Google’s long stated goal has been to provide people with the best possible search engine results.  They’ve developed one of the most complex search algorithms in the world, something that is a mystery, and something that companies such as Spark Logix Studios spends hours and hours pouring over, testing, and trying to figure out, in order to be the best search engine optimization company out there.  As Google continues to evolve, their goal for better search results has begun to change the way search engines function.  One of the biggest changes in recent years was the incorporation of Social Search, where they included social media aspects into search engine results.  So, for example, if you have a friend who blogs about their favorite restaurants in Minneapolis, a normal search engine result would include all of the popular and most visited websites, and wouldn’t include your friend’s relatively unknown blog, but with Social Search, your friend’s blog would be a higher search result for you as an individual user.

Google has now taken it’s next step towards the future of search engine tactics, by introducing Google Search Plus your World.  Instead of being used simply to find a needle in a haystack, something Google does amazingly well when you are searching for a specific business, image, or video, they are aiming to make Google a more comprehensive tool, one that people can use to find more relevant public content from your circle of friends, family, and acquaintances.  People who share your interest and world view will now be able to help you find new content, new web pages, and more relevant to your business, new customers.  They’ve done this by introducing three new features:

1 – Personal Results – Within your Google search results, you will now find information solely available to you.  Things like photos and posts from Google+, things that your friends have shared with you that might be pertinent to your search, and interests and webpages your Google+ friends have shown an interest in.  As we all know, often times the experiences, thoughts, and ideas of your friends and family are more important to you than an impersonal web page.  With Your World, you will see a marriage of these two worlds, getting both recommendations and ideas from your friends, as well as more general content from the world wide web.

2 – People and Pages – When you search for a topic in Google, you will find people, profiles and pages from Google+ related to your specific area or topic of interest, and enable you to follow them or subscribe to their web pages with just a few clicks.  Because, as Google put it “behind most every query is a community”.  Now, if you are interested in searching for your favorite band, included in your search results are any Google+ profiles of prominent fans, or people who are discussing your band, and you can quickly connect with them on Google+, have meaningful conversations, and discover entire new communities of like minded people in a way that was simply impossible up until now.

3 – Profiles in Search – Both as a part of the autocomplete and search results, you will find profiles of people you are close to, or who you might be interested in following or friending on Google+.  Everyday on the internet, there are millions of searches for people, and often it can be extremely challenging to find the specific person you’re looking for.  And once you do find the person you’ve been searching for, there is often no way to interact with that person, you simply find a photo, or reference to them on some website that hasn’t been updated for five years.  But with Your World, that will all change.  Now you will be able to find, and interact with the people you’re searching for, right from within the search results.  

In addition to all these new features, Google is also revamping their security measures, introducing a new level of security, transparency, and control for the user.  Since some of the search results you’ll now find in Google are private photographs and posts, they will now be secured by SSL encryption by default.  This means, that your search engine results, and all of the private content associated with your search results, are encrypted by the same high standards as your gmail account.   They are also giving you more control over how to use the new features.  When a result returns a Google+ result, it will provide you information on who posted it, whether the content is publicly available, or only something you are able to see, which circle in Google+ the result is associated with, or the suggested connection to you.  

Google has also introduced a new toggle switch when you are logged in to your google account, allowing you to, with a single click, you can see the normal, or unpersonalized search engine results.  This means that no result from your friends, no private information and no personalized search engine results will appear in your web history.  This grants pretty unprecedented and transparent control over your personalized search engine results.

 As you can probably imagine, this will have large implications for the world of Search Engine Optimization.  Now, the grass roots community building which used to be done by small businesses in the real world, through sponsoring athletic teams or buying ads in local newspapers, is about to go digital.  What exactly those implications are remain to be seen, but rest assured that Spark Logix Studios will continue to follow, understand, and integrate these new technologies and techniques as they are introduced.

The rise of mobile will mean more businesses will need to focus on a better mobile experience for their customers. Spark Logix Studios has created this mobile internet infographic to help you start the thought process as to why you’re going to need a better mobile website.

Do you want to put this infographic on your site? Just copy the embed code below:

<div style="width:700px;"> <div><a target="_blank" href="http://www.sparklogix.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Mobile-Internet-Infographic.png" ><img alt="Mobile Internet Infographic" src="http://www.sparklogix.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Mobile-Internet-Infographic.png" /></a></div> <div style="text-align:right; font-size:11px; margin-right: 5px;">Designed by <a title="Minnesota Web Design" href="http://www.sparklogix.com/" >Spark Logix Studios</a></div> </div>

Anchor text, for those who don’t know, is the clickable text in a hyperlink when you visit a webpage.  But what many people don’t know, is it can be a great tool in your SEO strategy, if properly understood, and implemented.  So here, we’ll endeavor to explain a little bit more about how this all works, and how to take full advantage of  your Anchor Text, and how best to use it to move up your keyword ranking.

Let’s use an example.  Here in this blog post, we’re talking about SEO Strategy, so I’m going to include a hyperlink using SEO Strategy as the anchor text to another page, in this case, our page advertising our SEO services.  What it is now telling to search engines, is that I think this page, the one I’m linking to, is a good page on the subject of this keyword (aka anchor text), and I want to give them some weight in the page rankings.  I’m telling google, or yahoo, or whoever, that this page deserves to be associated with these keywords.

Since Google, and especially Bing, add a lot of weight to these sorts of links, a lot of people want these sorts of links back to their pages.  And the challenge becomes to make these links natural, and organic, but linked to strong keywords you want associated for your website.  So for example, if instead of using “SEO Strategy” in the previous example, I had used “Search Engine Optimization Strategy in Minnesota”, well, that text is much longer, and probably less likely to be searched than “SEO Strategy”.    So make sure, as we’ve emphasized before, that you do your homework, and choose keywords to emphasize that make sense for your website/company.

