Anchor Text
Anchor text is the wording of the visible link to your page on somebody elses website. So I may have a link to Chester Wedding Photographer, which points to the weddings page of our main website – the anchor text is Chester Wedding Photographer. While almost any link is a good link, a better link affirms the content of the target page or site. You could have optimised a page for “Wedding Photographer North Wales” using the title tag, keywords in the URL or on page content (see SEO Part 1), but if there are lots of incoming links with the anchor text “Pet Photography”, then you are likely to rank highly for that term which may not be your goal.
People have used this technique in the past to rank certain sites unfavorably, a process known as Google Bombing. George Bush was linked as “Miserable Failure” from hundreds of sites and as a result ranked highly for this term for more than 2 years!
When commenting on blogs, it is possible to set your own Anchor Text so choose your wording carefully, but bear in mind you are more likely to be seen as spam if you comment as a generic term rather than your own name.
Menu Text
Following this principle through, you can also optimise your sites internal link structure. That is the menu items within your site. If all the links to your home page have the anchor text “Home”, then congratulations, you just optimised well for the word Home! Consider the terms you use in your websites menu structure, your footer and your sitemap if you have one.
If you are using a Graphic for navigation, then include the keywords in an ALT tag as described in SEO Part 2.
On page -v- Off page Factors
To put the information I’ve put forward so far in to some sort of perspective, you should consider that on page factors (domain and URL naming, title and description metadata, content and ALT text) are probably responsible for 40% of your SEO capability. Off page factors (basically incoming links) are responsible for the other 60%. That’s a pretty big reason to work on getting those links from other sites.
Age of domain
Now there is not a great deal you can do about this, unless you are lucky enough to bag a domain which has been in existence for some time. Older sites have more trustworthiness so far as search engines are concerned. Many new sites outrank older sites, but as a general rule older is better. On that same note if you just buy your domain for one year at a time, it is possible you can be seen as a fly by night operator by search engines, so buy for as long a period as you can. That’s only two years for a .co.uk, but longer for a .com.
Things to avoid
Hidden Text or Links
Some sites try to trick search engines as to their content and present different data to what a user browsing might see. Examples of this include using white text on a white background, hiding text behind an image or using a tiny font size. Don’t do it! Don’t hide links in a single character or make a tiny 1 pixel graphic to do the same – Google will find it and your site is liable to disappear from search results.
Content and Site Naming
I said it once before, but I’ll say it again – don’t stuff a page full of keywords so it doesn’t read correctly and don’t duplicate content from other sites. If you have a domain name and you own the .com and the .co.uk versions, don’t just duplicate them and if you use “http://www.sitename.co.uk” don’t duplicate it at “http://sitename.co.uk”.
We have a web forwarder for “www.marielloydphotography.com” that displays “www.marielloydphotography.co.uk”. The .com has not been submitted to Google and does not show up on search results. Your ISP should be able to help set this up for you.
301 Redirect – do this to avoid diluting your page rank!
Regarding the www and non-www versions of the site, you need to specify which is the preferred domain in Google webmaster tools (will be detailed in part 4 I think!) and you should set up a 301 redirect to the preferred version. Additionally, make sure any link building you do references the preferred domain, otherwise you are potentially losing out on the value of that link.
Before you start, to see the .htaccess file in Filezilla, on the Server menu you need to select Force Showing hidden files. It’s hidden by default, so you can’t see it. Don’t just create a new one unless you are sure there is not one in place already, most FTP programs hide this file by default. Also, note the odd name – it has no prefix before the . so is just called .htaccess. Windows will not recognise it, just open it in Notepad.
To redirect a sitename.co.uk request to a www.sitename.co.uk request use the following code in the .htaccess file
# Redirect non-www to www
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
To redirect a www.sitename.co.uk reuqest to a sitename.co.uk request use the following code in the .htaccess file
# Redirect www to non-www
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
Things to do
Make sure there is a link to every page from somewhere on your site. Preferably a text based link. Create a sitemap.xml file and upload it to your website. This helps search engines know about all your content and index it properly. You can create one by hand, but much easier to use Sitemap Generator to automate the process. If you have a wordpress based site, there are plug-ins to do this for you (part 6!).
Test your site works in all different browsers – not strictly speaking an SEO tip, but it’s important 
There are no pretty pictures in this post and I’ve already thrown some code at you, so that’s enough for now! I’ll mention some more code related things including page speed, site submission and ranking factors you can refine in part 4 and also how to remove pages using a robots.txt file. Promise not to leave it so long next time, I’ve been really busy this month! Thanks for reading if you have managed to get this far….