A blog post over on seodailytip.com that discusses the additional importance of credibility with regard to SERP positioning.

Credibility
What’s important in the article is the idea that search result pages are perceived more as a top-10 list than an arbitrary ordered result. Company’s that are listed first have more credibility—consciously or subconsciously—than company’s listed lower in the results.

Furthermore, more and more people are turning to the digital world to find their information.

If you add those two situations together, you have an opportunity for your company to appear to have more credibility than older, more-established company’s in the same space.

Second Is The First Loser is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

Over on searchengineguide.com, there is a great multi-part guide to everything you need to know about SEO. If you wanted to learn a little more about SEO or brush up on your basics, it is a great series to read through.

Great SEO Overview is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

Rand Fishkin discusses the changes they we all may see in search. The primary change has to do with adding social-media influences, which to me brings a greater human element to search–what are people interested in and what are they talking about.

Change is always good for Internet marketers, because a change in the rules is simply another opportunity to out-perform your competition.

Give it a watch.

The Future of Search is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

This is the first part of a multi-part series that looks closely at developing organic-looking external links. As the search engines’ crawl intervals increase and their algorithms become more sophisticated, it is going to become more and more important to start making your link building profile appear organic.

Why should you care? Because search engines have developed a healthy disdain for aggressive marketers / SEOs and have improved their ability to recognize and penalize them.

So if you don’t want your link-building efforts to be a waste of time, you need to know how you can effectively fly under the spam-dar. Because everyone is expected to build links–that’s what makes the Internet go around. But create too many links, and suddenly you are transformed from mild-mannered website promoter into the rampaging spamanator—and all your linking efforts will suffer for it.

It is a grey area at best, but you can minimize your chances of tripping any kind of link filter by approaching link building with an understanding of what a search engine is looking for and what it is not.

NOTE: This article is not intended to suggest how you can spam search engines and fill the Internet with worthless garbage. There is a fine line between more aggressive marketing tactics and truly black-hat tricks. Be responsible and keep the Internet green.

Anchor Text

Part I focuses on anchor text. In case you weren’t sure, anchor text is the text used to create a hyperlink. For example, in the sentence below:

My mother makes the best homemade ice cream in the world.

the text “homemade ice cream”, which is the clickable link, is the anchor text.

Search engines place a great value on a link because they consider each link to be a vote for a particular webpage and website. Furthermore, they look at the text within the link—the anchor text—to determine what keyword/s are being used as an indication of the subject matter for the targeted webpage.

The more “votes” that a website and webpage receives for a certain keyword/s, the higher that webpage ranks for those particular keyword/s. This is all fairly academic.

As soon as most website owners hear that much, they start creating links, hundreds or even thousands of links that target a specific keyword and webpage. And once upon a time, that worked great. But the search engines are getting smarter.

Today, search engines are not only trying to determine which websites and webpages should rank for specific keyword/s, but they are also trying to figure out which websites are attempting to manipulate the SERPs with questionable link-building practices.

How to Avoid Spammy Links

There are a lot of methods that search engines can use to figure out if someone is aggressively building links and analyzing anchor text is just one of them. But how can search engines determine if a link is a good link or spam? Because search engines have perspective.

Search engine companies aren’t looking at single links, but hundreds of millions of links at a time, and they can see link-building patterns. Patterns that appear to be natural—such as the wave of links that were created with Michael Jackson passed—and patterns that are not natural.

The search engines can use this data to make certain assumptions about what natural versus unnatural link-building patterns should look like—or in this particular case, what natural vs. unnatural anchor text should look like. And if there is one word to describe natural link building, it’s diversity.

Anchor Text Diversity is Key

Applying the principle of natural diversity to anchor text means that every link that you build should not use the same keyword/s. If one thousand people each built one link, there would be diversity with regard to the anchor text used. And that type of diversity is what you have to achieve.

Lets assume the keyword is “used cars”. Here are some ideas for variations that you should use as the anchor text while building links:

1. Keyword: “used cars”
2. Keyword Singular or Plural: “used car” or “used cars”
3. Keyword + Text: “low-cost used cars”, “used cars in California”, “used cars in great shape”, or “used car lot”
4. Synonyms: “previously owned”, “previously leased”, or “off Lease”
5. Proximity Keyword: “great used cars for sale”
6. Generic Text: “click here” or “this website”
7. Completely Unrelated: “cool website” or “check this out”
8. Foreign Language: All the same links, but translated into a foreign language and on an appropriate website.

If you need more ideas for anchor text, search for your targeted keyword and see what people are using to create links.