But as you and your web design team work through your Anchor Text strategy, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind.

Multiple Links

Multiple anchor text links from the same page do not ad more weight or value to the search results.  So, if in this blog post, I were to do three more links for “SEO Strategy” to the same page, it would simply be a waste of effort.

Domain Authority

Multiple web pages using the same Anchor Text keyword will help you, but if all of them are from the same domain name, it is not nearly as valuable.  Google and Bing have gotten quite clever with this, and now can differentiate between the same web domain, which will add some weight, but not a lot, and separate web domains.  So the more web domains you can have linking back to your page with a solid keyword as the Anchor Text, the better.

Where’s the Anchor Text?

The very first Anchor Text found on a given web page is what Google and Bing look for.   This can be a bit frustrating, but basically, if you add an anchor text link  at the beginning of your webpage, and then another later in your webpage linking to the same page, it won’t add any weight.  This can cause problems if you have links already available at the top of a page in a menu bar, or somewhere else.  So for example if I included a link for “SEO Strategy” in the footer of my webpage, and linked to a page available in the HTML coding at the top menu of my page, Google will ignore the link in the footer.

Internal Links on Your Site < External Links TO Your Site

Internal anchor text links, links placed on your webpage which link to other pages on your webpage do help search ranking.  A bit.  A tiny, tiny bit.  But as we discussed earlier, it is much more valuable to have external domains linking to your webpage, so don’t spend too much time and effort on this particular strategy.

Images

If you are using a link with a photo as the anchor, instead of text, for example if you wanted to use a screen cap, or a logo, then you can use the Alt attribute.  Search engines generally (although not always) use the Alt attribute as the anchor text, and if the Alt attribute isn’t present, then it will use the surrounding text, or even the page titles.

SEO Strategy

As you can see, Anchor Text, if properly understood and utilized, can add a lot of weight to your webpage, especially if those links are coming from other domains.  It’s yet another tool to use as you map out your more comprehensive SEO Strategy.

As the world of Search Engine Optimization becomes more and more popular, and a greater tool for online companies, there are a few simple SEO tips and tricks you can use to ensure that your company is going about it’s SEO strategy in the smartest way possible.  So here are 10 Absolutely Essential SEO Tips & Tricks from your friends at Spark Logix Studios.

1 – Be Patient – Search Engine Optimization isn’t about instant gratification.  The results of an effective SEO strategy can sometimes take months to see, and this is especially true if you are a smaller company, or a new presence in the online community.

2 – Build a great website – What business doesn’t want to appear in the top search engine results for their given market?  But if you don’t have a well made website that has a lot to offer visitors, you’re really wasting the effort .  So make sure you have a website that really is one of the 10 best sites in the world on your specialty or topic.

3 – Be a student – If, instead of hiring a company, you have decided to tackle SEO yourself, you’ll have to become a pupil, and learn as much as you can.  Thankfully, there are many great resources on the web, and several terrific books you can use to learn more.

4 – Create amazing and unique content – This is important for every website, but can be a particular challenge for online retailers.  But, if you and your competition are all selling the same product, and simply using the same generic description for that product that your manufacturer provides, you have a great opportunity right in front of you.  Create your own unique product descriptions, and make sure you  include keywords that make sense for your business, and internal links to other pages on your website.  Great and unique content is a very simple but effective way to get inbound links.

5 – Include a site map page – Search engines cannot index pages which can’t be crawled.  A site map will help search engine companies discover and map the important pages on your site.  If your website is particularly large (for example if you sell thousands of products through your website), make several site map pages, and try to keep each site map page to a maximum of seventy five to eighty links.

6 – Use Web Analytics from day one – You need to have clearly defined and measurable goals before you begin implementing your SEO strategy, and in order to track what is working and what isn’t, you need we analytics software in place to learn how to meet the goals you’ve set for yourself.

7 – Build a great website – Just wanted to reiterate, this is the most important thing.  Make sure your website is worth visiting.  Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and energy getting people to visit a website they won’t stick around to explore and use.

8 – Research before hiring an SEO company – There are a lot of SEO Companies out there, some great, some not so great.  It’s your job to know which company is right for your business.  Ask specific questions, about any potential risks, about previous success stories, and about the tactics the company uses.

9 – Use SEO-friendly URLs – Use keywords in every single URL you create, and make sure you use hyphens instead of underscores when creating links with keywords.  Hyphens are treated as black spaces while underscores are not.

10 – Be Committed – Search Engine Optimization isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.  The algorithms search engines use change regularly, and so to must your SEO strategy.  This requires a strong commitment to the long term.

Year number 2 for Spark Logix Studios top yearly picks for the best fonts. Here you’ll find the best fonts of 2012 all free for download. As always there are hundreds of fonts available and we’ve chosen these as this year’s standouts. Click on any font below to see the alphabet and numbers. If you like it, download it. We hope you enjoy! Please note: Spark Logix Studios is not the creator of these fonts, these are simply our choice for best fonts of 2012. Please see each font’s individual download page for author and license information. Enjoy! btw… Did you see last year’s Best Fonts 2011?

Allstar Font

Alte Haas Grotesk Font

Anime Ace Bold Font

Boris Black Boxx Font

Budmo Jiggler Font

Chicken Butt Font

Code Light Font

Grobold Font

Hand of Sean Font

Helvetica Neue Bold Font

Komika Axis Font

Megalopolis Extra Font

Neon Font

Old Sans Black Font

Urban Sketch Font