I run two dedicated servers running Vitualmin with Awstats and Webalizer log stats analyzer programs installed. I don’t find Webalizer stats particularly useful, so disable running Webalizer log analyzer.

I like the detail of Awstats log analyzer, but looking at the Awstats website it appears they don’t update particularly frequently, as I type this the last stable update was Awstat 6.9 2008-12-28 (almost 7 months ago) and the latest beta release Awstats 6.95 2009-05-29 (almost 2 months old).

Bing is a new Search engine (new as far as it’s domain name anyway) and so Awstats 6.9 doesn’t include Bing stats reporting. Awstats 6.95 does include Bing stats reporting, but I normally don’t use beta releases on a deployed server, too risky, so as far as Awstats is concerned I’m working with Awstats 6.9 until Awstats 6.95 goes stable release.

Virtualmin reports the version installed as 6.8 but it has the same date as the 6.9 release, so think I’m running the latest stable version of Awstats. Unfortunately Awstats 6.9 doesn’t include reporting for the search engine Bing from Microsoft so I have to add it manually.

Not sure why, but Microsoft keeps renaming it’s search engines:

MSN Search = Windows Live Search = Live Search = Bing Search Engine

I’m sure Microsoft has made major changes to their search engine over the years, but could you imagine Google changing it’s name so often! Quite funny really, taken Microsoft about 10 years to realise it has to copy Google in it’s search engine branding, give it an easy to remember almost made up name. I wonder if Binging will ever be considered a noun like Googling is

Note: My wife is reading this over my shoulder and is arguing Googling is a verb not a noun! I think it’s a noun, and it’s my website, so there!!!

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and I own a site about conspiracies including a page about the Moon Landing Hoax.

This site normally sees 500 to 1,000 visitors a day, yesterday it received over 20,000 visitors (over 30,000 AdSense impressions, kerching ) so was very interested to see where it was all coming from. Well a lot of it (most of it) was from the new Bing search engine, but because Awstats lacks Bing reporting I couldn’t pull any useful Keyword data via Awstats log analyzer!

When I search for relevant searches in Bing the site is listed top 15, so wasn’t sure where all the traffic was coming from (I couldn’t be bothered looking through the raw log files). So time to update Awstats to report Bing.

Adding Bing Search Engine Log Stats to Awstats

To add a search engine to Awstats you have to edit a file called search_engines.pm

In Virtualmin the file is located under

/usr/share/awstats/lib/search_engines.pm

Downloaded a copy and edited it in a text editor.

Under %SearchEnginesSearchIDOrder_list1=( add

'bing\.com',

I added it above ‘base\.google\.’,

Under %SearchEnginesHashID=( add

'bing\.com','bing',

I added it above ‘base\.google\.’,'google_base’,

Under %SearchEnginesKnownUrl=( add

'bing','q=',

I added it above ‘alexa’,'q=’,

Under %SearchEnginesHashLib=( add

'bing','<a href="http://www.bing.com/" title="Search Engine Home Page [new window]" target="_blank">Bing</a>',

I added it above ‘alexa’,'<a href=”http://www.alexa.com/” title=”Search Engine Home Page [new window]” target=”_blank”>Alexa</a>’,

Save the file and upload over the original (don’t forget to make a backup).

That should do it.

It worked, but only for new search engine data.

Rebuilding Awstats Stats Data Log Files

To get Awstats to rebuild the log file data for July again you have to delete the file that holds the July 2009 log file stats and either wait for the cron job to rebuild the months file (should be within 24 hours) or run the cron job yourself (I went with the latter).

This would be a real pain if I wanted this information for all my domains (over 100), but I’m only interested in this one domain for this one month, so not a big deal.

Log into the domains ftp server and go to the root of the server (BELOW /public_html/, so you have to go back a level, not up). Load the folder /awstats/ here you will find each months data files.

The format of these files is

awstatsDATE.domain.com.txt

Where DATE is the date in this format monthyear, for example:

awstats072009.conspiracy-theories-hoax.com.txt

is July 2009 data file.

On my dedicated server there are two files for each month, one for the www version one for the non www version, not sure why this is since I 301 redirect the non www to the www version.

Delete or better yet rename these two files (by renaming you have a backup on the server, easy to find if something goes wrong).

If you check Awstats log analyzer for the domain now the last month will be empty, but previous months will still be there.

Either wait for the Awstats cron job to run (should be under 24 hours wait) or find the relevant cron job and run it now. I ran it now and this rebuilt July 2009 data.

I read about rebuilding all months, but it sounded a big pain and as I don’t need older data in this format (Bing is a new search engine and Google sends most traffic) I didn’t bother.

Now for the BIG surprise.

Bing Search Engine is my New Friend

The new rebuilt stats data showed over 17,000 visitors to one search engine result, one I’d not checked or thought of as important:

moon landing hoax letter c

Since I don’t use Bing as a search engine (I love Google, I love Google…..) I can only assume a link to that SERP was on the Bing home page or something for that day.

David Law

Based on this web sites log files you most likely found your way here via a relevant search on Google. Maybe a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) like Improve Search Engine Ranking or SEO Consultant.

