Google is now using anchor links in their search results. You might not remember anchor links, it was once popular many years ago when people had the tendency to include a lot of infomration on one web page. Today, with blogs, forums, and other platforms, it seems like there is much less content per page compared to say ten years ago. At anyrate, anchor links are internal links to sections on the same page. Wikipedia is well known for still using anchor links.

So what does this mean for you? Well, if you start using anchor links in your text, then it’s very possible that you’ll get these links included belowing your listing in the SERPs when Google indexes your page. Having your anchor links included in your search result listing can help you because it direct traffic to specific sections on your page.

Harrison Hoffman from CNET wrote a post that shows some specific example of how Google anchor links work. Also, be sure to read the Official Google Blog as well as the post included in Webmaster Central Blog. Sart taking advantage of Google Anchor Links and you may see an increase in traffic as well as higher conversions on desired actions within your pages.

If you’re looking to get some excellent search engine marketing tips, there’s obviously quite a few sites online that provide them. One site in particular has captured my attention. Recently, I discovered a search engine marketing company in Houston called, Search Engine Marketing Group.

The company was formed in 2006 by Gerald Weber, who happens to be an avid reader of SeoHosting.com Blog. The company started out as a web design business; However, when the needs for professional search engine marketing and optimization services increased over time, Gerald and his team adapted to the demands of business.

Quickly the group grew to be one of the leading search engine marketing companies in the city of Houston. Consequently – and in addition to providing some of the most top notch and professional search engine marketing services in their city - their group also sports one of the hottest blogs covering the topic of search engine marketing and SEO tips.

I discovered the blog recently after getting a trackback notification on a previous article I published on SeoHosting.com. It seems that Gerald had some opinions that differed from mine and he felt compelled to share them on their company blog. It’s a good thing that he did though, otherwise who knows how long it would have been before I would have discovered the site.

That said, if you’re looking for some excellent and practical tips on search engine marketing, I would definitely recommend checking out Gerald’s SEM/SEO blog. A lot of hard work goes into the articles being published and as always, the information and education is totally free.

Some of the more recent tips include information on how to reduce StumbleUpon message spam, how to become a Digg power user, and how to make WordPress more secure. Be sure to check the blog out and connect with them by subscribing their RSS feed.

One thing which is significantly noticeable is that Internet Marketing is the least affected industry even in the time of universal economy downtime. I do not remember any internet marketing consultants losing their jobs as cost-cutting in recent days. And it is obvious that it will continue to grow for next many decades. While an average SEO is paid more than an average developer, it becomes an attractive career decision. But knowing something and showing something are two different things. I have seen many good SEOs not being able to crack a deserving job because of some silly mistakes. Here, I am offering a mini-guide to crack a job of SEO.

Learn SEO
Well, this is the most important of all. You must know SEO to do SEO, there is no way around. You need to know answers to all the questions asked, but as it is a techo-marketing job, you are not supposed to know it all and at times you shouldn’t hesitate to share your perspective.

Own a website
A blog on WordPress or Blogspot will do, but owning a domain highlights your personal level involvement and seriousness towards web media. Onpage optimization skills are a must with blend of usability. And some nice to have stuff:

Blog topic: It doesn’t matter at all what are your writing about. It’s your website, you wanted to share something and you are sharing it, however, quality of content should be maintained.
Blog posting frequency: It doesn’t matter how frequently you post as long as it is quality and persistence is maintained.
Traffic: Not everyone is destined to be another ProBlogger and they know it. While you are expected to have a website, it is well known that many marketing consultants get really busy with their clients and projects that they get no time to do it for themselves.

While the things above are good to have things, actually having them can raise your bar way up than you can imagine.

Be Active Socialist
You don’t need to go to parties for it. Just signup to a nice social media website and be active in participating into discussions and events or whatever the site offers. Such websites boosts your online presence very naturally, and come on;  it’s a fun thing to do. You don’t need to have an account with all of them, choose the few that you like, sometimes even one or two can do the magic. Make sure that these are public viewable profiles and your actions are indexable by search engines. In this case, Twitter and Digg works, Orkut and Linkedin don’t.

Web Projects
Be a part of a nice web project. No matter what role you play, being an active part of web and contributing to it is what matters. If at all you aren’t able to find a good project for you, be an active member of a popular forum. You will need to be active enough to acquire a rank of moderator or administrator. That can be a mentionable achievement.

Keep yourself updated
Any marketing job needs you to be updated with the latest market trends. Apart from offering new possibilities, it also prevents you from reinventing the wheel. Knowing something the interviewer doesn’t know already makes you a winner.

