SEO News Bytes October 2004

By Shelley Murphy

Welcome all SEO Studio readers and as promised I am keeping up with the pace of our monthly newsletters and this month I have a fair bit to discuss in relation to our upcoming new feature the SEO Studio Top 10 Spy reports. We are going to thoroughly explore the Google allinanchor, allintitle, and allintext commands as it relates to the top 10 ranking web sites.

For those who have advanced knowledge of search engine optimization may know about these particular Google advanced search commands and the hidden value of using them, for those who are not so familiar this will give you somewhat of an understanding on how to utilize these advanced search operators. Hence, since SEO Studio will incorporate these new features in the Top 10 Spy tool within the next little while, we deemed it important to write about this topic.

What is allinanchor...

The Google allinanchor command finds pages that have the keywords somewhere in the links pointing to a specific page with a hyperlink. A sample Google allinanchor command would look like this: allinanchor:SEO software. To better understand the Google allinanchor command, you need to understand what anchor text is. Anchor text is the text within links pointing to a page or a domain.

In the following example of a hyperlink, the anchor text is "SEO software" would look like this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com">SEO software</a>

The reasoning behind using this advanced search operator has two purposes; To find who your competitors are based on the keywords you are targeting; secondly find your own ranking with the allinanchor command.

If you are not ranking in the top ten for the selected keyword, you have to start working on your link building strategy focusing on both internal and external link structure.

What does all of this mean you ask, well simply put, if you are using "Home" to point to your own home page within your own web site, why not place your most important keyword phrase in the anchor text of the home page hyperlink for example, in our case, "SEO Company".

In the case of external links, ask your link partners to use the same anchor text pointing to your home page, once you have 10 to 15 links pointing to your home page you now want to focus on a different set of keywords and a different web pages on your site.

For example, we want to target the keyword "link popularity", we would then ask our link partners to point to our new Links Plus+ tool page with the keywords "link popularity". You can target all your important keywords with this method.

If you work diligently within a few months you could have a dozen or more pages climbing in search engine ranking. Optimizing anchor text is critical to good search engine positioning in Google.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Don't make the anchor text placed on your link partners' web pages too long, this will be diluting the effectiveness of the link. For example it is more affective to use SEO software than using SEO software search engine submission and search engine optimization with keyword analysis.
• A good rule to remember is to use the first keyword phrase found in the title of the web page where the link is pointing to, this will add extra relevancy to the page.
• Do not use stop words, or dead words in your anchor text, for example the anchor text "SEO software" is more effective than "A high quality SEO software product". Having extra non-relevant stop words or dead words will diminish the effectiveness of your links.

What is allintitle...

The allintitle command returns all the web pages in Google's index that contains the keywords in the title tag of web pages. For example, allintitle:SEO software will display all the pages with the keyword phrase "SEO software" contained somewhere in the title. This command does not pertain to link building campaigns, but rather it falls in the category of on-page factors in search engine optimization. Why do we want to use allintitle, when we want a quick means of finding out where Google ranks our web page based on the title.

What is allintext...

If you start your query with allintext:, Google restricts results to those pages containing all the query terms you specify in the body of the web page. For example, allintext: SEO software will return only pages in which the words "SEO," and "software," appear in the text of the page. Why do we want to use allintext, when we want a quick means of finding out where Google ranks our web page based on the body content of a specific keyword.

Putting it all together

The Google allinanchor, allintitle, and allintext commands are important to get familiar with and making it a part of your link popularity building and optimization strategy. When you start analyzing search results with these commands it starts to become apparent there is a certain correlation between the top 10 sites and their inbound link text. A good link analyzer tool such as the SEO Studio Links Plus+ tool can make the link analysis process a breeze. 

In order to make sense of this I have prepared a quick start guide to analyze and understand the results.

If your target page was ideally optimized for both on and off page factors your page would rank number one in the natural search results for a specific keyword and the Google allinanchor, allintitle, and allintext commands. More often than not this will not be the case, you may encounter any one of the following scenarios:

Higher keyword ranking but ... lower allinanchor ranking

• Focus your attention building your link popularity and at the same time make sure you are employing a razor sharp anchor text strategy. Get at least 10 external links with the keywords pointing to a specific page on your website that matches those keywords in the link and title of the page.
• Don't fall for the temptation to try and stuff as many keywords in the anchor text as possible. This may seem like a good idea, but you will only devalue the effectiveness of your links and your allinanchor position may not climb as much as you like.

Lower allinanchor ranking but ... higher keyword ranking

• Turn your attention to the on-page factors influencing your natural search engine ranking. Start with the title, then focus your attention on H1-H6 tags and then increase the keyword density of the body text.
• You can also add emphasis to keywords with the bold, italic and emphasis tags.
• Not as important, but you should review the META tags and add some keyword rich text to the ALT tags of some of your images.
• A few other places where you might want to consider adding keyword rich text is the table summary and link title tags.
  

A real life case study of Anchor text optimization www.linkateer.com

How can you take an almost unknown website from obscurity and achieve a number one ranking for some of the most competitive keywords in a matter of a few months?

That is exactly what linkateer.com has done. Now that I've your attention how would you like to do the same for your own keywords and websites.

In order to understand linkateer.com's dramatic rise in search engine ranking, all you have to do is run a Backlinks analysis using the SEO Studio's link analyzer tool Links Plus+ with the keyword phrase "link exchange". Make sure you turn on the keyword analysis option in the Advanced tab of the Links Plus+ tool.

As the websites linking to linkateer.com begin populating into the grid, it becomes evident the keyword phrase "link exchange" anchor text is present in most of the links pointing to linkateer.com.

So what did you learn here?

Link popularity is not just about the number of links or "votes" your web pages get but also about what text goes into those links pointing to your website.

Some search engines are more link centric than others, but clearly Google leads the way in placing higher relevancy on link popularity than any other search engines, so it makes sense to take advantage of the advanced search commands Google gives you such as the Allinanchor command.

What's next...

Look for advanced Google command analysis in the next version of SEO Studio Top 10 Spy tool to be released in late November 2004.

Closing Comments.

Are you even more confused now?  All SEO Studio tools are user friendly and easy to comprehend, we guarantee you'll get the hang of using the Google command analysis in no time at all and remember if you ever run into a problem we are here to help in any way we can.  All in all the objective of adding these new features will not only assist in building well optimized pages, but a better understanding of building quality link campaigns and the end result will be higherrankings in which we all work hard to achieve.