Whatever keyword search you used, you almost certainly are looking for help to improve your search engine rankings (most likely for free ) and more than likely consider Google THE most important search engine to your web sites rankings.

How to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a relatively straight forward set of quite basic techniques.

1. Create an optimized template/theme for your web sites pages: For example with WordPress (a very popular Blogging CMS, this site uses WordPress) SEOing the WordPress themes is a small business in itself (see Google AdSense Theme Site). Whether you use WordPress or individually hand made HTML pages, the general optimization is the same.

Having a search engine optimized template/theme means your title elements (title tags to the layman), headers, menu links, footers (everything except the main content) should be optimized without having to do much work (the theme should work for you).

2. Create search engine optimized content: It might sound obvious, but if your content doesn’t cover the SERPs you want, there’s no realistic way for your content to gain those SERPs. There are so many pages online today that do a brilliant job of covering content for the web sites visitors, but do terrible when it comes to describing what the page is about to the search engines.

For example the page you are reading is about Improve Search Engine Ranking, if you read the content you will note all those words are used a reasonable amount of times throughout the content and the page title is “Improve Search Engine Ranking”. A related SERP would be SEO Ranking, but if as I wrote this article I did not take the abbreviation SEO into account there would be no way for a search engine to know this page is also about SEO Ranking as well.

3. Incoming links/backlinks and PageRank (PR): Links, links and more links! With your well optimized theme and content you now need to find as many links to your content as possible without doing anything that the search engines (mainly Google) considers blackhat (blackhat SEO techniques = penalized content = low traffic!)

The best way by far to obtain links is to create content others will link to. This isn’t always possible, so take a look at the other pages of our site for ideas (lots of articles on gaining links via various methods).

Why is Search Engine Optimization so Expensive?

As you can read above the concept of search engine optimization is relatively straight forward. This might come as a surprise coming from an SEO consultant looking to take your hard earned money, but improving search engine rankings (Google rankings) isn’t difficult, at least what results in good search engine rankings isn’t a big secret only known by the select few.

Though like any specialty, if you don’t know much about the subject it might as well be advanced brain surgery.

If you know absolutely nothing about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you might have even been naive enough to believe you build a good website and masses of visitors will swarm to it via search engines, because that’s how websites and search engines work!. Since you are reading this page you’ve realised it doesn’t work that way.

I have to admit to being that naive person over 10 years ago when I started my first website (ecommerce store). My search engine naivety soon vanished when it took weeks to take the first order and that order was paid for via Overture paid advertising!

Eventually I stumbled upon search engine optimization and by the end of the first year the site was seeing about 8,000 unique search engine visitors a day (and growing) and sold over £80,000 worth of stock. Not bad for my first try

Over a decade later I use the same SEO information and many more newly learnt skills to help other small business website owners to improve their search engine rankings, with a strong emphasis on Google rankings.

Paying for Search Engine Optimization Advice

For years I’ve offered an email based SEO service where for a monthly retainer fee I’m available to answer search engine optimization questions to small to medium sized businesses. To date I’ve not worked with a big name since the service I offer lacks the “bells and whistles” large companies tend to expect:

I don’t offer phone support – this is because the advice is almost always very detailed and complex, from experience a lot of important technical information is lost using this medium: fine for a business chat, but not for how to SEO a website since the person optimizing needs to keep referring back to the information supplied.

I never meet clients face to face – no need, all I need is one person in the company that can understand and follow instructions and as long as they have the authority to change a sites code/content things go smoothly.

If you’d like to talk to me about search engine optimization take a look at my SEO Consultant Quotes page.

Pet peeve of mine here, so many people who should know much better call the title element the title tag. It’s so bad I’ve had to title this post Title Tag instead of title Element (as it should be). Please it is NOT a tag, it’s an element so SEO Consultants out there stop calling it a blinking title tag!

Now that I’ve got that off my chest

The contents of your title element is probably the most important on page SEO factor there is, so lets get it right.

Treat every page of your site as an island, if a page is about a mortgage calculator then the perfect SEO title for the Mortgage Calculator SERP is very simple it’s

Mortgage Calculator

If on another page of the same site is about UK Mortgage Brokers the perfect SEO title is

UK Mortgage Brokers

It really is that simple to determine a perfect SEO title when a page is targeting one main SERP (if there’s multiple SERPs, little more difficult, but same idea).

What you should avoid are titles like:

Name Of Site : UK Mortgage Brokers

www.urlofsite.com : UK Mortgage Brokers

Name Of Site Page 1

www.urlofsite.com Page 1

How I Spent My Monday Afternoon

Or a derivative of the above-

Name Of Site : How I Spent My Monday Afternoon – Name Of Site

Or worse of all the titles

Nothing whatsoever, no title element!!

The above titles waste valuable title tag real estate. The title is so important, so don’t waste it on pointless words that add nothing to your pages SEO or to a potential visitor clicking your link on a Google search result.