Knowing a little extra
Employing even the beginner level knowledge of web programming languages or design applications can help you a great deal over other candidates.

Be known to traditional marketing skills
Don’t be afraid to portray your offline marketing skills, it’s always a plus. During the job you might need to coordinate with offline marketing teams to conduct events and promotions. If you have got it, show it.

Every job has a different requirement. While doing mentioned stuff can always be helpful, presentation also makes a big impression during interviews. SEO being a highly controversial field ruled by diversified beliefs and perceptions, you must show how confident you are about what you say. Apart from the points listed above, what do you think can help you secure a job of SEO?

There is quite a bit of SEO related news to report. This week so far proves to be very eventful. Google announced on Jan. 13, 2009 the release of a brand new Google Sitemap Generator for your web site. Google admits that this update was long overdue but well worth the wait as this new generator has the ability to pick up on pages even if they don’t included.

It’s been well over three years since we initially announced the Python Sitemap generator in June 2005. In this time, we’ve seen lots of people create great third-party Sitemap generators to help webmasters create better Sitemap files. While most Sitemap generators either crawl websites or list the files on a server, we have created a different kind of Sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to automatically create and maintain different kinds of Sitemap files.

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In social networking, Liana “Li” Evans asks, “Are Ghost Writers for Social Media Profiles Wise?” As many are aware, Ghost Writing is a business that is picking up a lot of momentum among the blogging industry. When blogs yield higher levels of profit, this opens doors towards investing into ghost writers. But what about being hired as a ghost writer by a famous celebrity to rebuild a broken public image? Lana Evans expressed interest in Britney Spears.

I’m no fan of Ms. Spears, but I, along with every other American who has an Internet connection, couldn’t help but watch that train wreck shave off all her hair and beat a car with an umbrella a few years back. Now that her father is in charge of her affairs and her image, this in some semblance of saneness does make a logical sense.

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The youth of today has more motivation than most adults. Bloggers in their early teens want to make money online. Alex Delibas, 17 year old high school student recognized mainstream frustrations with bloggers constantly getting denied from participating in affiliate networks. He took aim to help increase approval success rates with publishing an article that helps fellow bloggers gain approvals.

Getting approved at big affiliate networks that have great payouts it’s a challenging thing, but my brain works on this principle “if he could do it, why couldn’t I?” and you should too. I am member of many affiliate networks and trust me, some of them are really really good (Market Leverage, MaxBounty,etc) but some offer only few campaigns that don’t even pay much. So, choosing and getting approved at a big and good affiliate network is an important step. So, how do I get approved by any affiliate network?

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How can you recruit and hire an excellent SEO? Who can provide your business with top notch SEO services? It can be a mess trying to figure out. Richard Baxter, an established SEO Consultant in London, provided an excellent article on how to recruit an SEO.

Recruiting a top flight SEO can be a daunting challenge for the inexperienced recruiter. This post examines what you may need to consider along the way, how you need to be prepared before placing an advertisement and what to ask in an interview to make sure you’ve got the right candidate for the job.

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Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

There has been a great deal written about link building strategies. It may be difficult to sift through what works and doesn’t work. Whether you have years of experience in SEO link building or are new at link building, you should always think independently when formulating how you will link build.

Link Building Takes Time
There is no two ways about it: link building is time consuming and a great deal of work. Get that squared away before going forward with your link building plans. There are no easy quick answers when it comes to building links. Even paid links you have quickly purchased must be indexed by the search engine spiders in order to count and we all know it takes time for links to take effect. If you provide link building services you must set the correct expectations of link results for your clients.

Social Media’s New Link Territory
In the beginning much of link building had been relegated to submitting to directories, reciprocal links and paid links. This concept has changed in the past few years. With the growth of personalized search and social media link building has become super charged. Before you totally jump on the social media bandwagon take a look at what your client’s website actually needs to produce a solid link building strategy outcome.

Think Through Your Link Strategy
Newer link building methods such as social media websites may be popular now but using old linking techniques and new linking techniques together can work very well for your link building strategy. Eventually all new techniques become old techniques making way for yet more new techniques. We know some human edited directory links still provide good results. Reciprocal links can be dicey compared to one-way links. One-way links on topic still work well.

Articles and press releases work if carefully orchestrated to the right websites. Think quality not quantity links. Paid links can be problematic with Google so use them carefully. Think through your daily types of link building (blogging, digging, stumbling), your well known techniques (directories, articles, press releases) to your long range ideas (product reviews on blogs, creating new blog sites, business profiles, paid links) and on and on. Take a look at the whole picture: short term, long term, in the future…where do you want to be online?

