Fresh Domains

How To Make A WordPress Menu Item Open In A New Window
Apr.17, 2012 How To Make A WordPress Menu Item Open In A New Window

Make That Menu

Open A New Window or Tab

With the flexibility to add any link to the WordPress menus built into most themes now, we often find ourselves adding items that are not necessarily part of the site.

When that happens, we usually want them to open in a new tab or window but it’s not immediately clear in WordPress how to make that happen.

Fortunately, making a menu item open in a new tab or windows is really simple (if you know where to look!).

image

click to see full size view

Steps To Make A Menu Link Open In A New Window Or Tab

(This does assume your theme is using the new “WordPress 3.0+” menu system.)

1) Go to Appearance -> Menus in your sidebar.

2) At the very top of the screen locate the “Screen Options” tab and open it (it drops down)

3) Put a check next to “Link Target” in the Screen Options tab. This tab has no save button so the effects are immediate.

4) Add or open up the menu item you wish to make open in a new tab. Now you will see a new check box that says “Open Link in New Window/Tab” (check it)

5) Click “Save Menu” to save your changes and you’re done!

Easy Peasey!

~ Kim ~
Simple Tech Tips For Marketing

http://just-ask-kim.com/how-to-make-a-wordpr

March 28, 2012
In Defense of Domaining

Recently I have read a number of negative comments online taking shots at domainers and the practice of domaining in general. I am not going to pen a post making out domaining to be the holy grail of business practice, because it isn’t, but I am going to outline why the stick domainers get is largely unfair and short sighted.

Firstly, the practice of domaining became inevitable with the creation of the commercial Internet. As search volume for a generic keyword grows, advertising around that keyword increases, and therefore domains containing that keyword become more valuable. It makes no business sense for domains containing attractive keywords to remain unregistered, particularly one of a kind domains that will obviously only rise in value. This is basic supply and demand; basic business practice. The rarer something is the more it becomes worth more to the market – think gems and precious metals, land, oil, etc. One might argue it is unethical for people to buy up domains with a view to selling them at inflated prices. But then it is as equally unethical for 1% of the world to own 99% of the wealth, and for landowners to buy land and make huge margins selling off smaller parts when market factors have increased the price tenfold. Arguably the web could be better regulated and the practice of domaining would certainly be an area of contention. But then what the majority of us love about the web is market freedom. The web is largely owned by the user, and is for the most part unregulated by governments and the world powers that be. Would we want to lose that?

If we are going to take a pop at domaining then we must consider that capitalist business practice in the modern world is comparably unethical. Entrepreneurs seek out opportunities where they believe demand will increase and buy in first to capitalize on opportunity. Traders buy stocks knowing certain market factors are likely to increase their value, making it harder for others to buy in when prices rocket. The same goes for property booms and busts. Yet why is it people moan so much that in the 90s domainers registered all the best domains and now people can’t own them? Of course this happened; market conditions paved the way for the domaining industry to thrive. Those with vision got in first and were lucky enough to buy in at low prices. You can’t blame people for taking a gamble to try and make more money, for this is the nature of the world we live in. You wouldn’t hate on a guy who bought property in a run down town 50 years ago and is now benefiting from a boom in that town due to the relocation of industry, would you?

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that people were shortsighted when it comes to domaining, indeed, one comment I read last week at the bottom of an article likened domainers to kids trading baseball cards and suggested domaining wasn’t an industry at all. Many people have a similar view of realtors, and domaining is exactly like operating in the property market, albeit in the non-physical world of the web. Great domains are like great properties, rising and falling in value, causing investors to make and lose money. And believe me, domainers lose money too. I think some people have a jaded view that domainers are all rich and stacking priceless domains at the expense of others. In truth most domainers aren’t earning much more than the average person, and have the yearly task of juggling renewal costs against sporadic sales. Yes, you can strike it big, but how many do? How many domainers ever realize the full price potential of their best domains – as I always say, a domain is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it, and that is largely down to market conditions. Even the biggest domainers have made big losses, some gambled one too many times and are out the game.

Again, to use the example of the old guy who bought a house in a run town; if I predict a future trend and register an associated domain name today, and that trend comes to fruition in 5 or 10 years, then surely I am to be congratulated like the old man, not persecuted for withholding a domain from others and waiting for it to grow in value.