This doesn’t mean you can’t add an extra word or three for sales reasons or to aim for some secondary SERPs, after all you want people to click on your pages in a Google SERP, if your page is about Cars the best title would be

Cars

From an SEO perspective, but from a click thru/sales point of view that doesn’t tell a perspective visitor what they are going to get. So you might need to qualify your keywords-

Cheap Cars

Cars for Women

Safe Cars

That said you’ll find most times when you do this you should have been more realistic in your keyword choice in the first place. So you want the Cars SERP, but realistically your site isn’t going to be in the top 10 for that really hard SERP, so aim for easier SERPs to start with (like the ones above).

If you ever get a site so popular it might compete for these super tough search phrases then you could try aiming higher. But most of us are going to have to settle for the easier SERPs.

Don’t worry though, I’ve found you can get far more traffic from the easy SERPs than the really hard SERPs (SEO long tail) and for far less SEO effort.

Also see title optimization from this SEO Tutorial for more examples of SEO title optimization.

David Law (SEO Consultant)

A lot has been written about the Google Sandbox effect, but much of it is based on early reports of what webmasters thought was a downgrading of a site that was just beginning to do well.

Many webmasters concluded from this drop that Google was giving their new sites some good rankings so other webmasters could find their content to link to it and then after a short period of good rankings for being a new site the rankings drop.

The theory was if the content was great that short period of good rankings would be enough to generate enough backlinks to give it a start on the journey to long term rankings in Google.

As you’ll see after reading this article the drop in rankings was not as these webmasters first thought, but the side effect of a new Google algorithm, they were unlucky to have new sites at the wrong time.

For starters lets determine what’s normal Google ups and downs in SERPs and what’s actually being in the sandbox.

What’s NOT the Google Sandbox Effect?

If you’ve got a new site and after a few months from going live your seeing a steady 40 visitors a day from Google and then it drops to 20 visitors a day, this is not the Google sandbox effect.

A drop from 40 to 20 visitors a day is not a big drop, you probably lost SERPs, (very easy to do with a new site) happens all the time, (you don’t notice it as much when you have 1,000+ visitors a day).

You’ve got an old site that’s ranked well for years and it suddenly looses Google traffic for no obvious reason, this again is not the Google sandbox effect, Google has either changed it’s algorithm (AGAIN!) and you’ve been hit bad or something else has gone wrong (maybe you lost some important backlinks).

Is Your Site in the Google Sandbox?

You have a sandboxed site when you have a relatively new site or an old site that’s never gained quality links (low PR) and despite adding enough links to rank well for several months (these are quality links and enough to give a PR5 home page, PR4 for easier niches) and having good on page optimization the sites rankings for semi-competitive SERPs are barely moving (feel like they are stuck in the sand).

If someone wants to jump in and say, but my new site was ranking really well after a couple of weeks then dropped like a stone, please post your traffic details, because I can practically guarantee your going to come out with low visitor numbers and that does not = the start of a well ranked site.

Has anyone recently started a site from scratch (newly registered domain, no backlinks) and in under 3 months got it to over 1,000 unique visitors a day from Google?

I used to be able to do this with ease, now it’s damn hard and needs sites with several thousand pages of unique content: basically each page pulls in a visitor or two a day, (if your lucky and in a high traffic niche) not a single semi-competitive SERP amongst them, so if this was a 20 page site you’d be seeing ~20 visitors a day, 1,000 page site ~1,000 visitors a day (so your gaining traffic through quantity of content and very easy SERPs, not a small number of well ranked pages).

So What is The Google Sandbox?

All sites start in what has been called the Google Sandbox, unfortunately there’s a lot of misinformation about what it is.

I have created and worked on over 400 domains some before and many after and a handful during the time this effect came to light. So I have a lot of data on how new sites rank in Google.

I have rarely seen what was originally called the sandbox effect:

Newish site (not to big, so not thousands of pages) started to get good rankings (meaning some semi-competitive SERPs = decent traffic numbers, in the hundreds not tens of visitors a day) then wham, traffic drops to barely anything (under 50 visitors a day) and takes months before it starts climbing again.

That was the original description of the sandbox and many webmasters got hit with this traffic drop when this effect was coming to light, but I’ve not seen this since.

What I am sure has happened is Google changed the way links passed benefit and the sites that was just beginning to do well in the old algorithm dropped like a stone in the new algorithm.

It’s analogous to having a sloping beach and when your out the sea (above the tide line) your doing well, in the water your not.

Before the time of the sandbox effect being reported by thousands of webmasters the tide was low, Google made an algorithm change and not only did the tide rise, but the beach front moved a few hundred feet inland swamping sites that had just started to do well.

Since the tide never went back out new sites that are in the ’sea’ have much further to climb up the beach before they reach dry land.

That’s not a bad analogy and fits in with the sandbox: sand, sea etc…

Before the change with a strong links campaign you could get a brand new site ranked for semi-competitive SERPs in 3-6 months.

For example I had a site banned (I used to use blackhat SEO techniques) before the sandbox (was getting 8,000 unique visitors a day in a money niche, loosing that site taught me a valuable lesson I’ll tell you!), made a similar site and within 4 months was close to 3,000 unique visitors a day (that doesn’t happen now).

