More SEO Questions

[JGreth]

Some basic questions on SEO are posted below if any has some expertise, insight, and maybe a little extra time. Thanks in advance for your help!

1. What exactly is anchor text, and why so many believe that it is the most important part of the SEO process? How does it help your site to be found for the keywords you are targeting?

2. When developing a new site, considering that the issue of branding will be addressed in the logo design, text and marketing in the site pages itself, etc, what is the best format for a keyword domain?

Let’s go with a keyword phrase that features multiple words, like “credit card rates.” What domain of the following, considering that we must include an additional would not included in the keyword phrase, would produce the best search engine friendly results:

www.creditcardratescompany.com
www.credit-card-rates-company.com
www.creditcardrates-company.com

3. In correlation with the above, how should the pages be named for the following additional keywords?

“credit card rates finder”
“credit card rates analysis”

Would they be something like www.mysite.com/credit-card-rates-finder or more like www.mysite.com/creditcardratesfinder ?

4. What is the benefit of including hyphens in your URL? If you keyword phrase is more than two words long, like the above stated “credit card rates” doesn’t using hyphens just split up the words so that the spiders read them as separate words?

5. Will inter-linking the keywords featured on your homepage to other pages of your site with more text on that subject, hurt your homepage ranking or Google page rank? What about when the pages beyond your homepage link back to your homepage, is that good? Is there an optimum number of inter-site links to be achieved? Should one scope their competition and say, whatever they have I must do twice as much?

6. Considering all things being equal, like seo, meta tags, text, keywords, graphics, url name, etc, which site would benefit most from their linking campaign via their results in search engines:

Site A, that sells business products, and has 1,000 reciprocal links from all ranges of site, like health food supplies, dating sites, gift baskets, gambling, etc, including business sites.

(Or)

Site B which features 500 reciprocal links all from business sites.



Thank you for all your help!

[kwvarga]

1. <a href="url">anchor text</a>
-- it shows as what other sites say your content is about..

[Canz]

I'd be interested in replies to these ??? also, plus one more.

I read somewhere that too many links off a page, drains your page rank, but I have seen link pages are websites that have pageranks of 6 or 7 and that isn't to be sneezed at.

[Mel]

Originally Posted by JGreth

Some basic questions on SEO are posted below if any has some expertise, insight, and maybe a little extra time. Thanks in advance for your help!

1. What exactly is anchor text, and why so many believe that it is the most important part of the SEO process? How does it help your site to be found for the keywords you are targeting?

2. When developing a new site, considering that the issue of branding will be addressed in the logo design, text and marketing in the site pages itself, etc, what is the best format for a keyword domain?

Let’s go with a keyword phrase that features multiple words, like “credit card rates.” What domain of the following, considering that we must include an additional would not included in the keyword phrase, would produce the best search engine friendly results:

www.creditcardratescompany.com
www.credit-card-rates-company.com
www.creditcardrates-company.com

3. In correlation with the above, how should the pages be named for the following additional keywords?

“credit card rates finder”
“credit card rates analysis”

Would they be something like www.mysite.com/credit-card-rates-finder or more like www.mysite.com/creditcardratesfinder ?

4. What is the benefit of including hyphens in your URL? If you keyword phrase is more than two words long, like the above stated “credit card rates” doesn’t using hyphens just split up the words so that the spiders read them as separate words?

5. Will inter-linking the keywords featured on your homepage to other pages of your site with more text on that subject, hurt your homepage ranking or Google page rank? What about when the pages beyond your homepage link back to your homepage, is that good? Is there an optimum number of inter-site links to be achieved? Should one scope their competition and say, whatever they have I must do twice as much?

6. Considering all things being equal, like seo, meta tags, text, keywords, graphics, url name, etc, which site would benefit most from their linking campaign via their results in search engines:

Site A, that sells business products, and has 1,000 reciprocal links from all ranges of site, like health food supplies, dating sites, gift baskets, gambling, etc, including business sites.

(Or)

Site B which features 500 reciprocal links all from business sites.

Thank you for all your help!

Wow what a load of questions!

OK search engines will only parse the keywords in URLs if they are single words or are multiple words seperated by dashes (-) so your domain name, directories and pages will all benefit from keyword rich pages only if there are dashes in the names.

The internal linking of your pages and the anchor text on those pages will be counted in some degree by various search engines, but at the moment I suspect that Google is ignoring them. Still, to get the best PageRank and anchor text links, you need to carefully consider how to do the linkages properly. Rather than devote pages to this subject I suggest that you visit br starting on this page then going where your needs take you.

As to which site will profit more from one kind or another of links, there is not enough information there to make a decision. The best method is to get links from pages with the highest PR you can, (and from pages a minimum number of outgoing links since the PR value of the link is the PR of the page divided by the total number of links on a page.

I am of the opinion that the Current Google algo prefers links from sites which are considered as expert sites with respect to that query, but any IBLs with good anchor text will help you, no matter the rank of the site or the number of outbound links, but sites from ontopic directories or sites which can be considered as expert sites are still better.

[Canz]

Thank you Mel,

I appricate the time you took to answer. Geeze I am learning so much.