Anchored Links for SEO - seo

I have read a little about this but could not find a definitive answer anywhere. So, I thought of asking this question here.
I am building a Travel Guide which has lots of information divided into tabs. Each tab has its own content and keywords which I would like to rank for in SEO. Here's a screenshot of what my structure will be:
Each tab has unique content with its own keywords,images,videos,etc. So, for example, I would like to rank well when people search for 'Top things to do in Bali' and 'best time to visit bali' and show that particular tab by means of anchored links. So, it will be example.com/bali.html#top-things and example.com/bali.html#best-time respectively.
Do anchored links have any SEO value? Will they even show up on search v/s a normal link. So, if I am trying to rank for the keyword Top things in Bali, which URL is better? example.com/bali.html#top-things or example.com/bali/top-things
Thanks for your help.

For a search engine, the anchors don't matter : Wikipedia uses them intensively, but I still haven't seen any link pointing to a specific anchored content from any SERP.
In a way, that's easy to understand : an anchor can be something like this :
<a name="my_anchor">My Anchor</a>
Or something like this, which is far more semantically right :
<anyHTMLTag id="anchor_name">my content here</anyHTMLTag>
Because an anchor can link to any id on the page.
Regarding your example, Google and other search engines will consider all of your content to be different paragraphs of the same page. If your purpose is to draw attention to a very specific zone of your page from the SERPs, that won't work.
Some years ago, when Google did not https encode their results page, a hook could have been used (Detecting the search query), but that's not the case anymore.

Interlinking is important part of SEO. Keep in mind while you creating Anchored make it in Heading tag that will be more effective. anchored text is use full to target Keywords that also important and It is easy to share your pages links.

The anchor link syntax for you website content will be equal to
<a href="" text="" target="_blank" > Your target keyword </a>
Select the target text from your content that you want to include anchor link.

Related

SEO - META Tags and Google

I just found out that Google recently decided to start using their own "title" when they display their search results. Also, after checking Yahoo and Bing I saw that the way they are displaying their results are the same but in completely different way than Google.
I guess my question would be, if there is an actual "correct" way of adding titles to my pages in order for Google to display what I want them to and this way get the same results with Yahoo/Bing that are currently using the page's title as a search result (sometimes they pick up the first tag and use it as title).
Any recommendations or links to follow for more studying would be appreciated.
There's nothing you can really do about it. Google will choose what title to display based on criteria they have not made public. This usually is the page's title as found in the <title> tag but if Google feels a different title better summarizes the page's content they may choose to display something else.
You can try to change your page titles to better reflect the page's content and see if that helps.
Using optimal keyword prominency in meta tags according to guidelines... and Google will pick up your meta tags. See our news portal's source and metas (keywords: hírek, választás 2014, etc.): http://valasztas2014.hir24.hu/

How do I make primary content in the right-rail SEO friendly?

My site design has three rails: navigation on the left, user generated discussions in the center (liquid), and a primary editorial block in the right rail (no advertising). So, an article would be published by me and appear at the top of the right rail, and user comments would appear in the center rail.
I want search engines to see the right rail content as the primary content, and so the meta description for each page would be related to the right rail.
Is it possible to do this in an SEO friendly way?
[Note: an SEO consulting firm have implied to my boss that web crawlers only "care about the center rail", and if the meta information disagrees with center rail content they will ignore the page]
Search engines cannot see the page the way human users do. Search engines see just the html code of the page, so they cannot distinguish between left, center or right rails. They do, however, have a sense of were the header, the body and the footer of a page is.
When it comes to the body of a page, search engines tend to give more relevance to text which closer to the the top. So if you can have a block of text at the top of your html source, move it visually with CSS somewhere lower on the page, and still (probably) remain more relevant than other blocks of text.
However, there is no way to specify to search engines what your "primary content" of a page is. Search engines determine the relevancy of a page in relation to keywords based on a lot of different on-page signals, so you should focus on those.
As for the meta description, your boss should choose the SEO consulting firms more carefully, as what they recommended is actually a nonsense. Meta descriptions are only used (eventually) by Google (for example) to generate the snippet for your pages in search results. They have no value when in comes to rankings.
Here's two SEO facts regarding meta descriptions that come directly from Google: Seo Fact NO.3, Seo Fact NO.4
Positioning of visible content on a page is handled using CSS.
There's a number of different approaches available from using float to position:absolute etc. For SEO purposes, there's no single-best approach, as long as you have your article content appear closest to the <body> tag, before the other "rails" or "columns".