When I use the same SEO techniques today it will take about a year to gain that sort of success due to what the sandbox really is. So what took 3 months to achieve pre sandbox Google algorithm now takes 9+ months post sandbox Google algorithm.

One way of looking at this is new links do not pass full benefit right away, there’s a dampening effect on new links. Before the sandbox effect the link benefit dampening factor lasted around 3 months, but now it’s around 9 months.

I believe Google made this change to combat comment link spammers, at the time of the change link spamming was rampant (and it worked), since comment links on blogs and forums tend to drop deep into the archived pages (usually low PR pages long term) after a month or two the benefit passed from links from popular blogs are not going to effect Google rankings as much if they don’t pass full benefit until they are deeply archived.

How To Climb Out The Sandbox

There’s only one guaranteed way out of the sandbox for a new site and that’s a good links campaign and patience.

Whatever links you add today will not pass full link benefit until around 9 months from now (used to be about 3 months). Unfortunately this means for most new sites to rank well your going to have to wait about a year, since it takes time to gain links to a new site.

Most important thing is to remember the links are growing in power, but not enough to help until around 9 months, so don’t think the sites failed and give up or do something stupid like trying blackhat SEO techniques in desperation.

Keep working on your content and on new backlinks and be confident your site will rank well long term if you’ve got the backlinks and reasonable on page SEO.

Can the Google Sandbox be Avoided?

The sandbox can not be avoided for a new site, but since what we are waiting for is links to age if you can buy an old site with aged backlinks and a reasonable PR home page (PR5 ideally, PR4 minimum) you could cut the waiting period between adding your content to good rankings from at least 9 months to potentially over night** with the right site.

** It would be over night for easy SERPs and some semi-competitive SERPs, but even if you bought a site with a PR6 home page since there’s the anchor text of incoming links to a page is important to that pages rankings, your going to be lacking that targeted anchor text.

If you bought a PR6 home page site about “Sandboxes for Children” and wanted it to rank well for “Cheap Mortgages” all the anchor text of the current backlinks will be about Sandboxes and not Cheap Mortgages, so there will be no anchor text supporting the new contents SERPs.

I’d estimate this sort of content change will loose around 30% of an aged sites ranking benefit, still much, much better than starting with a newly registered domain, but not as good as having those links using the right anchor text.

Fortunately internal links anchor text is just as good as anchor text from external links, so if you optimise your internal links you can at least benefit from the link benefit flowing through the site.

Since this link benefit is from aged links your internal links pass full link benefit from day one (there’s no link benefit dampening effect on internal links).

David Law (SEO Consultant)

Although SEO isn’t that hard when you already know what works SEO wise, if you’re starting out for the very first time and don’t have a clue what to do take a good look at WordPress which is a Content Management System (CMS) originally designed as a blog platform, but with minor alterations is perfect as a general SEO CMS (WordPress 2.6 is free which is always nice ).

When I first got into search engine optimization almost a decade ago now, content management systems were no where near as developed as they are now, first time I tried to install WordPress I couldn’t get it working, (gave up and tried again several updates later successfully!) but installing WordPress 2.6 today can be achieved in under 5 minutes (it is so easy).

Even setting up WordPress in the very best SEO format takes me a few minutes turning a new site from SEO 0% to SEO 75%+ just by installing WordPress and making a few easy options changes. This sort of on page search engine optimization could cost you thousands of dollars if paying an SEO company and quite frankly most SEO companies won’t come anywhere near as good as WordPress is SEO wise!

Yes, you can install WordPress and achieve 75%+ on page search engine optimization without even knowing what you are really doing (WordPress is that good).

I use WordPress on as many sites as possible because it offers a lot of features that saves time. For example I like to add a lot of internal links to relevant pages (a bit like Wikipedia links internally) and there’s a WordPress addon (a plugin called aLinks) that makes this almost automated (saves me many, many hours of adding related links between articles).

Although you can use WordPress 2.6 completely free, including hosting at http://wordpress.org/hosting/ I would strongly advise registering your own domains and hosting plans. You can register domains from Godaddy for example for under $10 a year and there’s plenty of cheap hosting plans out there that can handle WordPress fine (you can easily run a WordPress based website for less than $100 a year).

With WordPress free hosting your limited in what plugins you can use and you can’t install custom themes like the ones I sell at Google AdSense Templates and Themes which makes adding that extra 25% SEO so much easier and makes monetising your site with AdSense a minor chore rather than a big coding headache!

WordPress isn’t for every site, although there are ecommerce plugins available they are not easy to use and so if you plan to sell lots of products (run a online store) WordPress can’t do that. When it comes to information sites there is no better choice from an SEO CMS perspective than WordPress.

At another time I’ll explain how to set WordPress options for almost perfect SEO optimization and why the WordPress AdSense/SEO themes I sell at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/ will take a 75% SEO’d out the box WordPress site to as close as you can get to 100% SEO’d with a CMS.

