Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Articles - Mr SEO

I read having anchor text is important on a site when describing other pages. Is this correct? What is the best way to do that?

As I have stated before, every page of your site should be optimized for its own term or terms. Your menu should reflect those terms as best as possible.

In most cases, the home page targets the main term of the site. Let's say your site was about "discount shoes". Your menu should also have that page listed as "discount shoes". Don’t worry about having a tab that says home. Just make your logo on every page clickable and go to the homepage. Most people know to do this. If you feel strongly about having a home button, make one out of an image. As for the rest of the menu, your keywords should be in the menu, the pages should support them and vice versa. I understand it isn't possible to do it on every site, but ideally...

I want to put my product descriptions in a pop-up window, is that bad for SEO?

Actually, in some cases putting product descriptions in a pop-up is a great idea. Why? Product descriptions aren’t optimized and usually are exactly the same on every site that offers them. Moving descriptions to a pop-up will allow you to optimize a page a lot easier. E-commerce sites tend to have a lot of production descriptions which can cause a site to be either over or under optimized. It can also bring a better user experience on the site. Cluttered and long pages can be a turn off to visitors. This can be a simple solution to a common problem. What I would do is make sure the pop-ups are in javascript. This way, the engines will not find them.

My company has been doing link exchanges for over a year now, but our rankings have not improved. What are we doing wrong?

I took a look at your site and I see a few problems here. First let me say, link exchanges are fast becoming an extinct practice. Search engines know that the exchange links are an agreement between two sites. The value of those links are greatly depreciated. I would recommended moving away from doing them. The first problem I see is that you are exchanging links with sites that are unrelated to your industry. Not only will this result in your site not being crawled deeply, but it may also cause you to be banned by Google.

Let’s say your site was exchanging links with related sites, as it should be. Your next problem lies in how you are exchanging links. All the links are all going back to your link page. If you notice, your link section has a PR 5 while your site itself has a 3. The other problem is that you are not using anchor text in those links. You should have each page optimized for a specific term or terms and work on driving links with anchor text to support each page's keyterms. I have seen this mistake many times. I cannot tell you how many sites I moved to page one of Google by doing just this.

My rankings are slipping fast. No matter how many times I change my tags, nothing works. What can I do?

If you are changing all your tags at once, you will never know what works. Before tweaking the content, adjust your title tag, wait to get cached and see where you rank. Then move on to the description tags and so on. If you do everything at once, you will never know what made the site move up or down.

I have read that you say there is no need to resubmit my site to the search engines quarterly, why is that? My designer disagrees.

There is no need to submit your site via submission service, once or ever. Once the search engines find a link from another site to yours, which they prefer, they will always come back to your site. There is no need to submit a url once, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Save your money and invest it in some real advertising.

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