How Much and When

The exact balance of which types of anchor text solutions to use and when is unknown. It is part of the secret sauce that search engines use to determine a webpage’s position within its results. But I would guess something like 60% keyword specific (1, 2 and 3), 30% keyword offset (4, 5 & 6), and 10% unrelated (7, 8 & 9) should be safe.

Keep your anchor text diversified and the links you build today will remain valuable tomorrow and for years to come.

Looking Natural: 9 Ways to Add Variety to Your Anchor Text is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

Just a quick post. There is a great article over on best-seo-blog.com discussing some of the new black hat tactics that are appearing.

There are two good reasons that people should be aware of black hat tactics. The first is that if you don’t know what they are, you cannot prevent someone from using them. As a business owner, you may be determined to stay away from black hat tactics, but are excited about all the traffic the new article spinner campaign is generating.

A horse by any other name is still a horse. And if you cannot recognize a black-hat tactic, even when the name is change to something shiny and pretty like “Honest Abe’s Link Multiplier”, you’re in trouble. Which brings me to my second point.

The sins of the father will be visited upon the sons. As search engines mature, they will do a better job of recognizing over optimization, spam, and aggressive link building. Spam sins you have committed in the past are still lurking out there and may come to haunt you one day. Do not trade a quick rank spike to day, for a penalty tomorrow.

If you have a long-term strategy for your company, part of that strategy cannot include or even tolerate any black-hat tactics.

Be Careful Not To Sell Your Tomorrows For Today is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

There is a great article written by David Naylor entitled “SEO 101 Common Mistakes“. There so much SEO people are expected to do, that it is easy to fall victim to some of these don’ts. It’s a great read.

How Many of These Are You Guilty Of? is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

A short video discussing his experience with natural vs. unnatural link building efforts. It would seem the the search engines are getting much smarter at sniffing out links/websites that are over optimized and rewarding natural link building efforts.

As I have always said, you need to make your links appear natural by altering the anchor text, creating links and citations, linking from high and low PR websites, using a variety of methods/websites, varying your link velocity, etc. I discuss each method in another article, 11 Ways to Camouflage Your SEO and Link Building Efforts.

Natural vs. Unnatural Link Building Video is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

Here’s a guest blog article of mine posted over at DailySEOTip. It discusses using the Google Reader to ensure that your static web pages are crawled and index quicker and on a more frequent basis.

Guest Blog — Blogify Your Static Website for Google is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

How many times have you found a great website with great content that you wanted to follow, but the website has no RSS feed. I know, I know. It is amazing to me that any bloggy website that is trying to attract followers would not have an RSS feed. But it happens.

Some website owners are simply unaware of what RSS is–others are trying to force you to sign-up for an email newsletter or some other program when all your really want is the facts.

Well, I stumbled upon a great solution. FeedYes is a very simple-to-use and free tool that allows you to create RSS feeds from any URL. I highly recommend that you create an account and have it ready the next time you stumble upon a website that is worth your attention–who knows when you will ever find it again. Don’t make that mistake. Simply use FeedYes to create the feed and add it to your reader.

Image Attribution:http://www.flickr.com/photos/practicalowl/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

No RSS. No Problem. Create RSS Feeds for Sites that Don’t Have One. is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness

Apparently, the “NoFollow” attribute has changed slightly with respect to Google. According to PageRank Sculpting Leaves NoFollow Tags Behind, NoFollow tags no longer turn-off what PR would be passed, allowing the other links on the page to share it—it simply evaporates.

In other words, if you had 10 links sharing 10 points of link juice, normally, each link would pass 1 point of link juice. In the past, if you used NoFollows on 4 of the links, that meant that the remaining 6 Links would each pass 1.666 points of link juice. This allowed you to sculpt how link juice flowed through your website.

Now, the 6 links would still only pass 1 point each—the other 4 points are simply lost.

New Sculpting Strategies

The article recommends, and I agree, that you simply look hard and long at your website’s architecture and organization. Removing unnecessary links from the web pages higher-up in the hierarchy still allows you to sculpt your PR.

Another idea, however, is to use a scripting language, such as Javascript, for less important links, such as About Us, Privacy Policy, or Legal. This way, the link juice flows as it should to those pages with the greatest level of importance. Whether this is considered “black-hat” or not is debatable. Although I would definitely call it a shade of gray.

In the End…

In the end, the trouble and the advantage gained by masking links with a scripting language simply might not be worth it. Rethinking and organizing your website might simply be a better way to enhance your website for crawlers and users alike.

However, if you find yourself in a particularly competitive niche, sculpting might just be the edge you need to come-out on top.

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The New NoFollow Rules is a post from: JuiceeLinks Link Building Goodness