What is the SEO Value of No Anchor Text in Links?

This is regarding anchor text in a link. Of course, website owners and html programmers realize the importance of having “anchor text” in a link which appears on the page before the closing tag but the issue is regarding the effect of “not” using any visible anchor text.

For example, on many blogs and websites there are often images which are clickable and go to a linked site since the clickable-link is in the code. However, the image is often there mostly for its graphical impact and also acts as a link when clicked. However, there is no indication to the site visitor to click-on the link and in fact the visitor may not realize they can click on the image to visit a linked website.

The question is does the fact there may be NO visible anchor text detract or even eliminate the link value in the search engines and if the answer is yes, to what degree does it negate or dilute the value of the link?

An example of this question is the picture of the anchor below. When clicked-on the link goes to the home-page of this website but what is the effect (if any) of there being no visible anchor text on the page?

Is it a Good Idea to Use WordPress vs HTML?

Personally. I much prefer standard html sites vs WordPress sites. However, with that said, I must say a well designed WP site certainly can look great and be successful. Blogs and forums in particular do extremely well using WordPress where richness of features and live user interactivity are highly desired features, but with that said, I still like HTML vs Woprdpress by far for making “regular” (non-blog non-forum) new sites.

After working for years with regular html before using WordPress at first I found the WordPress learning curve to be huge and taking vast amounts of time. One of the toughest aspects was the look and feel of a WP site which is difficult to control and tricky to modify vs much easier to change html sites. Heavy spam or bot posts of WP sites are also a negative issue which is always looming but that is not a big problem involving standard html sites.

In addition, I do not think WordPress security is that good judging by some WP sites I know being hacked in the past. Speaking of security, the ongoing need to frequently update the version number is also an unwanted hassle, especially since the automatic upgrade capacity can and does sometimes fail.

In fact, you always need to worry your old WP version may not be fully compatible with the latest version and if not your site will go down when the upgrade fails and the old site will then stop functioning due to the upgrade failure. Been there and done that too. Even backups are a big hassle since there are extra steps involved to copy the data base but with standard html the database can be easily copied using simple FTP at the same time as regular htm files, with no other steps needed.

As far as search engine optimization is concerned I suspect WP and HTML are roughly equal in that regard. However, with that said, it’s much easier to do search engine verifications with html sites since it can be quite confusing trying to determine where the needed search engine verification codes are inserted into WordPress sites (because of the .php file names and confusing directory and folder structure, but with HTML and .htm files that’s all quite basic by comparison.

In my opinion, a big reason WordPress is so popular are the vast numbers of people who say they are WP programmers and designers (it must be easy to become one), or sell products that only work with WP, including many web-developer special offers and Clickbank products. Recently I decided to NOT buy several excellent sounding new developent site offers and programs since they were offered or designed only for WordPress and I was reluctant to add more WP sites no matter how good the offer sounds.

As a test, just ask a WordPress minisite developer, site designer or seller to help with some simple and basic modifications to your old html website and you will likely learn he/she can not do the job, no matter how basic it may be. Been there and done that. In fact, some of the things I wanted a bit of help or advice with from my WordPress developers or designers were real basic which I ended up doing myself, and I am far from being good with programming.

Kids Are Searching for Surprising Things

Kids search for surprising things online. A report from Symantec and its Norton OnlineFamily service, which allows parents to monitor and manage their kids’ online activities, including Internet searches. The Norton service tracks and reports the children’s Internet activities in real-time so parents can learn about online-content their kids should not be reading or seeing on the-web.

Here are the top-10 search-terms from kids over a recent 6-month period:

P.S. No, search-terms 4, 6, 28 and 89 are not April Fool’s jokes as you may be thinking!

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. MySpace
6. Porn
7. Yahoo
8. Michael Jackson
9. Fred
10. eBay

Other search-terms making the top-100 search-terms include Wikipedia (14), Webkinz (16), games (17), Boobs (28), the Jonas Brothers (47), Playboy (89), iTunes (89b) and and swine flu (93). Who is Fred? He is a made-up character whose YouTube channel has become big with kids.

Overstock.com is rebranding itself as O.CO

Found this on the Overstock.com website this morning. It’s also Super Bowl Sunday, so perhaps not just a coincidence since the .CO extension domain names will be strongly marketed in today’s Super Bowl commercials, making Overstock.com’s announcement real good timing in that regard.

“Shopping at Overstock.com internationally is about to get easier with the O.co domain. Since the company acquired the O.co domain name in July 2010, Overstock.com has been simpler to access by mobile Internet users. Now, to minimize confusion and hassle while translating the word “Overstock” into other languages, Overstock.com is rebranding internationally and will be known as O.co as of Jan. 2011. This guide will address any concerns you may have about Overstock.com’s new domain.