Domaining relies on the value of the web, on the value of advertising and trends. It is not independent of risk or controlling external factors It is an industry unique in many ways, but certainly not immune to losses or devaluation. I will leave you with this. If you’re looking to place blame for the practice of domaining and use ethics as to discredit the industry, then you need to go a step further and look at the bigger picture. You must look at marketing, which is essentially the practice of convincing people to buy things they don’t need. Without marketing there is no domaining. Marketing creates buzz and demand, which drives domaining. The more marketing pumped into an industry the bigger the demand and the more valuable the associated domains become. It is pointless standing on the other side of the fence throwing stones, when in reality, in you work online, in marketing/advertising, we are all essentially steering the same boat.

11 Quick Tips: Securing Your WordPress Site

WordPress is the most used open-source platform nowadays for any type of websites: whether it is blog, CMS or any other custom solution. WordPress is naturally based on PHP (among other languages), so, as a PHP developer I always make sure to cover/apply some tips for WordPress to make secure and speedup the site which I develop. In this WordPress tutorial you will find tips and tricks for securing WordPress and otimizing your WordPress blog.

This section will going to cover the tips related to securing your WordPress site. Tips includes protecting files, login restriction, WordPress admin restriction, database protection, etc.
Security Tip 1: Stay Updated
The most important tip for securing the self hosted WordPress websites is also the most obvious; WordPress provides updates with security fixes all of the time. When you get the notification in admin panel, don’t ignore it! It’s the single most effective way to secure your site from attacks, and yet so many people leave their site (and their client sites) un-updated for fear of breaking their themes and/or plugins.
Here’s the real tip though: If you themes and plugins don’t work with the latest version of WordPress, they’re probably not all that secure to begin with
Security Tip 2: Create Custom Secret Keys for Your wp-config.php FileAll of the confidential details for your WordPress site are stored in the wp-config.php in your WordPress root directory. Secret keys are one of the bits of information stored in that file… so make sure you change the default secret keys to something else.
If you are not sure for what to place in the default values, go to this link, and it will generate the random keys for you.
Security Tip 3: Change the Database PrefixA lot of the basic setup stuff for WordPress is the same across lots of sites… especially if you use a one-step install wizard through your webhost. This is super convenient, but lots of common setup values like, your database prefix(es), are known to hackers as a result. If you don’t change the database prefix, the table names of your site’s database are easily known to the person who trying to hack your site.
Security Tip 4: Protect Your wp-config.php FileAs mentioned earlier, the wp-config.php file contains all the confidential details of your site. So it’s pretty important that you protect it at all costs. An easy way to protect this file is to simply place the following code in your .htaccess file on your server.

1.
2. order allow,deny
3. deny from all
4.

Security Tip 5: Protect Your .htaccess FileWe can protect our wp-config.php file as mentioned above, but what about protecting the .htaccess file itself? Don’t worry, we can use the same .htaccess file to protect itself from being preyed upon. You just need to place below code in your .htaccess file.

1.
2. order allow,deny
3. deny from all
4.

Security Tip 6: Hide Your WordPress VersionAnother good idea is to remove the generator meta for the WordPress. This meta shows the version of your WordPress site. If you have enabled the WordPress version, then hackers will know the security lacking of your website. If you absolutely can not update your WordPress version (tip #1), this is a good failsafe to at least hide the fact that you’re not on the most current version.
To do this you need to place below code in function.php of your active theme.
view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. remove_action(‘wp_header’, ‘wp_generator’);

You can go one step further and additionally remove it from RSS feeds using this:
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1. function wpt_remove_version() {
2. return ”;
3. }
4. add_filter(‘the_generator’, ‘wpt_remove_version’);

Security Tip 7: Install WordPress Security Scan PluginThis is a good plugin which scans your WordPress installation and give the suggestion accordingly. This plugin will check for below things:

* Passwords
* File Permissions
* Database Security
* WordPress Admin protection

Download the plugin from here.
There are other security scans as well – for instance, VaultPress (which we’ll mention below) will do this as well as part of a much bigger package of security services.
Security Tip 8: Limit The Number of Failed Login AttemptsThis nice plugin can limit the number failed login attempts; Useful in case of someone is trying to guess your password manually or using a robot.
You can download plugin from here.
Security Tip 9: Ask Apache Password ProtectHere is one more good plugin provided by the Ask Apache. which gives you more control over your blog in terms of security.
You can protect your site with 401 authorization in easy steps. All these you can manage from the WordPress admin panel.
You can download this plugin from here.
Security Tip 10: Don’t Use “admin” As Your Username (and Pick Strong Passwords)This one’s perhaps the easiest of them all – WordPress normally will setup your main admin account name as “admin”, so it’s usually the first username that hackers will try using. As of version 3.0 you can change this during the initial setup, but it’s easy to forget that you can go back and change it even if you setup your site before version 3.0. So, pick a new name other than admin
Additionally, picking strong passwords for all of the users on your blog (and your MySQL database) are fundamental ways to boost your security. Use the Strong Password Generator if you can’t come up with one on your own.
Security Tip 11: Last but not Least, Backup!I have placed the backup as the last item here. but don’t consider it as a less important. Regular backup of your site will make you fill safer than any other above. There are several plugins available for WordPress which manage the backup for you.
Here are some free plugins for WordPress backup.

* Backup WordPress
* WP DB Backup

But if you are more serious about the backup for your blog then you should go with the paid solution. The two biggest premium solutions out there right now are Backup Buddy and VaultPress.
ConclusionThere are many more tips and tricks to go with this, but I’ve tried my best to present the best “bang for your buck” tips for anyone out there just looking to get started with WordPress security. Be sure to check out our other WordPress security articles for more information! Share your thoughts on this below!

Google Alerts is a free service that sends you email as and when something of interest takes place on the Internet on a topic which is being monitored by you and which appears newly in Google results. You can monitor developments on the Internet about your own personal name, any developing news story, latest news about any celebrity or almost anything on the Internet. If you own a website or a blog, you can even use Google Alerts to update you by email as and when somebody links to your website. Thus, in this manner you can monitor new backlinks to your website.
To get email updates from Google Alerts when people link to your website, proceed as under:
(1) Visit Google Alerts website. In the search box, type link:wikipedia.org [replace wikipedia.org with your own domain address or URL for which you want to monitor the links]. In Type, select Everything; in How often, select As-it-happens (or Once a day or Once a week, as per your choice); in Volume, select All results. Now, enter your email address at which you want to get the Alerts when people link to your website. See the following picture for these settings:
Create a Google Alert to get email updates when people link to your site
(2) As you select these settings, Google Alerts automatically shows you the preview for the Alert for Today (you can also manually click Preview results button), as shown below:
Preview results showing Alert for Today – when people link to your site
(3) Now, click Create Alert button.
You’ll get the success message informing you that Google Alert was Created. It will also inform you that a verification email has been sent to your designated email address and that you “will not receive Google Alerts on this topic until you click the link in the verification email and confirm your request”.
So, check you email account and in the email received from Google Alerts, verify the Google Alerts request by clicking the link. This email also contains the link to cancel this particular Google Alert if you decide to cancel it in future.
That’s it! Now your Google Alert has been set up. Now onwards, whenever people link to your website, and when that link gets indexed by Google, you’ll get an email update from Google Alert.
Please note that creating a Google Alert does not required you to login with your Google Account; what you require is merely any email address. However, if you use your Google Account and sign in to Google Alert with it, you’ll be in a position to better manage all your Google Alerts.
It may be noted that you’ll get the email update only when Google has indexed the web page that has linked to your website. However, as you’re aware Google is quite fast in indexing web pages. So, usually, you should get the email update of new links to your site on the same day or may be next day.