Independent Thought For Link Builders
Quality links is still the name of the game when it comes to long term link building success. Yes there are probably quicker ways to get results and it may at times be worth this type of strategy. Think through what you find effective to build links. Not every technique works in every situation for every client. Instead of going with the popular choices come up with your own independent link plans then see what happens.

Individualized Link Strategies Work
Creating specific, individualized link building programs for each client will give you more ways to provide successful link building results. Combining traditional marketing, social media marketing and traditional link building can be a winning combination in your quest for good links.

Many years ago when the search engine marketing industry began there was no problem with adding a lot of keywords into a web page to help rank in the search engines. In fact it was pretty easy to rank back then in the major search engines. Switch to today and you see three major engines and many safeguards in place by them to catch over-optimization and on or off page techniques used by modern search engine marketers.

Afraid of Search Engine Spiders?
Search engine spiders (aka crawlers, robots) are software programs designed to find links, read through text, follow links from page to page and index the individual web pages of a web site. If you know anything about software you know human beings create them. If you are a software tester then you definitely know how fallible software is. Remember how often your browser or your laptop crashes?

That is human programming for you. As smart as Google is as a company, software is software. It cannot compare to human evaluation. Google tries to use human observation in combination with their search engine spider software but automation is the only way the search engines are able to spot potential problems with so many web pages online. The reality is that there are too many web pages and automation is a must when evaluating content on the web.

Patterns in Optimization
Google is thought to have their search engine robot set to flag certain situations when indexing. One way to work against being caught up in this is by breaking the on page pattern of search engine optimization. Using keywords in your text navigation? Be sure to use some descriptive keyword phrases that make sense for your text navigation.

Do not use all keyword text in your text navigation, this may trigger a spam filter or flag from the search engines. Instead use only a few select keywords or keyword phrases in your text navigation. For Example keep the text link for pages like “Contact Us” and “About Us” text navigation links left intact. Be careful when using too much keyword text in links throughout the content of the page.

“Click here” is not a good choice for a link going to a product, of course you want descriptive text related to the product the page leads to instead. As with other over-optimization situations use this type of keyword text link sparingly through the content of your web pages. Make sure your text on the page is natural for the human visitor.

Patterns in Links and Link Building
If you need to break patterns in optimization code it only makes sense to break the same type of patterns when it comes to link building. If you have an articles page or helpful resource for users be sure to find on topic backlinks for those web pages.

Vary your keyword anchor text when acquiring links. You want a variety of keyword links pointing back to your pages that relate to the content of that web page. Using one url address for all your links? Use your homepage url and also a variety of inner pages to point your backlinks to.

Natural Optimization Is The Way To Go
If you focus on readable, natural looking page of text this will go a long way towards achieving your goal of breaking the patterns search engine spider software can detect in your page content and text links. Search engine spiders focus on text on the page and text links when indexing web pages. Vary your use of keywords and website urls for your backlinks. Provide sensible text navigation and title tags that are not overly optimized. By focusing on what website visitors need you can outsmart the search engines and gain website visitors.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most important things you can do to help customers find you online. For an online business this is crucial, but even their brick-and-mortar counterparts can benefit from this relatively new form of marketing.

Search Engine Optimization defined is an online marketing strategy. By employing certain keywords and keyword phrases at the correct density, you can bump your website’s listing to the top of someone’s search results, increasing your business. Entire advertising agencies have spring up around this fast-growing marketing method.

So what does this have to do with you? Everything! Regular joes like you and small business owners need to learn this tool to give your company an edge over the guy down the street with lower prices. Check out the top five reasons why you should be using SEO right now:

1. Adds credibility to your company. When someone searches for “widgets” on Google and your company is the first one to appear in the results page, the user assumes that you are an expert on the topic. This makes people more likely to trust you, and ultimately buy from you.
2. Cost-effective. You can get high-quality SEO copywriting for a fraction of the cost of traditional copywriters. If you are an excellent communicator, you can even do it yourself for free.
3. Easy to implement. Unlike a traditional print advertsing campaign, SEO is very simple to start using and can be done in minutes.
4. Results are easy to measure. There are many online tools available to help you measure the effectiveness of your SEO. Results change daily, however, so you must constantly monitor it.
5. Reach a wider audience than you would with print. When doing a direct mail campaign, you have to buy a list of your prospects, meaning you already know who they are. SEO allows you to capture the attention of people who you didn’t think would have a need for what you offer.

With all these incentives, it’s easy to see the need for a good SEO campaign. It’s not as difficult as it may appear, and lots of help is available.

