-addition.

I started a campaign for SEOmoz's premium membership drive in the middle of June and have been refining and rewriting ever since (remember the night I showed our campaign to Mystery Guest?). I bid on terms like "SEO Consulting," "SEO Tools," and "SEO Training," guessing that these were the most relevant phrases related to what the service offers.

The process I generally follow with AdWords creatives goes something like this:

1. Author 3-5 ads with different titles and descriptions, generally attempting to prominently use the target search phrase and entice the searcher to click.
2. Prune the ads by replacing anything that receives less than 1% CTR (measured after 2-600 clicks, depending on the variables)
3. Continue to replace lower CTR ads with new creatives
4. Wait until one of the ads "sticks out" or overachieves with much higher CTR than previous ads. That's when I know I've stumbled on something that connects with the audience.
5. Take that single ad and refine it with slightly tweaked headlines, descriptives & display URL, testing each against each other (and the original successful version)
6. Continue testing, refining and perfecting the overachiever ad forever (you can't rest on your laurels)
7. Start the process anew every few months to stay fresh and relevant - even the best ads won't draw clicks forever (and especially not in fast-changing industries like SEO)

I'll show you what I mean with a few current examples from our campaign:
_

_

I'm just starting out with the above ad group. I haven't had much success finding the right headline or creative for "SEO Consulting" so I killed off a few of my worst performers and added some new ones, while keeping my top two CTR ads (I know, 0.74% is pretty sad) in rotation.
_

_

The above example shows me in phase 4 - I've just found one ad that's really standing out from the crowd, so I've created several versions to test against one another. Usually, one of these will be a clear leader and I can further refine (and test new headline & descriptive modifications as well).
_

_

I'm in my final stages - 5 & 6 - above. CTRs over 5% make me pretty happy, but I suspect I can do even better than that, so I'm trying multiple versions of a successful formula. You can see that those tiny little differences in copy can have a monstrous impact on CTR - the only difference between the best and worst performer is the second line of text, yet it's a full 2% CTR difference. Don't let anyone tell you small changes don't have big results.

Obviously, I'm running an exceptionally granular campaign, bidding on only a few terms and micro-managing obsessively. However, in my previous experience, this was how it had to be done - take your eye off the ball or stop testing for a second and you'll find your costs up, your traffic down and your competitors running away with your visitors.

I'll be the first to admit that there are probably better techniques than the ones I employ above, so I'd love to hear your perspective on both the process of testing and refining and the ways in which you've found success.

BTW - Sorry I couldn't share conversion data - it's just too sensitive. In the cases above, you'll have to assume that the conversion rates were all equal (as high CTR doesn't always mean better conversions, though there is often some correlation).

The reality is that search engines are far from perfect. They face significant challenges trying to decipher our intentions and find the pages that best match our queries.

Here are some of the reasons why search engines don't return 100% relevant results all the time:

1. Relevance is subjective. This is the biggest problem. You can do a search for 'coffee' in Canada and find Tim Horton's website as the most relevant. Makes sense, as that’s the most popular coffee chain in Canada, but for somebody in Seattle, Starbucks might be the most relevant result. You can do a search for the ‘49ers’ and be looking for the football team, but a historian may be looking for research material on California. And you might even do a search today for 'bones' trying to find where to buy your dog a treat, but tomorrow you do that same search looking for an episode of the TV series 'Bones' that you missed the night before.

How can a search engine disambiguate such searches? Mind reading would be an excellent approach :-)

So far the best approaches the search engines have come up with are the use of human quality raters and personalized search. The better the search engines profile the searcher, the higher the chances of producing relevant results. This method obviously raises a lot of privacy concerns.

2. Natural language searches.  A MySQL database engine can precisely return all the relevant records given a query 'select first, last from employee where last = "Smith";'. There is a formal syntax and no ambiguity. A search engine, on the other hand, receives 'who has smith as last name in chicago' or 'smith last name chicago'.  The query is in natural language -- our language. There are many different ways to say the same thing--there is context, there are human idiosyncrasies, and so on. The searcher component of a search engine must disambiguate the query and translate it into a more formal manner before looking it up in the index.

3. Poor queries. Many searchers don't know how to express what they want in the real world, and are even worse when attempting to ask a search engine. They call the vacuum cleaner a ‘sucker’ and are unable to find cleaning services online. Worse yet they misspell words, making the problem more 'interesting' for search engines. 

4. Synonymy. This is another challenge. There are words that have the same meaning, like ‘car’ and ‘automobile’. When you do a search you would like to get pages that contain your exact words, and pages that contain other words that mean the same thing, as long as they are relevant to your search. Let’s say you do a search for 'monkey'. You would want your results to include pages that contain monkey, but perhaps also the words ‘chimpanzee’ or ‘ape’. If you were a little bit more strict, you would not want to include pages that say chimpanzee because, although a chimpanzee is a primate, it is not a monkey. These details don’t pass through the minds of most searchers, but search engines have a hard time because of it.

5. Polysemy. There are words that change their meaning depending on the context in which they are used. For example, if you do a search for 'wood' you might want pages that are talking about pieces of a tree, or you might be talking about the geographical area that has many trees. Without the right context, it is hard for a human to tell. Imagine how hard it is for a search engine!

6. Imperfect performance. To follow up on my previous post about relevance feedback, let me introduce a couple of related concepts to better explain this problem: precision and recall. 

Precision and recall are metrics used by information retrieval researchers to evaluate the performance of search engines. It doesn't matter how sophisticated the ranking algorithm is, at the end of the day what really matters is whether the user likes the results or not. Precision is a measure of how efficient the search engine is in returning only the relevant results for the search. The more irrelevant results, the lower the precision. Recall, on the other hand, measures how good the search engine is in returning all the relevant results. (Of course, this assumes the researcher knows how many relevant results there are.) The more relevant results missing from the search, the lower the recall.

Ideally, a search engine should identify all relevant documents without returning any irrelevant ones (100% precision and 100% recall). In practice, this has been proven to be impossible, as precision and recall are inversely proportional.

Empirical studies of retrieval performance have shown a tendency for Precision to decline as Recall increases. Trade-off between precision and recall

Fortunately, most searchers are more concerned about precision, especially in the top ten results. Few of us search past the first couple of result pages (SERPs). Relevance feedback via Quality raters is an excellent approach to improve precision. Quality raters can select the documents that are most relevant to the search, and that information can be used to refine the original search and yield better results for most users.

7. Spam. Search engines identify relevant pages by means of 'quality signals' or metrics that can be deduced from web pages by automated means. The challenge to search engines is that once black hat SEOs identify those signals, they can start to fake them. I think that over time it is going to be harder and harder to fake quality signals, but it is never going to be impossible. For humans it is easy to spot spam, but for computers it is much harder.

Why is it important to know all this?

This subject is important because it proves an interesting point. Although the search engines don't want to admit it, they need us (SEOs). As I mentioned above, relevance is subjective. Do you want to take a passive approach and hope for the Quality raters to qualify your website for the searches they think are relevant? Or, instead, do you want to take an active role and identify the best keywords, include them in your content and incoming links, and carefully study websites that are ranking high (web authorities) to see how you can do the same? Personally, I prefer the active role.