9 WordPress Security Tips To Protect Your Website From Harm
Written by: Christian Vasile
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System in the world, used by more than 60 million people around the globe. WordPress hosts more than half of the blogs itself. The popular CMS is used by huge companies and associations in the world such as TechCrunch, NBC, CNN, CBS or the National Football League of the US. There are more than 2.5 billion WordPress pages in the world, read by more than 300 million people daily, while around 500.000 new posts and 400.000 comments are posted each day.
This is huge and shows how important and widely used WordPress is. WordPress doesn’t show signs of slowing down either, so expect these numbers to increase dramatically in the near future. Therefore we also need to learn how to protect ourselves, because there is no popular web technology nowadays not targeted by hackers and robots.
Today I will talk about tips, tricks and plugins to keep your WordPress blog safe from hackers and robots. This doesn’t mean you have to do all of them, but using as many of them as possible is recommended.
1. Always UpdateKeeping your WordPress updated all the time is important, because the developers work to solve security issues as well and if they release an update, it is a good idea to update. It takes only a few seconds, is safe (because WordPress backs up your data before actually updating, so you can’t lose anything) and will help your blog run better and be compatible with more plugins too. When you update, do it through your dashboard or if you want to do it manually, do not download the update from another site than WordPress.org.
2. Strengthen your passwordNow this shouldn’t be something new to you. If you’ve been on the internet for some time you know strong passwords are recommended. Include small and capital letters, numbers and different symbols to make your password not difficult, but impossible to guess. Once somebody has full access to your blog, it’s not yours anymore!
Image by railking
3. Keep an eye on file permissionIt is a good idea to keep an eye on the file permissions. You have a link at the end of the article with a guide about what file permissions are and how should they be used. You can set file permission with FTP clients and FileZilla works just fine, so I recommend it.
4. Use .htaccessThe .htaccess file is available by default in your hosting folder. You can use this file to block different IPs and you can learn how to do this by following the links at the bottom of the article.
5. Use SSL EncryptionSSL Encryption is used for encrypting data your blog sends. This means that nobody accessing your router can intercept the data you use, such as account credentials. This way your data is not only really difficult to intercept, but also to decrypt. The bad in general is that you have to pay for having an SSL encryption, but most of the services out there do a tremendous job and also help you set up the SSL server. However, for WordPress SSL encryption is free and you only have to add this particular line to your wp-config.php:
define (‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);
Image by Smaret
6. Always Back-upBacking up once a week is something I would like to recommend as well, because no matter how much you protect the blog, anything can happen. There are things you can’t even do anything about (like the host servers getting hijacked – which doesn’t really happen too often, but it is a possibility) and it is good to have a back-up which you can install again right away.
7. Protect the wp-config.phpThis is one of the most important files in your WordPress folder, therefore you really have to protect it. You can hide it from public view by inserting few lines of code into your htaccess file:

order allow, deny
deny from all

This prevents the wp-config.php file from being seen by public users and makes it therefore more difficult to spot for hackers and robots.
8. Never use “admin” as loginA common mistake is to use “admin” as the login username. When you install WordPress, right after the process is done create a new account and use that one as default. The “admin” account is quite dangerous to use because all the robots go for it.
9. Use an SFTPMost of the time people upload files by using FTP, but you could use a Secure FTP (SFTP) so that the files you send are encrypted. You can find a detailed guide about how to do this here.
Now we move onto plugins you can use to secure your WordPress.
1. Login LockdownYou can use a plugin called Login Lockdown, but make sure you remember your password. Login Lockdown registers every failed login attempt and the IP of the person, and blocks the ability to login for a range of IPs if the number of failed logins exceeds the number you set. As a default setting, the plugin locks down IPs for an hour after 3 failed logins within 5 minutes. The IP addresses which have been blocked can be removed from the plugin panel in the WordPress dashboard.
Login Lockdown protects your WordPress login page from people trying to guess your password.
2. WP-DB-BackupI told you earlier you should have backups for your database all the time. This is the plugin that I use for this purpose. It sends you backups on your e-mail or can also store them on the server. You can also set how often you wish the plugin to back up your data.
3. WP Security ScanRemoving the version of WordPress you have should be a basic option, but WordPress makes it difficult. Therefore you need to use a plugin to remove the version of WordPress from the header of your PHP page. Why? Because knowing which version you have means hackers know the security issues you have, therefore this makes it easier for them to hack you.
With all these plugins and tips being listed, I only wish to tell you that WordPress, although very popular and widely used, is threatened all the time by hackers and robots. WordPress security is something that has been discussed long and you should take a look into it, because finding out your blog is hacked and having no backup is definitely not fun. Try to avoid this by backing up regularly and following my tips and you will find yourself less often in troubles.

WordPress is everywhere, and it’s one of the most simple and easy to use content management systems out there. Not only is it simple, but it’s ultra powerful. Many of the Web’s top sites use it; even we here at LockerGnome are using WordPress to power this blog. It’s scalable from small personal blogs to giant, high traffic sites. It’s a universal system that can be modified and changed to each user’s desires. If you’ve been making Web sites for what seems like ages or are just getting into it, WordPress is where to start. It’s powered by the most powerful frameworks on the Web: PHP and MySQL. Now let’s get into why you should use it.
Free and open source — WordPress is completely free and open source, meaning that you can take WordPress’ code and change it if you like and customize it to your needs. Of course you can only use this for your own good and cannot resell the WordPress platform, but you can create plugins and themes that make it powerful.