how does google recovers the web site description?

do you know how google recovers the description of a website in their search results? is it the meta-description? the first paragraph?
Their algorithms aren't officially released to the public, but if there is a meta description tag, it takes that. Otherwise it generally depends on where the keywords lie within the body of the webpage. If someone is searching for "foo", a paragraph with foo in it will likely appear, with foo highlighted in bold.
Search Engines (including Google) crawl through the first introductory paragraph of the page or a post and takes that excerpt to put in the description when search results are shown. But there's a protection measure that one should take to be SEO friendly. If you are starting your page/post with an image, it negatively affects the SEO of that page because the search results are in text form and for that search engines won't understand the format of the image since they want a text description. In case of WordPress, use All IN One SEO Pack Plugin to manipulate the description if you are starting your post/page with an image.

SEO Google - Navigation Title vs. Page Heading

i was wondering if anyone knows if there's a connection between what a navigation item is named and the page heading it goes to - does this have an impact on SEO?
so for example, if i had in my navigation menu an item called About Us, but when you click it you come to a page with the heading Learn Who We Are (i.e. wrapped in [h1] heading tags)
because there isn't an exact one-to-one match, is that a bad thing in terms of SEO?
No, not at all. In fact it can be beneficial in some cases because Google picks up the text used in links as keywords for that page. So in theory your page could appear in SERPs for the phrase 'About Us'.
If Google's algorithms decide that your 'learn who we are' page is not at all related to the phrase 'about us' then the phrase may not count much as keywords. But you won't be penalised or lose ranking.
Incidentally, keywords in links don't think it carry as much weight as they used to, because of Google Bombing.

SEO - Does google+other search engines index links within <noscript> tags?

I have setup some dropdown menus allowing users to find pages on my website by selecting options across multiple dropdowns:
eg. Color of Car, Year
This would generate a link like: mysite.xyz/blue/2010/
The only problem is, because this link is dynamically assembled with Javascript, I've also had to assemble each possible combination from the dropdowns into a list like:
<noscript>
No javascript enabled? Here are all the links:
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2009/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2010/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2010/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2009/'>mysite.xyz/red/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2010/'>mysite.xyz/red/2010/</a>
</noscript>
My question is, if I put these in a tag like this, will I be penalized or anything by search engines such as Google? I've already been doing so for some navigational stuff which required offsets etc. However, now I would be listing a whole list of links here too. I want to provide them here, moreso so that google can actually index my pages - but for those without javascript, they can still navigate too.
Your thoughts? Also.. even though I have some links that appear to have been indexed, I AM NOT 100% SURE, which is why I'm asking :P
If the noscript code represents an alternative to the javascript code, then it should be fine I think, but Google does try to spot fishy seo and may penalize, so it's better to avoid doing this when possible.
In your case, consider spending some time making a drop down menu such that you can have the links on the page in a list item and use javascript + css to simulate a drop down menu, this way you will not need to use the noscript tag.
A decade ago, I made my website using image links for internal navigation (this at a time when CSS was brand-new and HTML4 Transitional was normal). I then added text navigation links at the bottom of the page.
I believe this (and your idea) is a common enough technique that, as long as you really aren't trying to do something sketchy, Google et al should interpret correctly.
I think the noscript tag is irrelevant, but having a giant list of links links may make their algorithms think you're doing some fishy SEO. Like having a wall of keywords.
Google (or whoever) would index these, and as long as you're not going overboard with a bunch of BS links I don't see a problem. Though from an SEO standpoint, it's not good to create menus from javascript or flash. I might look for an alternative that uses anchor tags with some CSS to dress it up.