SEO Information Sites:

SEO Tutorial
SEO Consultant Information
Affiliate Marketing with a SEO Perspective

David Law : Like to network with me, you can find me on FaceBook at http://profile.to/davidlaw/

Here’s some real SEO Tips you can actually use to increase your sites search engine rankings in Google.

No wishy washy, get backlinks (with no pointers how to achieve this) or obvious tips like build good content (what the heck is good content!).

SEO Tips You Can Trust

These are all SEO facts NOT SEO myths.

SEO Tip 1 Anchor Text of Nofollow Links

The anchor text of nofollow links count towards the Google ranking of the page the nofollow link is ON (this was an unexpected result when I tested this). However, as expected it does NOT count towards the page you are linking to and does not use PR/link benefit.

SEO Tip Usage – You can link to relevant external sites and add the nofollow to the link and gain on page SEO benefit from the anchor text used without wasting link benefit/PR to the site your linking to.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – I’ve not seen a page/site that uses nofollow excessively receive a penalty, but even so it’s something to take into account. It’s not a clean white SEO tip, it’s a little grey.

SEO Tip 2 Title Attribute and Alt Attribute Text

The title attribute (that’s title=”keywords here” normally associated with text links) does NOT count towards a pages rankings, the alt attribute text (that’s (alt=”keywords here” normally associated with images/image links) does count.

SEO Tip Usage – Makes no difference what you put in the title attribute, but try to be keyword rich in your alt attributes, meaning if a page is about SEO Tips try to use SEO Tips as alt text.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – Like any on page SEO technique, don’t go over the top with stuffing your alt attribute text with long keyword lists. Be descriptive about your images whilst covering your pages SERPs and you’ll be fine.

SEO Tip 3 Google Sandbox

The Google sandbox is not avoided by using an aged PR0 domain name. The sandbox is the effect caused by a lack of aged links and so adding links and maintaining them until aged (minimum 9 months old) is the way out of the “sandbox” (how long you are in the sandbox depends how good and how old your links are).

SEO Tip Usage – Basically it’s add enough links and wait for them to count fully. Higher the PR a link is an longer it’s been live the better, if the anchor text is relevant as well, that’s icing on the cake.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – With link building growth is slow at first, don’t be tempted to cut corners (link spamming for example) because it’s moving to slow for you. I tested adding 25,000 links to a new site almost over night, the home page hit PR7 first PR update, but it NEVER received any decent Google rankings (was penalized for sure). Be patient, remember the links you add today will not mature until 9+ long months from now (give them a year to be sure).

SEO Tip 4 Anchor Text

Anchor text of a spiderable link is not only important to the page you are linking to, but also to the page you are linking FROM.

SEO Tip Usage – From an SEO perspective anchor text is considered more important than standard body text so use relevant (that means relevant to the SERPs you want for a page) anchor text a LOT.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – If you own multiple domains be careful with how you interlink them, it’s very easy (talking from personal experience here) to link way too many times from one site to another. Try to avoid site wide links, not completely (one is OK to a domain), but don’t make the mistake of adding multiple links to the same domain in a site wide fashion.

SEO Tip 5 Title Element and Meta Tags

The contents of the title element (that’s the title a lot of webmasters call a title tag, it’s not a tag/attribute, it’s an element) is damn important, more important than any other on page factor so don’t waste it’s SEO value. Conversely the meta tags DO NOT count towards a pages rankings in Google, though the description meta tag can be used for the SERPs description so add something to increase CTR from a Google search.

SEO Tip Usage – Spend a lot of time on your pages title, (ideally targeting one main SERP per page) and a small amount of time on your meta description (think sales copy, sell your page) and forget about your meta keywords (I copy the title elements contents and forget about it).

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – It’s difficult to do anything blackhat with the title element and meta tags. That said if you make really spammy parts to your pages and a manual Google reviewer sees it, it’s not going to look good. There’s no benefit in spamming your meta tags, so don’t waste your time trying. You could make a really long title element, (Google counts a lot of characters, far more than it shows on a SERP) but every word you add to your title shares the benefit, add 100 words and each receives just 1/100th of the titles benefit!! So don’t spread this valuable SEO real estate too thin.

ALL the above SEO tips have been thoroughly tested and confirmed by myself over the last 5+ years through countless SEO tests and observations of real world SEO examples.

Author: David Law (SEO Consultant)

There’s a lot of talk by many SEO consultants about themed text links and how they are the ONLY text links a webmaster should be seeking. Some go as far as to state un-themed links are worthless in the search for high Google rankings!

What’s a Themed Text Link?

First we must decide what a themed link is and this causes a major problem!

I know a site about home furnishings is related to a website about kitchen accessories (related meaning the same visitors might like to see both sites), but does Google? How can Google match content that doesn’t use similar content/keywords!

Are there thousands of Google employees categorising sites so text links can be graded on relatedness? Of course not, the vast majority of what Google does is automated, so if Google can’t automate text link theming, it won’t use it as a ranking factor.

So IF Google treats themed links differently (and this is far from a certainty) how could it determine theming of text links?