Q. Why will Overstock.com be known as O.co internationally?

A. In July 2010, .co domain names became available for general purchase, and Overstock.com acquired the O.co domain name in order to reinforce the “O” of the Overstock brand and capture customers’ attention with a short, memorable web address. The short .co domain will also solve translation issues and allow Overstock.com to create a universal logo, brand and web domain name that will be recognizable internationally…”

Click the Overtstock.com® woman on the couch picture below to visit the new O.co® website:

The Saga of Nonsensical Traffic Quality Scores

One of the causes of the big PPC revenue declines appears to be Bing.com with their nonsensical TQ scores, i.e, my Parked.com/Bing TQ score recently fell off the cliff going from an 8 to 1 in a week even though traffic and domains stayed basically the same. My TQ scores have most aways been much better than a very poor 1 and in fact for a while under Yahoo last year TQ hovered at the 9/10 level for some time but now (a few eeks ago) the names and traffic are basically the same but we are at an impossible TQ-1 score.

Support claims Bing looks closer at conversions vs Yahoo but that makes little sense since why would the same traffic from the same names convert so poorly, especially since there are lots of typeins from good keywords. Makes no sense. If these wild gyrations continue and we stay at a level-1 we may be moving my traffic names away from Parked/Bing, which I do not really want to do since the system is extremely good (IMO, the best) in other ways.

However, we really can’t take the TQ BS any longer and am ready to throw in the towel on it. If I did not know my TQ was in fact good it would be easier to accept but I know the truth and my traffic is not anywhere near a ridiculous 1 score.

Interestingly, I wrote the above several weeks ago when I was discussing with parked.com support the absurd claim by Bing that my website traffic quality was only at a level of one. I forgot to post it here at the time but my memory has been now jogged in that I see my TQ score has skyrocketed to the 7 level. That is somewhat reasonable but still a little low since I believe my true TQ should be roughly an 8 or 9, but still an amazing improvement in the TQ achieved by basically the same domains.

The first graph shows the TQ score published by parked.com on Dec 8 2010. The next chart is the TQ score reported by parked.com on Jan 3 2011. FYI, the last 3 date points on the first chart correspond to the first 3 date points on the next graph.

Keep in mind, the traffic and parked domains were basically the same during the entire time frame covered by both TQ charts so the obvious question is how could the TQ fluctuate so wildly? Obviously it can’t. It must be a screw-up by someone, possibly bing.com?

Comparative Value of Google Search Rankings

How likely is your URL to get a visitor click based on its keyword(s) search-terms Google ranking?

Click based on Google Rank #1: 42%
Click based on Google Rank #2: 12%
Click based on Google Rank #3: 9%
Click based on Google Rank #4: 7%
Click based on Google Rank #5: 5%
Click based on Google Rank #6: 4%
Click based on Google Rank #7: 4%
Click based on Google Rank #8: 3%
Click based on Google Rank #9: 3%
Click based on Google Rank #10: 3%

Your website url when found on Google’s 1st page of ten search-term rankings (as broken-down above):
Likelihood of a click: 90%

Your website url when found on Google’s 2nd page of ten search-term rankings:
Likelihood of a click: 10%

Note: Data is recently published and courtesy of a reliable source. All figures are rounded to the nearest percentage.

Been Busy on Site Development i.e. Crows Feet

Unfortunately, we have not been posting much this month due to being extra active and busy on website development, with a bunch of new web properties freshly developed over the past few weeks.

An example of a small (but we feel a good one) website which we finished recently is crow’s feet wrinkles which is about the common eye area wrinkles widely known as crow’s feet. Having facial wrinkles skin condition is viewed as a real serious issue, and is especially disturbing for women who of course don’t enjoy looking older.

Any comments and opinions about Crow’s Feet (both women and men get it) and our new CrowsFeetWrinkles.com site are always welcome. Please click-on the worried woman below to see the site. Thanks.

Real-Time Example of Page Title Keyword Value

There has been an ongoing discussion for years about the SEO value of having important keywords in the webpage title. Some SEO experts tend to downplay its value to a degree, while many others say it is of high value. Personally, I have always talked about its great value.

As an experiment I picked a more or less randomly chosen basic word, the word is ‘make’ and then did a Google search for “make.” The search shows out of 100 top search results the keyword was in the web-page title 95 times (95% of the total).

I think that is pretty strong evidence of its significant SEO value. In fact, it would appear the keyword in page title may even be of equal or greater value than the website content (at least on some of the search-result sites I looked at). This is all quite interesting if this seo research is in fact valid.

Here is the search: click-here for Google Search