Anchor text, is the text that becomes the clickable link usually created to avoid placing long URL’s in the body of text or in menus. For example, “Eric Moretti” is the anchor text in this link, Eric Moretti. Anchor text is important for search engines because it usually attributes relevance to the page. Of course, one or two links could have faulty anchor text, but when many pages link using similar anchor text search engines get a better idea of how important a page is to a particular phrase or keyword. As I have mentioned in the past, overzealous link-building can be bad. So simply cramming a bunch of links with anchor text targeting your key phrase will have the same effect as link farming.

So why avoid using ‘click here’ as anchor text? Simply put, it’s wasting potential influence. What does ‘click here’ say about a page? Nothing, because ‘click here’ is probably used as anchor text for billions of links on the web. Make relevant anchor text so that search engines can get a better idea of what your page is about.

Chances are, if your company is small or the internal search marketing department just needs more bandwidth then search agencies or consultants have been brought up. Great! If it’s a small company search marketing can provide great results and if you already have an established search team then an outside expert can always offer a different perspective and help your team develop professionally.

However, as with anything, caveat emptor or buyer beware. Bad agencies will often try to target high traffic terms without taking into account relevancy. This can happen with both Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Optimization.

With SEO, consultants can walk in and give you great news. “We can get you guys on the first page!” What they don’t tell you is they will get you on the first page for a term that is low traffic and not relevant. It would be pretty easy to rank for “Pink Concrete and Tire Barriers” but how many people actually search for that? Is it even relevant to your business? It’s also number 2 of the “Three SEO Strategies That Stink.”

They might even be able to find a high traffic term and drive a ton of traffic to your site. Chances are though, it won’t be terribly relevant. There is an easy way for you to check this, watch your conversion rate and bounce rate. If conversion rate drops and traffic climbs then they aren’t sending you customers. If bounce rate is approaching 80% then the traffic is quickly leaving your site.

The same is true for PPC campaigns. If your impressions and clicks go sky high and your conversions drop then you are now spending more money on less customers. That’s not good business!

How do you know what search marketing experts are good or bad? Well, if you have unlimited budget you can talk to SEOmoz, Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Land to find great agencies. If you are dealing with a smaller local agency a good litmus test is to search for seo + your city and variations of that. If they can’t rank for the terms you want either. This isn’t fool proof either, if they are using black hat techniques to game the system then it can be hard for those not in the know to figure it out.

There’s no reason why you need to go gung-ho and revamp an entire site. Starting your consultants off with a single page or small campaign can be a good way to vet their approach if you have concerns.

1.) Overzealous link-building. Links are great to improve rankings, but just like anything too many of them could have a negative impact on rankings if they aren’t good links. One black hat strategy is to generate links through link farms. Black Hat SEO’s will use worthless sites to make search engines believe that pages are important. In the short term this works and rankings for those pages improve but Google is pretty good at filtering out. What happens when Google figures out what links are spammy? Google either devalues those links or blacklists that site.

2.) High Traffic-Low Relevancy Keywords. If Acme Co. sells custom pipe fittings, but the traffic around custom pipe fittings is low, then bad SEO’s might try to optimize pages for Brittany Spears to draw in traffic. Granted, the IQ of custom pipe fittings and Brittany Spears are pretty much identical, but the two things are very different. If Acme Co. manages to rank and draw traffic from Brittany Spears keywords, how many custom pipe fittings do you think they will sell? Chances are that people looking for Brittany Spears don’t care a whole lot about plumbing. While traffic volume is important it isn’t the be-all to end-all metric that people make it out to be. Just optimize for the relevant term that best fits the page!

3.) Cramming Only Keywords In The Title. We’ve all seen those search results! Custom Widgets, Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Green Widgets. Uh, what? Remind your SEO that it’s still forward facing marketing – people see this. It looks like crap and doesn’t make people click on it. Write meaningful title tags for people, not robots.

Mmmmm, Donuts. While they happen to be Homer Simpson’s favorite “food” they also happen to be unhealthy. Naturally, that hasn’t run Dunkin’s out of business. Thankfully, we can still get our overly sugary breakfast treats. However, like most food places, Dunkin Donuts is diversified and its big push item is coffee?

How do I know this? Well, I happen to own a TV and whenever I see a Dunkin commercial it’s not for the donuts, it’s for the coffee. While I like donuts, there are mornings I can’t make it through without coffee. Dunkin knows this, and when they go marketing they want you to think of them as a coffee place that offers donuts and not the other way around.

Just look at their home page:

Coffee cup in the logo, coffee beans, coffee drink and a coffee bean cartoon. How many donuts are on that page? Uh… that twist thingy?

That should clue you into what your competitor is concentrating on – what is actually on the page. The name says Donuts, the content says coffee. Let’s look at what SEO experts change when they talk keyword strategy. There are 3 big things, the URL, Page Title and Meta Description. The URL is a hard one, they really can’t escape going with dunkindonuts.com. The page title and meta description offer some pretty concrete evidence that the double D want’s a sip from the coffee cup.

The page title is:

“Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee | Buy Coffee Beans Online.”

Buy coffee beans? What about donuts?

The meta description makes the coffee theme get really obvious:

“Buy Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Beans Online – ground coffee or whole coffee beans shipped by the pound in Original Blend, Decaf or flavored coffee beans; sign up for regular coffee delivery service. Shop online for coffee gift baskets, coffee makers, Dunkin’ Donuts store gift certificates and coffee lovers gifts.”

They used the word “coffee” a total of 8 times! There are 49 words in that description, and over 15% of them are coffee. If you read that out loud to yourself it sounds like they wrote it on their 3rd pot of coffee.

Why did they try to target coffee? Well, the business reason is that coffee is the 3rd most consumed beverage on the face of the earth and therefor has a pretty big audience. The profit on coffee sales are also pretty good. The SEO reason for it though? According to Google, there are over 2.7 million searchs a month for just the word “coffee” – compared to about 135,000 for “donut.”

What audience do you want to go after? The one that is 2.7 milllion in size, or a paltry 135,000. That’s what I thought.

Is it effective though? Well, from a business perspective I can’t say. Who knows how much coffee Dunkin Donuts sells through its website. It does however, rank 10th for “coffee” in a Google search – your results may vary, and theres reasons for it, not the least of them personalized search.

Although 10th isn’t in the golden top 3 results its not too bad considering it gets beat out by Starbucks, Wikipedia, Folgers and the like. That’s tough competition.

There are some really easy steps to improving search engine rankings that are often over looked. One of the big ones is actually putting keywords in your title. How often do you see a title that simply offers the brand name? Quite often! In fact, lets take the Pepsi challenge! Both Coke and Pepsi have their brand names as their homepage titles. However, Coke gets bonus points for using Cola because it can help them rank for more than their brand name. The simple truth is that Pepsi and Coke’s page titles could be anything they wanted to and they would still rank for their brand names. Why? Because the URL takes care of ranking for their brand name. As an added bonus, sites that link to Coke or Pepsi probably use the brand name as the anchor text. You will notice though, when you search for pop or soda neither Coke or Pepsi show up.

Search results for the keyword 'toilet paper'

What does this have to do with toilet paper? Nothing and everything. Searching for ‘toilet paper’ brings up another one of those missed oppurtunites. There is one brand that ranks for the keyword toilet paper, Charmin. What’s in Charmin’s page title? You guessed it, toilet paper! Guess what, Charmin still ranks for ‘Charmin’ too. It’s good to protect your brand name, but if you’re looking to gain more traffic from search engines, consider placing the actual product or service in the title.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ’3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.