If Google uses theming it is going to have to be pretty basic and automated. For example it might be something like this-

1. Anchor Text – Does it match the linking pages content.
2. Title Element of the linking page – Does it use keywords that are on the linked to page.
3. Body Text of the linking page – Are the keywords used as anchor text within the body text.

These are simple things Google could look for, not sure if they do (I suspect they do something like this), but they could and so IF Google uses link theming this is how I think Google would do it.

Lets Assume Google Themes Links

What this means is for a text link to be themed the linking page should have a title and content that matches the anchor text of the text link.

Hmm, that’s a problem, because in the real world despite having many quality text links from sites that are related (like the home furnishing and kitchen accessories sites example above) only a small percentage match the above criteria and so most are not going to be fully themed.

And yet my sites, my colleagues sites and many SEO clients websites are doing extremely well in Google with few themed text links, why?

Themed Internal Text Links are as Good as Other Links

Many webmasters believe the only text links that count towards a pages SERPs are incoming links from external sources, others believe incoming links from external sources give far more benefit than a similar internal link. Both are wrong, to Google there is no difference between an internal and an external incoming link, both are treated the same way**

** Actually internal links are better for one reason, when a site has aged PR (from links that have been live for a year) a new internal link passes full PR/link benefit right away. This is why big news sites like CNN can temporarily take a high position for a hard SERP just because they had a new page with a link from their high PR home page. However if CNN linked to a new page on another domain it wouldn’t get the same SERPs because links from external sources have to age (at least 9 months) to pass full PR/link benefit see Google Sandbox for more details.

Yes it’s true an incoming link from another site will eventually increase a sites PR/link benefit (which is why we all like new links), but in ranking terms they are no better than an internal link.

Probably lost a few of you on the above point, so I’ll delve a little deeper.

A websites SERPs are powered by the PR flowing through the site, more PR a site has more likely a particular page will do well in the SERPs (I’m ignoring the age of incoming external links, that’s another article!). When a site gains a new incoming link from an external source that passes new PR/link benefit to the site, basically it increases the sites PR and this in turn helps every page of the site do better.

With internal linking there is no over all increase in PR/link benefit, what you are doing is sharing your existing PR/link benefit through your site using text links, and since a sites PR/link benefit is finite it can only go so far.

When you add a new internal link to say a new page this takes some PR/link benefit away from the existing pages of the site, basically the new page is taking a share of the sites PR, how much of a share depends on the number of internal links and which pages are linking.

Analogy time: A growing website is like a growing family, think of a medium sized family, 2 parents and 2 children, when a third child is born it receives some of the resources (parents time for example) that used to go to the first two children and if a 4th child is born those resources are spread thinner. Bring in another family member (grandmother) to support the family is like adding new incoming links from external sources

The effect of this sharing of PR is current SERPs can fall when a webmaster adds new pages because the existing pages no longer receive the same PR/link benefit they had before!

This does not mean don’t add new content, just make sure every page of your site has a function (preferably targeting a new SERP), otherwise you are wasting some of your PR/link benefit! And if you add a lot of content look for new sources of PR to maintain the overall PR/link benefit to existing pages.

As you can see to the uninformed webmaster that adds new internal links traffic can fall if they wasted PR/link benefit and this leads them to the conclusion internal links are downgraded or don’t count at all.

Back to Themed Text Links

Since internal themed text links are as good as similar external text links you should make sure all internal links use relevant anchor text. When done correctly this can generate thousands of targeted visitors a day to deep product pages with quite modest amounts of PR flowing through a site.

And this is where theming of incoming text links from external sources is not needed. Send an un-themed PR7 link to your home page and your home page could increase in PR to as high as PR6 (depends on several factors). Now through wise internal linking you turn that un-themed PR into highly themed internal text links which are just as good as any other PR6 link!

It is that simple, every text link (and this includes image links) to a site no matter where it is from (as long as it passes PR, for example doesn’t use rel=nofollow) will increase the sites overall PR which through keyword rich internal anchor text of internal links can power a site to high targeted traffic from Google.

And that’s why buying un-themed text links works, they increase the overall PR of the site which aids internal linking.

This SEO question appears on most SEO forums from time to time and is another generally misunderstood SEO topic and one all SEO consultants should understand.

What’s a static HTML page?

The classic static web page is generated from an actual page ‘physically’ located on the server: so if you had a page named static-page.html somewhere on your server you could find and download this page (it exists, you could grab it via FTP).

The very first websites all used static HTML pages and so the first search engines cut their teeth on static web pages.

What’s a dynamically generated web page?

As the web developed a new way to generate websites arrived, dynamically generated web pages. They differ from static pages in that there is no ‘physical’ equivalent to the page you may be viewing on the server (so you can’t directly download it via FTP).

Dynamically generated pages in it’s simplest form is a single template page that’s used to generate an entire website (could be 1,000,000 page site). Since dynamic pages use scripting languages like PHP and ASP the template will be named after that language for example dynamic-page.php.