Typically, a splash page is designed to catch the attention of a human visitor through use of a large graphic, a Flash movie, or some other technological item.  While this may indeed attract the attention of your human visitors, visiting search engine spiders won’t be impressed, and ultimately your human visitors will not get all the benefit they could from visiting your site.

Search Engine Spiders and Splash
Search engine spiders rely on text and links to get their work done. In the past when there has been virtually no text on an entry page, images or a Flash movie, the content of the web page has not been read and indexed by the search engine spiders. Graphic images and Flash were lost on the spiders beyond ALT attribute text for the images. Until recently Flash was unreadable to the search engine spiders.

This is now changing as the major search engines are joining together to understand and index the content of Flash movies. While this is a major improvement for search engine indexing of Flash movies in the meantime it is important to provide at minimum a title and meta description as well as a text description of your company on your main entry page using important keyword phrases. A good combination is to embed a Flash movie within a page which also uses keyword optimized text.

To see what the search engine spiders see, go to SEOChat and use their spider simulator tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/ and enter your website address. When you run the spider simulator, you will see what the spider sees when it visits web pages to read and index information.

Splash Pages In Search Results
Ever search on the url of a splash page? It can be a real eye opener. Try searching on the url of the web page in Google and most often you will find minimal information about the page in the search results. You can hope that the search engine spiders pick up at least the meta description and title tag as part of the search results. There are times when even this is not available in a splash page and there is no text on the page to index. The search results are what searchers click on to go to your website. If there is no real information about your website chances are slim the searchers will click the search result to find out more about your company. If this is the entry page to your website it is not a good use of your online property.

The Importance Of The Entry Page
While a search engine spider can follow text links into the main content of your website, you are wasting this splash page. To make this page most useful to your visitors and to search engine spiders, you want to put good, keyword-rich text on this (and every) page in the website.  Content is what your visitors, both human and electronic, are really looking for. Rather than having just a page of links, put some real content on the entry splash page. Websites that talk about their companies and their products and services on the entry page tend to catch users’ attention and make them delve deeper into the site to look for more information.

Make The Visitor’s First Visit Memorable
Once a visitor reaches your website you want them to stay and click farther down into your website. You never know what your visitor’s attention span is going to be, so each page on the site needs to stand on its own, and to give the visitor something useful; never waste a page as a “click here to go somewhere else” page. Splash pages are most useful if they provide information about your company to the visitor as well as information that can be indexed by the search engine spiders.

“I don’t want to talk about SEO. I don’t believe in it!” claim some web developers when approached about the ever-popular subject. However, you know otherwise. You need to convince your web developer of SEO importance. What is the best way to communicate effectively about SEO with your web developer? Well, become informed, get prepared and return with an arsenal of information.

Here are some of the things you will need to convey your message:

1) Recent statistics show that at least 90% of all web visitors use the search engine to find what they are looking for. That is an important number to remember in explaining SEO’s importance to your web developer. Your web developer usually likes statistics. If your site isn’t SEO relevant, it is a waste of both time and money. Isn’t there a bonus available for a web developer who comes up with a site that increases visitor traffic? Don’t they want that raise for having developed an efficient, and pleasant looking, site? Of course, they do.

2) SEO (search engine optimization) is not a passing trend. It is here to stay. Content on a website needs to be relevant to both the search engines and people looking for websites. Your website needs to be picked up by the search engines in order to be worthwhile. Search engines feed on SEO.

3) Gather verifiable proof such as documents containing charts, studies, and interviews with top officials regarding the SEO world. Bring this with you for your meeting with your web developer. These will be used to provide references for your knowledge. The purpose of this is to help you start a informative discussion.

4) Keyword placement and frequency help determine your ultimate success with SEO. Use examples of keyword search tools to help show this point when talking with your web developer. Overture works well here. In fact, let your web developer know that keyword search tools have increased in popularity simply due to the necessity of knowing SEO. Your web developer loves keeping current on the industry trends with friends, right?

5) Keyword importance. The importance of keywords needs to be mentioned here. Let your web developer know too much will cause more harm than good. Tell them that it is easier to create keyword-dense content when each page contains no more than three keywords.

6) Keyword phrases are also more relevant than single keywords, research shoes. Using phrases narrows search rank competition and improves the likelihood that your content will meet the searcher’s expectations. For example, if your web page is about “doggie dental care”, it will have more success by containing the keyword phrases “dog teeth” or “dog dental” rather than the more generic single keyword “dog.” Your site visitors will be more targeted towards what you are offering.

There you go, take these factors into play and you will have success while explaining to your web developer why SEO is important. Good luck!