It’s not forgotten — With so much popularity around WordPress, it’s being constantly updated with security fixes and improvements. The developers are dedicated to the project and have not forgotten about it like some other management systems out there. You know that if something is wrong, it’ll be fixed within a reasonable amount of time.
Plugins — Out of the box, WordPress is a powerful management system. But like everything else, its developers cannot include everything that people want in the system. That’s where its open source functionality comes in; developers have the ability to create plugins to do a variety of things to the WordPress installation. Thanks to the efforts of many, WordPress has a huge plugin directory filled with awesome plugins for everyone to use.
Visual editing — Not every content management system can do this, but WordPress integrates a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for posts and pages to preview your content before it goes live without having to go preview it in a different window.
Easiest blogging platform — WordPress was built on the notion of blogging, and hasn’t moved away from that. To many, it’s the easiest platform from which to blog. It has iOS, Android, and even desktop editors for easy blogging from anywhere.
Themes extend the possibilities — WordPress is by far the easiest platform for which to design templates. Templates can be created for a variety of people and easily changed and customized. Even the default theme that comes with WordPress is highly customizable so that you can make it your own. There are both paid and free themes out there — there is something for everyone.
Google and WordPress love each other — In this day and age of the Internet it’s all about SEO (search engine optimization). There are many powerful plugins to help with that in the plugin directory. WordPress itself is optimized for Google and works well when the search engine indexes it.
Accessible from anywhere — WordPress is built upon HTML and CSS, meaning that it can be rendered on any device from a phone to a tablet and beyond. Anywhere you can get Internet, your site can be accessed. There are even plugins for mobile sites to make them easier to use when on a mobile interface.
Scalable for any size — WordPress can be hosted anywhere where PHP and MySQL can be found. It can integrate with CDNs and cloud hosting services to expand and grow the site when traffic becomes too high or costs of one huge server get too high. WordPress has great caching plugins, too — this allows parts of the site to be served without making many queries to the server and stressing it out.
WordPress is a great platform that is highly expandable and can go anywhere. Consider this next time you plan on building a Web site or design for a client. If you’re not that into hosting a WordPress site yourself, there is always WordPress.com that has hosted free blogs that you can create and expand to your liking. Although it isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation, check it out if you just need a simple blog.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

By David Bynon

If you are stuck and need help creating a good name, there are a number of fantastic tools you can use. Here are some websites that you can use to get your creative juices flowing.
Domainr — If you’re finding it difficult to get a dot com name that isn’t a mile long, maybe it’s time to go trendy. Domainr is a popular website naming tool designed to help you explore top level domains (TLD’s) other than dot com that put popular websites like ping.fm and del.icio.us on the map. Domainr also shows popular TLD’s that are available, so it’s a wonderful tool for brainstorming.
Dot-o-mator — Here’s a domain name suggestion tool that lets you mix and match with a list of popular prefixes and snazzy suffixes. It’s a real lifesaver when you need to find a perfect name for a keyword targeted niche site. The Dot-o-mator tool also lets choose from a list of popular website categories that use prefixes and suffixes.
BustAName — This is a feature-rich name finder. They use some sort of linguistic data to help you identify names. What’s really cool is the ability to save, manage and organize your research. It’s a time saver, and I really appreciate their “List of Words” feature. It identifies similar words that you can then use to do more digging.
Domain Tools — This isn’t as much a name finder as it is a domain research tool. Domain Tools helps you uncover relevant information about domain names you have interest in. You’ll like the “Whois” search feature that provides all the registration information you need. Plus, they offer a basic suggestions search to help you find similar names as well as names that are for sale or at auction.
DomainsBot — This is a domain search engine containing an advanced search capability that allows you to conduct customized and highly refined searches. For instance, you can tell it the highest number of characters you will accept. You could also tell it to exclude any names containing a hyphen.
StuckDomains — If you’re after a used name, StuckDomains is for you. What they offer is a database that’s full of expired names that fell out of their renewal period. It’s worth checking out because its an opportunity to find a name that is available now or about to come available. I have snapped up a few hot names this way.
Nameboy — Okay, I’ll admit it, Nameboy is a shameless exploit of the Gameboy name, but it’s a popular name generator just the same. Nameboy asks for a primary keyword and a secondary keyword that best describe the topic of your website. It then whips up a long list of names for you to consider.
Your domain name is a very important business asset. Take the time to make the best choice the first time. Once you begin building your website, changing the name has many challenges that will take a lot more of your time to recover from than investing the correct amount of effort upfront. If it takes you a day, a week or a month to find the right domain name for

