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Black Hat Search Engine Optimization

SeoCenter — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:27:19 +0000

Google makes it clear that it disapproves of certain SEO tactics, such as hiding keywords with invisible text, or showing one page to Google’s spider and another to actual human visitors. Methods that conform to what the search engines like are called White Hat SEO, and disapproved methods are called Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO are not considered to be good or fair by search engine operators, search engine optimizers, or web site visitors.

Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

breaks search engine rules and regulations
creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Black hat techniques are sometimes referred to as search engine spamming. One example is repeating an important keyphrase many times on the homepage. Another is using text that it is the same colour as the background of the page, so the keyphrase is visible to the search robots and algorithm, but not to the human reader. Engineering pages for robots is a practice known as ‘cloaking’. Other examples of spamming which are well known are doorway pages and link-farms.

So, you must choose a search optimizer who wears a white hat rather than a black hat.

Whether you think Black Hat SEO is bad or not you should avoid it anway, because it can get you banned from the search engines, or at least reduce your ranking. Google has been known to remove sites it felt weren’t playing fair. Granted, this isn’t likely, but why take that risk? Also, much Black Hat SEO involves some fairly technical work.

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Fresh Content Improves SEO

SeoCenter — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:00:50 +0000

Search engines love fresh content. New pages should follow a theme and be placed into categories. Add product reviews, press releases, customer comments, how-to information, and other relevant information, and refresh it often. Incorporate product related keywords in the title tags, on-page titles and descriptive text in the new content being created. Over time, you can watch as the major search engines begin to sit up and take notice of your new, fresh content.

The better your content is, the more likely it will be to show up in search engines and naturally attract links to your site. Additionally, fresh content is a major factor that plays a role in search engine rankings (which was recently confirmed by Google’s patent application). SEO experts will still need to use their skills for all the old SEO tactics like title optimisation, keyword research and backlink building, the new focus will be on fresh content. New content put into a site on a regular basis is what will help the most to get a site to the top position on Google.

Blogs, news, products, customer reviews, buying guides, articles – regularly adding fresh content like this to your website can give your SEO campaign a big boost.

Here are 3 ways content marketing can help your website:

1. Freshness

If search engines spiders see that new content has been added regularly since they last indexed your site, they are more likely to come back and index your site more often. This can also help build authority – search engines will see your site as fresh and up-to-date.

2. More keywords

The more content you have on your site, the more variations of keywords and phrases the search engines can index. This means more chances for your site to be found by many more search terms (sometimes called the ‘long-tail’).

3. Relevancy

Basically, the more relevant content you have on your site, the more likely your site will appear for relevant search terms.

For example, Google doesn’t just look at the content of a page when it ranks sites in its results pages. And one factor it will look at is the amount of relevant content across the site and domain.

So if you’re an estate agency, regularly adding content about buying and selling property will help your site rank for search terms related to your business.

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Advanced SEO Tactics

SeoCenter — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:29:45 +0000

If you’re like most online webmasters, then you have probably read one article after the other about search engine optimization. Most of them rehash the same old information and you end up wading through tons of fluff. However, this isn’t one of those articles. Listed below are 7 advanced SEO tips that you won’t find on every digital corner.

1. Syndicating Articles that Link to Your Sitemap

As you probably know, syndicating articles is one of the best methods for obtaining one-way backlinks.

They are also valuable pieces of search engine bait because search engine crawlers are frequent visitors to many high-profile article directories. If you want to get the spiders quickly crawling your site, simply submit an informative article to a site like EzineArticles, GoArticles, or ArticleCity.

However, there’s another article marketing strategy that isn’t mentioned much in marketing circles. This tactic can get the crawlers searching deeper into your site and indexing more of your pages. Simply link to your sitemap within the resource box. This will send the spiders straight to a content buffet where they can quickly slurp up all of your pages.

2. Translating Your Website Into Other Languages

Are you marketing in just one language? If so, you are missing out on 64.8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages.

One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffíc is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. If you are a seasoned SEO, you’ll be happy to hear that the competition in foreign search engines is much less than in those of the United States.

In addition, online foreign language markets are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets.

You have the opportuníty to tap into this market while it’s in an exponential growth phase.

3. ROR Sitemaps

As you probably know, sitemaps are important for making sure your site can be completely spidered and indexed by the search engines. Unfortunately, many of these sitemaps are specific to one search engine or another. For this reason, there have been a number of Google and Yahoo site map generators produced in recent years.

However, there is an alternative that is even more exciting. These are ROR sitemaps and they are readable by all search engines, not just by Google or Yahoo.

ROR is an exciting new sitemap tool that uses XML feeds to describe your website. These sitemaps are structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text search with structured information to better interpret the meaning of your site. With a ROR sitemap, search engines can better understand your products, services, images, newsletters, articles, podcasts, and anything else that you want to describe.

For example, if you are selling products, a ROR file enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affilíate programs, and any other relevant information. Search engine crawlers like the Googlebot have an enormous job to do. It’s time we start helping them to better understand our content.

4. Keyword Phrases that Convert

Selecting the right keyword phrases is the single most important aspect of any SEO campaign. Unfortunately, many webmasters target the wrong keywords. Too many of us target very general keywords like “real estate” or “internet marketing”. Although these terms get lots of visitors, it is unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffíc produces very low conversion rates because it does not target prospects.

You will be much more successful, if you target keyword phrases that are 3-4 words long. These terms are much less competitive and have been proven to convert much better than keywords that are 1 to 2 words long.

Who do you think is more likely to buy; someone who goes to Google and searches for “ipod” or someone who searches for “4gb black ipod nano”? Obviously, the person who searches for a more specific phrase is much closer to making a buying decision.

