Hyperlinking is the lifeblood of distributing content or linking to other relevant and valuable information outside of the current page or website.  A very common occurrence is when authors use generic anchor text for their links (prime example: click here).  It’s something nearly everyone has done and is still done by many people out of habit (I’m even guilty of it from time to time).   Anchor text is yet another important factor in SEO, and it’s our topic of discussion in today’s SEO Tips series.

The Importance of Anchor Text

What exactly is the function of anchor text when linking to other pages and/or websites?  Anchor text should be used to tell visitors and search engines basic information about what is being linked.  Typically, so long as the anchor text is relative to the site it’s being linked to and is easy to understand, both visitors and search engines will benefit best from this, as information is more precisely accessed by visitors and indexed by search engines.  Below are a few examples of what and what not to do when writing proper anchor text.

Have you ever visited a website found it challenging to navigate through the content? Having a clean and organized navigation for a website is crucial in many different ways.  With an organized navigation, visitors can find content easily, and are more likely to either visit the site again or browse other pages.  Not only is navigation important to visitors, but it’s also important for search engines.  How content is structured on a website can indicate what a webmaster believes is important content on the website.

Designing Navigation

An important starting point with any type of navigation design or re-design is planning out the navigation based on the homepage, as this page is more than likely the most viewed page on the site.  If there is enough information on a specific topic, then is makes sense to create a page that describes the said related pages.  As the navigation becomes more complex with abundant content, having a breadcrumb list at the top of the page where visitors can quickly navigate to the home page is vital, and also gives the visitor a better sense of website structure.

In today’s SEO tip, we’re going to examine the importance of user friendly URLs.  Not only are they important to search engines, but they are also important to your audience.  Having an organized and easy to follow structure will pay off in the long run.

User Friendly URLs Overview

One of the prime benefits of having user friendly URLs is the fact that search engines can crawl your website more efficiently with URLs that utilize word choice that best matches the content of the page.  Following that, when people link to your site, they are likely to use words in their anchor text that are relative to your pages content, so why not make the URL friendly enough so that people can have a basic understanding of what’s on the page, rather than being intimidated by unrecognizable parameters  (and deciding not to link to the page at all).

In last week’s SEO Tips article, we discussed the title tag and its significance in SEO. This week, we’re on to tackling another beast: The description meta tag.

Description Meta Overview

The description meta tag for a page is important to search engines because it can provide a summary of the content on the page.  Title tags do this as well, to some degree, but the description meta tag can have a summary of the page in a sentence or two rather than a few words (I try to keep it less than 160 characters, as recommended by WordPress SEO plugins like All in One SEO. The description meta tag, much like the title tag, is placed in the head tag of the document.

The advantage of the description meta tag is the fact that search engines will sometimes, if not likely, use this text as a snippet for your page in search results. Below is an example.

Today’s blog post is the beginning of a mini-series by WebMovement, LLC that focuses on the core aspects of SEO.  While we have written a few articles on our blog pertaining to SEO, some of the topics covered may not be suitable for novice audiences.  This mini-series caters to those who are just starting out with SEO and would like a better understanding of foundational best practices.

Title Tag Overview

Today, we’ll be covering the title tag, one of the most important parts of SEO.  The title tag is significant because it used to notify both search engines and users of what the expected content of the page is supposed to entail.  More importantly, the title of the page will appear in the first line of the results in Google and other search engines.  Here’s an example:

For those just starting off with an SEO campaign, a great way to start the linkbuilding process is to submit your website to high quality web directories.  The problem that most people have with this process, though, is that they try to take on too many directories at once.  A good approach is to make a list of paid and free directories and submit only to 5-10 per month, especially if you’re on a budget.

Here’s a good starting list of 10 web directories that we recommend submitting to

In the world of SEO, linking and link building are significant.  Furthermore, how these links are treated is also important because of how search engines will treat them in turn.  Two important words that get tossed around with linking concepts are DoFollow and NoFollow.  To simplify, we’re going to discuss the implications of the use of the NoFollow attribute for links.

What are NoFollow and DoFollow?

Whenever you create a link on your website, no matter where the link is located (article, comments, etc.), a typical link will be coded as follows:

<a href=”http://www.webmovementllc.com”>Web Movement, LLC</a>

As you can see, this is your average and typical link with an href and how the link will be represented textually.  Now here’s the same link, except tagged with the NoFollow attribute.

There are many strategies that SEOs still use today that are either outdated or just flat out constitute bad practice, and even some that could get a website removed from search engines.  Strategies that are used to spoof search engines and attempt to produce quick results unethically are categorized as Black Hat SEO. When constructing an SEO campaign, remember that results don’t occur overnight and that a large investment of time and long term commitment is involved.  Many times, people that are building and operating their own SEO campaign without a firm or consultant can be misled on what is good or bad practice. Below are some examples of bad practice or misconceptions and what you should do to correct them.

1) Masking text so that it hides in a website background

This tactic is a common practice for “keyword” stuffing.  For example, if I were to make the background color of my website black and then put keywords in my background with black text, this would make the text invisible to most users and attempt to trick search engines into indexing bogus content.  This practice is HIGHLY frowned upon and simply isn’t effective.  In fact, Google states that keyword stuffing can have negative impacts on search rankings.

2) The more meta-keywords, the better

Firstly, not all search engines even utilize the use of meta-keywords for better search rankings.  In fact, Yahoo is the only major search engine to still use the meta-keyword tag.  Bing doesn’t use it, and Google has made it more apparent that they do not utilize the tag either. For those, though, that would like to optimize for Yahoo, only use a few, specific keywords in your tags.  Typos and misspellings do not count, and they could have a negative impact.  Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity.

The King needs you to drive his content!

Getting Started

While content is the focal point of any website or blog, writing even the best content for your niche markets is only the beginning.  How are people going to find your content if they do not know about your site? A few ways to promote your content is to utilize social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Let people know you exist! Here are some of the services I recommend submitting your content to and engaging in