This one template page can then be used to create a theoretical unlimited number of unique (unique content) pages each with a unique dynamically generated URL. A simple example would be a 100 page site with each page generated with the format below-

dynamic-page.php?page=1
dynamic-page.php?page=2
dynamic-page.php?page=3
dynamic-page.php?page=4
dynamic-page.php?page=5
…
…
dynamic-page.php?page=100

None of the pages above exist ‘physical’, they are all generated from the single dynamic-page.php page using server-side scripting (PHP in this example). The content from each page could come from a MySQL database, updating the database also updates the website content. Editing the dynamic-page.php changes the entire site.

Many new to web sites looking to go dynamic become confused when they can’t find a page like dynamic-page.php?page=4 on their server (FTP) to edit and post to forums asking how to find them

Why use dynamically generated content?

There are many benefits to dynamically generated websites, this site for example uses the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) which creates dynamically generated pages with a very easy to use back-end for adding and editing content on the fly (any fool can create a site using WordPress and many do!).

A user of WordPress types/pastes content into a text editor like web page (similar to Word), gives it a relevant title etc… clicks a publish button and within seconds the page is available on the website with links from any relevant sections automatically created. Add a new section to the site and the CMS automatically creates a link from the menu, so visitors to the site have immediate access to the new section.

This is just the tip of the ice berg of what’s possible with dynamically generated content, this site uses a WordPress plugin that automatically links phrases to a relevant page (the phrase “Text Links” automatically links to a relevant page and “SEO Consultant” to another page).

To do this with static HTML pages could involve hours of manual editing, though there are ways to simplify the process for example using server-side includes so the menu code (the menu links) are held in a separate file (edit one file, whole site updated). But even with includes and similar techniques static HTML sites (especially large sites) are far more time consuming to maintain than a well thought out dynamically generated site.

Now you know why smart webmasters use dynamically generated sites now we’ll deal with how the search engines, especially Google handle dynamic sites.

Search Engines and Dynamic Sites

In the early days Google etc… could only handle simple URLs like static-page.html and choked on URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1.

As more and more websites went dynamic the major search engines played catch up, first being able to deal with simple constructs like dynamic-page.php?page=1 and later the more complex dynamic URLs like-

dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=1
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=2
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=3

In the example above we now have 2 variables, a section and a page.

Search engines like Google at first could only handle a small number of variables, wasn’t that long ago when Google would choke on 4 or more variables in a dynamic URL-

dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=1
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=2
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=3

And so it was advisable to limit the number of variables passed.

Right now Google and the other major search engines can handle multiple variable URLs, not unusual to find 4+ variables in an indexed page and so there is no SEO reason NOT to use dynamic URLs since they can and will be fully spidered and indexed just like any static HTML page.

That said there’s two reasons for avoiding dynamic URLs, the first isn’t a big deal, so I’ll deal with it first.

Dynamic Sites are Spidered Slower than Static Sites

Google in particular has made it clear dynamic sites are spidered slower than static sites. The reason for Google to do this are webmaster friendly (as I’ve recently discovered), dynamically generated sites can potentially have unlimited pages and so Google assumes a dynamic looking site (a site with URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1) is big and slows the crawl speed. It does this to limit server load because if a dynamic site (any site) has millions of pages, Googlebot and the other spiders could cause the server to crash if they spidered too many pages at one time.

The above has happened to my server, I use many dynamically generated sites, one script in particular uses Amazon’s XML feed to generate an Amazon affiliate store with millions of Amazon products. I have quite a lot of these stores, so potentially tens of millions of pages spidered by Google etc…

I use something called mod_rewrite to convert dynamic URLs to appear static (an SEO technique) in a web browser or search engine spider, so to Google on my server it finds tens of millions of static looking pages which it spiders at full speed!

This has brought my server to it’s knees at times and I’ve had to take measures to slow Googlebot and other spiders!

For an average user though the slower spidering won’t impact SERPs to a great degree, your new pages may take a day or two longer to be indexed, but they’ll get there eventually and when indexed will gain what ever SERPs they deserve.

For this reason if you have a dynamically generated site that’s regularly indexed by Google etc… it’s wise to keep things as they are.

SEO Pros and Cons of Dynamic vs Static HTML

If you are starting a new site and want the most traffic out of Google etc… then filenames are important and static HTML pages are very easy to name for maximum SEO effect.

You create a new page and give it a filename like-

best-seo-filename-in-the-world.html

An equiveleint dynamic URL might look like-

index.php?page=best+seo+filename+in+the+world

or even-

index.php?page=1

To Google all are spiderable/indexed, but the first one is the best because Google takes all words it recognises from a URL and uses that in the rankings algorithm.

Google treats hyphens (-), plus (+), equal (=) and dot (.) as a word separator so it reads the URLs above as-

1. best seo filename in the world html

2. index php? page best seo filename in the world

3. index php? page 1

The first has 7 recognisable words and one (html) is wasted (and you don’t have to use html).

The second has 9 recognisable words and three (index php? page) are wasted.

The third has 4 recognisable words and all four (index php? page 1) are wasted.

Wasted meaning not part of the keyphrase this page is targeting.