Getting started with domains
Before you blow past this post because the headline infers that this is “Domains for Dummies”, let me tell you that there are some basic concepts here. However, even seasoned web developers haven’t realized some of these tips and it’s worth it if you want to make your job easier.
ble of Contents
1. Domain concepts
2. Ideal configuration
3. First time setup
4. Changing web hosts/servers
5. Just for fun

Domain conceptsRaise your hand if you purchased your domain with your web host. Don’t worry, we’ll get through it together.
The basics of website ownership are domains and servers. Think of your website as a house. It’s where everything physically stays. Your website essentially has two home addresses: the IP address and the domain name.
Picture the scenario where you move across the country. All your stuff moves with you and your home is made up mostly of everything it was before. The same can be said of your website moving to a new server. The physical things move and your address changes. Now you have to notify the postal service and everyone else of your new address which takes a while. But what if your address never changed and you never had to notify anyone you moved? For your entire life your address could be yours. Well, that’s what a domain allows you. Even if you physically move, your domain allows you to keep the same address.
And here’s where the mess begins. Most people end up having to move their website to a new server as well as notifying the world (via DNS transfer) of their new address. You domain is hosted with a domain registrar. If you purchase your domain with your web host they are the registrar and web host. When it’s time to upgrade to another host then you have to move both of those facets. Moving comes down to transferring domain ownership and DNS records, which is usually a 48 hour process at the minimum and can cause some headaches.
Ideal configurationSo what are you supposed to do?
Register your domain with a domain registrar that is not your web host. GoDaddy, for example, is a domain registrar. This company is where you’ll register all of your domains to keep them organized in one place. A further goal here is to keep domain ownership in one location for ease of management even if you have 100 domains and 5 different web hosts.
The biggest reason to separate your domain registrar from your web host is to make web host/server changes seamless.

1. Changing hosts may only require updating an A record.
2. You maintain all existing DNS records, including MX, CNAME, etc. records.

First time setupIf you’re buying a brand new domain or want to re-organize, follow these steps.

1. Register or transfer your domain with the registrar of your choice. I use GoDaddy because they’re cheap and fast.
2. Transfer your DNS hosting to your domain registrar if you’re moving the domain. This may take 48 hours to take affect around the world.
3. Copy all DNS records from your web host to your registrar.
4. Create or update an A record and use the IP address of your server. This enables hits to your domain to be redirected to any IP address you specify.

Changing web hosts/serversNow that your domain and web host are separate you can make a clean, quick switch to a new server.

1. Update the A record at your registrar with your new IP address.
2. Wait a few minutes to an hour and you’re done!

Just for funNow that I’ve driven home this web host vs. domain registrar concept, how about a third facet? I’ve been a big fan of Cloudflare, a company which Michael Arrignton said is like, “muffler repair for the Internet.” Cloudflare isn’t a domain registrar, but they are a DNS host. How this works into our setup is that you have your web host, domain registrar, and a DNS host. Cloudflare manages all of your DNS records, while the registrar simply leases you the domain name.
Cloudflare does many things, and I’ll spare the sales pitch beyond the basics. It makes your site faster and more secure. Just check it out.
The bottom line here is that website ownership doesn’t have to complicated forever and if you do things right the first time you’ll make it easier on yourself down the road.

