Check Out Anchor Text Used to Link to Your Site

Google recently improved the page analysis section in Google Webmaster tools to show complete phrases used in external links to your site. If you have your site verified with Google, you can now see the text used in links from other websites to your site.

Simply go to the statistics tab in Webmaster tools and click on page analysis and you will see the list of phrases under in external links to your site.

Previously this tool only showed a list of common individual words used in text that linked to your website. Now you can see whole phrases, i.e. the anchor text. Some of the information is aggregated and the list is limited to 100 phrases (more than was shown with individual words). See the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog for more detailed information.

See also: Anchor Text & Why its Important

Naj's Links to Free Web design Resources

Tips for Proof Reading Web Pages

If you have just created a web page, you will want to proof read it for spelling and gramatical errors. Lots of spelling and gramatical errors can make the page look rushed and unprofessional.

One way to speed this up, is to use a spelling and grammar checker to flag up the errors. There are various free spell checkers available online if you google for them, and one example on my free web design resoucres page. Often, though, they will not check the grammar. Much better are the spelling and grammar checkers found in word processing packages such as Microsoft Word.

Simply open your web page in your browser, select all (ctrl + a) and then select copy (ctrl + c) and then paste (ctrl + v) into an opened blank word processing document. You can then run a spelling and grammar check on your page content to locate any errors, minus the code.

You will have to make any amendments to the actual webpage, not the word processing document. If you are using a simple text editor such as notepad, you can open your full webpage alongside the word processing document and use Edit>Find to locate the word or phrase for correction.

Believe it or not, some errors may be worth including! For example, if I had a webpage in the search engines which wrote about watercolour painting, it would be good to also have the phrase watercolor painting on the page. This would help the page to be found by both UK and US English speakers. Another reason for retaining some errors is common misspellings of keywords, such as gramma and grammar, although care needs to be taken that the page does not look unprofessional, and that the misspelling is common enough to warrant inclusion.

Meta Revisit - A Completely Useless Meta Tag

Having read some recent discussion on the meta revisit meta tag, I am now convinced it is utterly useless. So much so, it is not even worth including "just in case". The tag goes something like this:

<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">

The only search engine that ever obeyed it was Canadian search engine searchBC, specific to Vancouver Webpages, which confines itself to British Columbia sites!

Read the Google Code Blog article Metadata and you will see this meta tag referred to as

"nothing more than a good luck charm".

So a complete waste of space, and if used, unnecessary clutter in the <head> section of the web page.

Horse Portrait Painting - An Artists Pallette

Here's a recently completed equine portrait in pastels of a Pembrokeshire horse. Its already been featured on a couple of other sites, so its possible you may have already seen it. I thought it might be interesting to show the palette, i.e. the actual colours I used. I have a wide range of colours in pastels, yet the blending properties of pastels mean I usually only need to use a small handful of colours!

Check out my portait gallery and commissions page on the web site, if you are interested in commissioning a portrait, pet portrait or other custom art commission.

Award Winning Website

Mydepictions - Original Art by Naj website has won the Silver Surfer Friendly Award, which has just become a QIWA certified award program! You will see the award icon at the foot of the homepage, together with a link to other award winning web sites and an explanation of the award.

It is nice to know all that hard work is appreciated! You can read about the award in Coxsoft Art News and also in my article on The IAG Blog.

There's been a couple of other minor updates to the web site. It was pointed out to me that the javascript pop-up window for Buy Affordable Art at Auction was being blocked by some pop-up blockers. I was unaware of this because my own adblocker was not blocking it. The words (Pop-up) have now been added to the Buy Affordable Art at Auction link at the top of the page to make users aware, and to make the site more user-friendly.

There's a couple of new great artist web sites on the arts and crafts links page, and a link to Google Analytics has been added to the free web design resources page (can't believe I'd left it out!)

Checking The Search Engine Index

If you want to check if pages from a web site are listed in a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, you can use the site: command. Simply type site: followed by the web site address (no spaces) into the search box, for example, site:www.mydepictions.co.uk as below:

This will return the pages from the site queried that are listed in that search engine. If the site queried is not listed in that search engine, there will be no results. (If it's your site you may want to consider submitting it to the relevant search engine! See my web design resources page for links to submit to the UK versions of Google, MSN & Yahoo.) In Google you need to go to the final page of the results and click on repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Google has previously excluded some pages in these results, such as pages from a site with duplicate title and description. Changes are now afoot to rectify this issue: read Using the site: command for more information and particulars about using the site: command in Google. If you have your site verified with Google you can perform this check on your own site in webmaster tools from the index stats link under the statistics tab.

Occasionally pages may disappear altogether from the Googles index. I recently had a case where some main pages from my site were temporarily excluded. Sometimes this can be due to a penalty or ban imposed by Google, or maybe inadvertantly as a result of recent changes made to a site. In my case, the suggestion was made that this was the result of "everflux", basically a technical hiccup as the vast Google database updates. Seven days later the missing pages were back in the index. Panic over! The point here is that on occasions pages in good standing with Google may temporarily drop out of the index for a short time. Unfortunately this means that during that time those missing pages will not be returned in search results. This also highlights why it might be important to regularly perform a site: query on your website.

Naj Featured in Coxsoft Art News

Coxsoft Art News have done a mini feature on me, check out Naj to read the article and visit this great art news blog!

Anchor Text & Why Its Important

Anchor text is the visible, underlined, clickable text link, or hyperlink as it is sometimes referred to. For example:

About the Artist Naj

"About the artist Naj" is the anchor text in the above link.

It is so-called because the text sits between the anchor tags in the html code, as shown in the example below:

<a href="http://www.mydepictions.co.uk">About the Artist Naj</a>

Google and other search engines give weight and importance to the words in the anchor text. A good choice of words in the anchor text can boost your position in search engine results. This is why I try to avoid anchors such as "click here" or "http://www.mydepictions.co.uk" or "home". It is better to have choice keywords (searchable words) as the anchor text, and it is better to have text links, or a combination of text and image links, rather than image-only links on a web page. This applies to the internal links on a website, as well as in coming links from other sites.

If hundreds of sites link to a page with the same anchor text phrase, that web page may appear high in Google's search results for that phrase. Known as Google bombing, the phrase does not even have to be present on the web page (the George Bush "Miserable failure" phrase in 2003, being the most famous example; see the Official Google Blog response). This goes to demonstrate the importance search engines give to anchor text. But wait...before you go about getting whole forums of people to link to your site with a particular phrase, Google does take many other factors into account since anchor text could easily be used to spam the search engines. Therefore, it is also better to vary the content of the anchor text for incoming links, so they are not all the same. This is why I like to ask people to link to my web site using particular and varied anchor text.

Also see: Check Out Anchor Text Used to Link to Your Site

Naj's Links to Free Web design Resources

Red Squirrel ACEO Painting by Naj

Here's a red squirrel ACEO ~~currently for auction on ebay~~. This is a mixed media miniature affordable art work on Ingre paper, mounted onto a card backing. Ingre paper is a textured coloured paper traditionally used for pastel work. In this case, I have used pastels, some gouache paints and indian ink. Apart from the mediums used, the highly absorbent, coloured Ingre paper has contributed to the soft appearance of this painting.

My Depictions