As you can see the HTML version is the best because it is so easy to manipulate and the dynamic URLs can range from terrible to not too bad.

As an SEO consultant I want the most out of each and every page, so when I create a site I try to make all filenames SEO friendly, but I also like to use dynamic sites because they save so much time in managing content and this is where mod_rewrite rears it’s ugly little head!

Mod_rewrite an SEO Consultants Nightmare

The hours I’ve spent converting dynamic URLs into static looking URLs through mod_rewrite is my own little hell, one tiny mistake and nothing works! But get it right and you can convert ugly SEO unfriendly dynamic URLs into SEO friendly static like filenames that Google etc… loves.

Not going to try to explain in this article how to use mod_rewrite, so open up Google type in mod_rewrite and have fun

If you find mod_rewrite is beyond your skill set, take a look at WordPress CMS, designed as a blogging platform, but very easy to convert to a general CMS (the SEO Consultant Services site uses WordPress, just remove the monthly archive from the menu). Out the box WordPress creates dynamic looking URLs, but with a few clicks of a mouse they can be converted (easily) to the URLs you see with this site.

Note: mod_rewrite is for Apache servers only.

This is a series of SEO advice and tips aimed at new SEO consultants or those looking to learn SEO from scratch. As the owner of SEO Gold I ensure all our SEO consultants understand the importance of links to good search engine listings.

Importance of Text Links

If you are familiar with Google search engine optimisation you’ll already know text links are essential to gaining even slightly competitive SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You may have come across reference to Googlebombs such as the Miserable Failure SERP which shows the power of text links with specific anchor text**.

**Note: as of Late January 2007 Google made an algorithm change and this completely reorganised the miserable failure SERP. Google has made a change so Googlebombs are no longer as affective. It’s difficult to say if this change will have a negative impact on link campaigns, but you could see a case where a site owner obtained thousands of links with identical anchor text and in doing so was seen as a Googlebomb. So to be on the safe side try to vary your anchor text.

It’s what most SEO consultants refer to as an off page SEO factor, meaning the text links aren’t on the page (the SEO expert can’t change them, unless they also own the sites the links are on as well ).

Contextual Text Links

Look for contextual text links (links from within content) like the text links in the next paragraph.

I own SEO Gold so can link to and from it at will, say to the SEO Tutorial page as it’s relevant to this pages content. When the SEO Consultant Services site gets more content this page will link to relevant pages.

Contextual links like these are the best types of links you can aim for, they are as natural as it gets. You should also use this form of link both within your own site (linking to internal pages like the home page links above) and to other relevant sites you own (like the two links to SEO Gold Services above).

Lets Gain Some Text Links

There are many ways an SEO consultant or webmaster can gain text links for a website, here are a few.

Text Links from Directories

Text Links via Reciprocal Linking

Text Links from Blogs

Buying Text Links

We offer an email based SEO Consultant advice service which includes 250 text links.

In a nut shell all the search engine optimisation advice needed to optimise a website and enough text links (PR as high as PR6) to make a new (PR0) websites home page a strong PR5 (usually enough to rank well for relevant SERPs).

Considering the 250 text links the fee we charge (around £500 a month) is on the low end of the SEO services market. We keep the price low by not offering phone support per se (if absolutely needed there’s an additional charge per call) and never meet our SEO clients (all advice by email).

It’s what SEO clients need to rank well in the major search engines long term, not necessarily what they want: for example we don’t waste time submitting client sites to search engines or compiling glossy SEO reports**

** The bottom line is if the client isn’t seeing increased revenue from their site, search engine optimisation isn’t working (there are site types that SEO doesn’t work well with). An SEO report that tells a client they’ve moved from 110 in a main SERP (their hard SERP) to 46 does not help the client make more revenue, 46 is not in the money. Experienced SEO’s know the real traffic for most sites is in the long tail (I’ll do a post on the SEO long tail soon): potentially thousands of relatively easy SERPs that can pull in thousands of relevant visitors. The long tail is where the majority of SEO resources should be spent not on the long term goal of hard SERPs that can take years (if ever) to obtain.

In our experience as long as the client is able to understand the advice and act on it (so they need access to their content and code and the ability to change it) this is more than enough to turn a failing web based business into a successful one. So our SEO service works, most of my failures are when there’s no one person controlling the site changes needed or the person in control of the changes lack basic HTML skills (little gets done).

We give out free SEO quotes for our service and our quotes tend to be quite detailed taking at least an hour, more often than not several hours to compile. All SEO quotes are compiled by an experienced SEO consultant and will give a little free SEO advice (a taste of what’s to come).

I send out about 10 SEO quotes a week which takes over 15 hours and this results in approx. one new client a month (around 1 in 40 quotes from ~60 hours of work converts to a new client!).

Since clients have a strong tendency to stay with our SEO service for years it’s an acceptable amount of work for a new client. However, if small changes in the SEO services offered could increase the sign-up rate it’s well worth looking into. Hence this post.

I’m interested in comments from both potential SEO clients (those looking for an SEO service) and other SEO consultants as to what SEO clients want.

So please comment below.