ALCANDER NEWSLETTER

14 May 2004

 Issue 8

NEWS ITEM IN BRIEF

LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION

Google begins featuring image Ads in Adwords

13-05-04

Dabber attack worms its way along the Sasser trail

14-05-04

Search engines delete adware company

13-05-04

European broadband takes off

12-05-04

Google Launches Official Google Blog, Not Blog Search

11-05-04

In this article, we look at how optimising your anchor text can dramatically improve your web rankings.

What is anchor text? It's the text that appears in any hyperlink e.g. the text of this link is "this link".

Such a link is not very helpful to the visitor nor is it going to help the site get a good ranking. Anchor text needs to be indicative of the page it links as this will be more persuasive to the visitor. Any visually impaired visitor is even less likely to follow the link as they often use their equipment just to focus on the links themselves, without necessarily the context around them.

For help with the web rankings, keywords need to be built into the anchor text. Most of the impact on doing this will be directed to the target page URL. For example, free monthly newsletter will be beneficial to Alcander's page for subscribing to the newsletter as well as being of benefit (to a lesser degree) to this page when it becomes a part of the Alcander web site.

If you are in the fortunate position to be able to create or influence links from other domains to your own site, then these principles concerning anchor can have great effect. In fact, everyone can take advantage of this by setting up a good link exchange. Your link exchange should provide would-be linkers with multiple options for linking to your site, each exploiting different anchor text. This would avoid your site always being linked to with the same anchor text. With some simple programming, you could rotate them so at least the first option (the one most will go for) is not always the same.

If we ran a web award scheme, we would give out awards to the following web sites. We have placed each "award" in one of 8 categories. Who knows, one day we may run an official awards website. One way of getting ideas for compelling websites is to look for inspiration from other compelling websites. The categories below are subject to change.

Arts & Entertainment :

Cambodian Contemporary Arts

The spirit of Cambodia.....a tribute.

Humour

Humour Australia

The home of Australia's ABC Local Radio comedy, sketches and skits!

Business/Commercial:

World Property Market.com

WorldPropertyMarket will put your listings before thousands of buyers looking for their next home.

Science and Technology:

Science.ie

Science for a successful Ireland

Creativity :

Frog Design

Frog design bring beauty to the bottom line.

Webmasters Resources :

PHP Labs

"Off the shelf" PHP scripts and custom PHP programming, support, and installation.

E-commerce :

Lakeland Limited

The world of creative kitchenware

Educational :

Corporate Classroom

Their mission is to help teachers become better teachers.

Each month we look at ways of making searching the web easier, or ways to be specialised searching (with or without Google).

This month we take a look at search short-cuts. Google has quite a few e.g. link:www.mirago.co.uk to see who links to a named web site. They've also recently added a number range search. Say you wanted to find out about Jefferson Airplane albums released in the late 60s, you could type jefferson airplane albums 1965..1969. The more you think about it, the more useful the range operator becomes. You can search for products with a price range or look for information related businesses situated along a particular stretch of road (by supplying a range of street numbers). Yahoo now features numerous useful shortcuts which make it easy to get airport information (just type heathrow airport, for example), information on books via ISBN number and much more.

AllTheWeb have a few interesting shortcuts which facilitate searching for mp3s, videos and a picture index, or converting (weight, temperature etc. - try convert: 12 oz) and looking for news.

Read about terms or definitions before we get around to putting them in our knowledgebase (www.alcander.co.uk/knowbase.php)

Bookmarklets : A bookmarklet is a JavaScript 'program' in the form of a URL. Though it acts like a link, it is dynamic and interactive. So you can add it your bookmarks or perhaps include it on your personal home page. The fact it is dynamic means one bookmarklet can actually link to all kinds of things depending on the context i.e. what you have highlighted or what you type in at a prompt.

What that means is that a bookmarklet acts like a link, and you can bookmark it or add it to your favourites, but it is dynamic and interactive too, so it will really link to all sorts of different things according to what you are viewing, what you highlight, or what you enter when prompted. JavaScript must be enabled in your browser for you to use one.