Anchor text is perhaps one of the most important aspects ofSearch Engine Optimization but it is also one of the least talkedabout.This one element of SEO is important to understand because it canhelp your page get ranked for a target keyword and also help youevaluate your competition more precisely.The latter is critical and, in fact, if you don’t take anchortext backlinks into proper consideration when looking at thecompetition for a keyword you could be missing out on some hiddengems that are easy to rank for.What Is Anchor Text?Anchor text is the hyperlinked text you see on a webpage. It isthe visible words that you can click to take you to another page.Anchor text html code looks like this:Your Anchor Text)On most websites, you typically see this as blue text that isunderlined and when you click on it with your mouse, you aretaken to the corresponding url.How Bloggers Use Anchor TextBloggers and website owners use anchor text naturally to point toother pages on their website as well as pages on other sites thatthey find relevant to what they are blogging about. You’veprobably even done this yourself when writing a post where youreferenced another post on your site, an affiliate product oreven a post on another site.Usually a blogger will use a phrase that indicates what the pageis about in the anchor text, as opposed to a url, so that thesentence reads correctly.The anchor text in these links helps both the visitor and thesearch engine spiders figure out what the ‘linked to’ page isabout.How Search Engines Use Anchor TextSearch engines use anchor text to help them figure out what thehyperlinked page is about. So, as you can see, getting anchortext backlinks with relevant phrases in the anchor text is prettyimportant if you want the search engines to rank you for aparticular keyword phrase.In fact, anchor text is such an important factor in ranking apage that pages can rank for a keyword phrase even when thatphrase does not appear in the url on the page!There are several cases where this has happened, but perhaps themost famous is where the Adobe Reader download page ranked number1 for the search term ‘click here’ for many years even thoughthose words were nowhere on the page. So many people had linkedto that page using the anchor text ‘click here’ that it got tothe number 1 spot without any on page SEO for the term.Search engines place a large importance on external anchor text(links coming in from other sites) and some importance oninternal anchor text (links from within your own site) whenranking a page so it stands to reason that you should makegetting anchor text backlinks with your target keyword phrases apriority.One important thing to note is that it is widely thought that iftwo links on the same page target the same url, that only thefirst link is counted by Google so you want to be sure that youuse your desired anchor text in that first link.How Anchor Text is Important When Judging Competition for aKeywordIf you think about how important anchor text is to the searchengines when determining ranking for a keyword, then it’s easyto see why it is a critical component of analyzing thecompetition for a particular keyword phrase.Google even provides you with a search operator to do this -the allinanchor operator. You can use it by typing the followinginto the Google search bar:Allinanchor:”your keyword phrase”This will return the pages which have anchor text pointing to itthat contain the quoted keyword phrase.I hope you can see how powerful this is – first of all, Googlemust think it is an important element of a page because itprovides the allinanchor operator. Just the existence of theoperator would seem to indicate that it uses the anchor text whendeciding what a page is about and ranking it.Secondly, using this operator will show you which pages areoptimizing for your chosen keyword phrase!It makes sense that only the pages that have anchor textbacklinks with your phrase are the ones optimizing for it so youcan forget about searching for your phrase in quotes or any ofthat nonsense.Not only that but, you can take a look at the actual backlinksfor each of your competitors and see how many of them have thatanchor text and what the strength of those links are to make amore educated guess as to how difficult they will be to beat outfor that top spot.Anchor Text “Best Practices” For Your WebsiteNow that you know how important anchor text is to your rankings,I’m sure you will want to pay more attention to it in your SEOefforts but you don’t want to go hog wild and create tons ofanchor text backlinks all with the same keyword phrase or youmight find that your efforts don’t yield the results you want.Here are some things to consider:1. Vary Your Anchor Text – We all know that Google prefers itwhen people link to you naturally and when that is the case, theydon’t all use the same anchor text. So, when you are linking toyour site from your articles or web2.0 properties you want tomake sure you don’t always use the same phrase as well. Usingyour target phrase in about 50% – 60% of the links is probably agood idea.2. Links From Relevant Pages – For the best results, you wantyour anchor text backlinks to come from pages that are relatedto your topic. This is what would happen naturally if peoplewere linking to you and it would most likely be from a blog poston the same topic.3. First Link On Page – Don’t forget that Google only countsthe anchor text from the first link that it sees so if youhave more than one link to the same url on a page, actaccordingly.4.Plan For Natural Linking – There’s nothing better thanhaving people just naturally link to one of your posts but, ofcourse, you can’t control the anchor text they use when theydo. Since most people will naturally use your headline as anchortext, you want to be sure to consider that when coming up withthe title for your blog posts.Anchor text is crucial to both your SEO efforts as well as whenanalyzing the competition for a keyword phrase. Taking the timeto use it properly can be the difference between ranking in thetop 3 and not ranking at all so it’s in your best interest tostart putting better anchor text practices to use in yourbusiness today!