5. GoogSpy

Would you like to get an in-depth view of how your competitors run their business? Well, you can do exactly that with an online service known as GoogSpy. GoogSpy is a free research tool that will tell you what keywords your competitors are bidding on.

This tool tracks over 500,000 keywords every day from Google and then loads this goldmine of information into the GoogSpy.com database. Using this tool, you can browse by company or by search term.

This tool is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, many people take it for granted. This service basically hands you a business strategy on a silver platter. Maybe we should just keep this one to ourselves and enjoy the benefits of being one step ahead of our competition.

For example, let’s say you wanted to do some in-depth research on Overstock.com, one of the largest companies online. You would simply go to googspy.com and type in overstock.com. You will then be shown thousands of words that this company bids on. These keywords are proven profít generators. Research like this would normally cost thousands of dollars, but they are providing it free of charge.

If you want to find keywords with high conversion rates, simply type in words such as buy and purchase. You will be shown keyword phrases that are bid on that include the words buy or purchase. These are very lucrative keyword phrases because the person who types in “buy sony playstation 2″ knows exactly what they want. They’re not just looking around, they are in buying mode. These are the type of keywords you want to bid on. Using GoogSpy, you can uncover these hidden gems in seconds.

Other high-converting keyword phrases include brand names and product names. Type in the keyword “camera” and you will find thousands of different brands and product names for cameras. These keywords are some of the best keywords because of their high conversion rate.

6. Internal Links Within Content

The navigation of your site is a crucial element of your search engine optimization campaign. Each link within your navigational structure should correlate with a keyphrase that you are trying to rank for.

However, you can also include internal links within your content. For example, let’s say you have written an article about online marketing. Within the article are a number of keyword phrases. Some of these phrases include “link popularity” and “web site traffíc”. If you have other articles within your site that pertain to these topics, then you should definitely link those keyword phrases to those articles. By doing this, you can increase the link popularity of other pages within the same site.

There are very few sites that take advantage of this optimization technique. By doing this, you enable the search engines to find and index much more of your site. These internal links also contribute to a higher ranking because of the anchor text that is used.

Many people only think of inbound links from outside websites when trying to raise their link popularity. However, the internal link structure is also a major ranking factor.

7. Using Your Log Files for SEO

Your server logs reveal very important information about your site. If you learn to use them properly, they can quickly help to maximize your site’s traffíc and conversion rates.

One of the most valuable pieces of information found in your log files are search phrases. The log files will tell you exactly which keywords people are using to find your website.

Once you have optimized a page, the log files will tell you how people are finding that page and what keywords they are searching for to get there. If you find that people are using keywords that you hadn’t thought of to get to a certain page, it would probably be in your best interest to further optimize that page for those keywords.

You might also want to create a new page optimized for that particular term. This is especially true if a new page would enable you to serve better information on the phrase being searched for.

In addition, by looking at how your site is found organically, you can determine whether the same keyword phrases belong in your paid search campaigns. Only choose the ones that are highly relevant. You will find that these keyword phrases have the best conversion rate.

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Why SEO Transcends Tips, Tactics or Techniques

Why SEO Transcends Tips, Tactics or Techniques

SeoCenter — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 08:30:31 +0000

Website Optimization is a complex issue, but should be known by every entrepreneur who wants to succeed on the Internet. SEO is many things, but it is really the basis of understanding which keywords, markets and methods produce results. Optimization of your website would make it comply with the best possible with each of its functions. You can tweak all the meta tags and descriptions you want, add all the pages, external links or internal links you want or program in just about any platform possible (cfm, asp, aspx, php, html, xhtml, etc.) but without a firm grasp of how everything fits together, it is all in vein.

Just like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, SEO transcends the basic parameters it utilizes to express itself. Rankings are nothing without conversion, and SEO does not matter, unless the market is present and a genuine demand exists.

You could exhaustively cover every facet from the level of usability, programming, design, conversion optimization, market research, competitor analysis, analysis tracking with key performance indicators, baseline benchmarks and the like, but there are all tied by one unique thread that runs through them all (monetization, compensation and results).

There is not enough time in the day to work for working’s sake just to play with ideation and theory, you have to roll up your sleeves, assess all the metrics that are imperative to the success of your website, understand the trends, market, influencers and your competition to push through the barrier to entry and rise above common obstacles online.

Anyone wishing to succeed in the Internet market should make a website that is a true “virtual branch.” That is, this should be an extension of your company and operate as a local online. For this, the site must achieve the objectives for which it was created, must be compatible with the principles and policies of the Company, be functional and actually transmit useful information to its users. So, while you are content to carve away a few keywords in a market and religiously monitor them to see which keywords slipped a few positions that day, there are others out there targeting entire markets with virtually limitless budgets because they understand one thing. What works and how to replicate it…

What is their secret? It is time divided by return on investment scaled by market share. Meaning, while you spend a few hundred dollars to acquire a keyword, a competitor may spend thousands under the same parameters to optimize several. While you write one blog post, there are companies with entire teams dedicated to writing who post 20 a day to stay on top.

We are firm believers in targeting hundreds of keywords simultaneously and eventually ranking for thousands of keywords in the same time other SEO firms might focus on a dozen. You have to hedge your efforts, understand your competitors, but also observe their weaknesses while leaning into your own strategic advantages.

SEO is more than just a collection of techniques and tactics, it is a lifestyle which embraces many layers to fully understand and implement (beyond the processes involved).

This is why we share so much at SEO Design Solutions, because we understand that competition is healthy, that profitable markets are fierce and you can talk about SEO all day, but unless it produces results then it’s not SEO…

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