Will Jason Gambert get the trademark for the term “SEO”?

If Jason Gambert gets his trademark application approved, which I highly doubt will happen, the SEO world will definitely be in turmoil.

I cannot imagine that someone can be given that much power in a world where the free market decides.
Just to give you guys an idea of potential consequences, Jason would be able to cease and desist any domain name using the term “SEO”. Read more

General SEO -Dos- Explained

For those of you that are like me and need an explanation for everything, I took my SEO dos and don’ts post and broke it down adding brief explanations for each recommendation. Again, feel free to chime in with your thoughts or experiences. Here’s an explanation for the dos; I’ll post an explanation for the don’ts later.

SEO Dos

1. Build Quality Relevant Links

It is no secret that links are one of the most important factors in ranking a website – building high quality relevant links will produce the best results. In general, a good link will first bring you traffic and second pass a little bit of link juice to your site. I believe keyword anchor links within related text are best. Some good ways to build links include: article submissions, directory submissions, social media, forums, blogs, press releases, creating web pages on Hubpages or Squidoo etc..

2. Make it easy for search engines and users to navigate your entire site

By providing your website visitors easy access to your entire site, you will give them a better user experience. In addition, user-friendly sites are generally search engine friendly sites. Just make it so there is a link to every page on your site making it easy to navigate your entire site by using only links.

3. Create Unique Content Often

Your visitors and search engines love updated content, especially if it is unique and good. Train the search engines to visit you site often by giving them something new with each visit. Unique content allows you to target more keywords and gives you something to build links back to; it gives your visitors a reason to vote for, or talk about, you.

4. Use Page Titles, H tags and Meta descriptions

Page titles help users and search engines identify the content that can be found on your website/webpage. Titles have weight in algorithms and can improve your rankings. H Tags also have weight and can help your rankings. H tags allow you to set your content up in sections H1 is the heading of your page and H2, H3, H4 tags are used to assign sections and distribute importance. Meta descriptions do not do much, if anything for many search engines but they may be what your visitors see first in the search results. A well written description could attract more visits.

5. Link out to trusted sources

You should be linking out to sources already but if you aren’t, linking out to trusted sources just adds that much more authority to your document. Think of it as a college term paper, teachers made sure you used credible sources for research and Google appreciates credible sources too. Read more

What the F are you doing on the “PR doesn’t matter bandwagon”?

A while ago I started seeing comments and threads showing up on forums and blogs about how much PageRank (PR) doesn’t matter; I’m sure you’ve see them too. Forget about the fact that a high PR opens up a whole new world of opportunities as far as link exchanges and link sales (if that’s your thing). Let’s just talk about whether or not PR helps influence search engine rankings. I’ll admit that for a minute or three I was questioning if PR really did matter. I mean, there are tons of websites that rank well for keywords even though they don’t have high PR, but how competitive are those keywords?

Are these people honestly suggesting that PR has absolutely NO effect on Google rankings? Are they trying to convince me that Google’s algorithm puts absolutely NO weight on PageRank? Are they seriously telling me that the Googler spends time and money on a big joke? Are they telling me that they believe a link from a PR1 page is equal to a link from a PR9 page? Are they stupid, do they just not think before they post, or both?

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Who Cares About Anchor Text?

What is anchor text, who cares about it and what role does it play in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Anchor text is a keyword or key phrase used on a web page that labels a hyperlink to another web page. For instance, in the sentence “Billy went fishing and used trout bait to catch bass” the anchor text used is trout bait and it is linked to the homepage of Bass Pro Shop. Anchor text replaces a regular link such as www.basspro.com with a more descriptive keyword link. If you use anchor text, it helps give the reader a better idea as to what they’ll find on the web page that the link-links to.

*Make sure your anchor text accurately describes the information on the web page that it links to.

The above example of an anchor text link was used within a sentence; it is a contextual link. Contextual links are links that show up within a sentence or paragraph on a web page. You can also use anchor text without surrounding it with words e.g. Government Housing, but the most effective way to use anchor text is to surround it with related text. Keep in mind that putting an anchor text link for trout bait on a web page about government housing will not be as effective as putting the trout bait link on a web page about fishing.

Why the hell should I care what an anchor text link is? I’m trying to optimize my site and am interested in building quality backlinks.

Building quality back links to your site is important and anchor text makes those links more valuable. In the same way that anchor text tells the reader what to expect on the next web page, it tells the search engines what the web page is about and helps them classify it.

Think of it like this, If I tell you that I like Suzi, that’s great, that’s a vote for Suzi, but what the F does Suzi do? Now if I told you that I like Suzi because she’s a great chef, you would know that I think Suzi is a great chef. Anchor text tells search engines what information is on your web page and will help give your page more authority for a keyword.

Example of Anchor Text

Link Code - <a href=”http://www.yourwebpage.com”>Example</a>

Looks like - Example

Link Code - This is an <a href=”http://www.yourwebpage.com”>example</a> of what the code for an anchor text link looks like.

Looks like - This is an example of what the code for an anchor text link looks like.