Captains SE0 Primer - Page Title & Anchor Text

We built Tampa Bay Charter to promote local charter captains with a proven reputation of getting their clients on the fish. By sending our visitors to the guys who get the job done, we know that we've provided a service to our visitors. As we visit captains sites, and look at the search results we're often surprised not to see more of these outstanding guides where other visitors can find them.

It's not that most captains don't appreciate the value in coming up near the top in search engines, but more likely that they're unfamiliar with the strategies that are most effective. With this blog post I hope to illustrate a couple of those factors and adjustments that you can make to your sites to put yourself in a better position.

We're developing our site the same goals in mind and are building in features to assist these trusted resources in promoting their web sites.

Your page title: The page title is one of the single most important factors in what your individual pages will possibly come up for in the search results. It's not going to get you someplace that you don't deserve to be but it can certainly stop you from getting there or make the process many times more difficult.

Something that I always find humorous, and illustrates this point fairly well, is to enter the words "untitled document" into the search (without quotations). Google returns over 38 million documents whose authors didn't see fit to modify the standard title tag in their html editor.

Use keywords in your title tag that accurately reflect the content of the page, keep them brief, logical and be sure that they're terms that are relevant to your campaign. For example, this document is titled "Captains SE0 Primer - Page Title & Anchor Text". If this page is going to rank for anything it would be those terms in roughly that order.

To change your title tag, have a look at your page in a text editor, like notepad, and simply modify the text between the tags below.

Link popularity: Google's Page Rank algorithm measures the value of a page based on the number, quality and type of links that point to that page. In other words, the Page Rank of a specific page is calculated based on a percentage of the strength of the page that links to it.

Along with the quality and strength of the linking page a big factor is the "anchor text" of the link. Anchor text refers to the actual text that is the link to the page.

For example: If you have a page that you would like to rank for the keywords "Tampa Bay Snook Charters" you should have a good number of high quality links to that page with the linking text being "Tampa Bay Snook Charters". Here's a link to our page for the same and how it should look in the external links to your similar page: Tampa Bay Snook Charters

Using TampaBayCharter.com to improve your link popularity: Our web site has garnered a bit of authority in search engines, primarily from the strength of our content and our relevance to searchers. You can use this to your advantage with a little effort.

1. Register For the Forum: When you register be sure to set up a "signature file" that includes a link to your web site. By doing so, and making sure the check box saying "include signature" is checked, you will get a link to your site with every post that you make in the forum.

Being that our site is highly relevant for area fishing terms a portion of that authority will be passed to your site with each post.

We feel that it's a credit to our site that we allow captains to add references to their relevant posts. We won't tolerate any spam but we're happy that our visitors can easily find an appropriate reference!

2. Register For a Free Blog: Although we will not tolerate any spammy links in our blogs they are set up so that participants can add links to high quality relevant resources in the "links section" of the blog manager. With every post your recommended resources will be included. Be sure to review our terms of service before registering though as we will strictly reinforce them.

For example, if you look to the left margin of this page you can see my link section: Mastry's Tackle and Discount Marine.

There are other links to those pages throughout most of the site but the blogs are the only place where the specific anchor text is used outside of the forum. If you search "Discount Marine" you won't find our page anywhere on the search results as the general term is too competitive for a supporting page on a local fishing site. But... if you add St. Pete, or St. Petersburg to the search see what happens. (smiley here)

Try most of the combinations of terms in the title tag and you're likely to see similar. If you're into it, you might try the same with the Mastry's Tackle page. Use a combination of the terms in the page title and it does pretty well. The terms aren't at all very competitive but the reality is that Larry & Dale's page in the last 30 days had 197 page views, 136 unique page views and received 9 emails directly from our site. Granted, it's not a great deal of traffic but being that it's a supporting page and the terms aren't competitive... it's really not bad at all.

At any rate, thanks for the time in reading the post and I hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions please be sure to post them in the "your web site" section of the forums and I'll be glad to clarify. Hopefully we'll begin to see more of our captains where they belong... at the top of the search engine results.