Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

If you are really interested in taking your website to better position in terms of ranking you better stay away from black hat SEO tricks. They will hinder your website’s success contrary to your interests. The term black hat tricks is used to refer to actions that are meant to cheat the search engines so as to get good ranking or to attract an user to your site by misleading a visitor.

There are hundreds of black hat tricks and you can see how creative people can get when it comes to deceiving and fooling the search engines. If only such creativity is shown in white hat SEO efforts you will certainly be able to get an excellent ranking for your website. One of the fortunate or unfortunate things about black hat tricks is that they don’t remain for a long period of time each trick has a short life span before they are reported.

There are some black hat tricks that are still used such as using the same text color as the background color. The user who visits the page will not be able read this portion of the text but that is not the case for search engine spiders. Often the black hat magicians add this text at the bottom of page hoping that the search engine spiders will be attracted to that text. If you come across a webpage next time with a huge empty space then you can suspect that something is fishy. Next time when you come across such pages with empty space at the bottom try to right click your mouse and drag the mouse till the end of the page as if you are selecting some text in the page, if there is any hidden text then you will be able to see it when you highlight that area by selecting the hidden text through your mouse.

Refrain from such tricks even though you may get good results out of it because it may not last for long before someone reports your website. If you have a heavy competition in the market then your competitors are keeping an eye on every move of yours and your successes they will look for things that they use against you and your success. Once they find that your site has used black hat tricks they have got a trump card to play against you.

There are many black hat tricks which I don’t want to discuss here because instead of learning a good lesson out of that they can get additional tips of black hat tricks that they can start using for their site in spite of the warning that is given. There are plenty of white hat tricks that you can use for your website and more and more innovative ways of optimizing your site for better results and better traffic are constantly emerging. Keep visiting this section regularly to find quality SEO tips and tricks that you can safely use to optimize your website.

Now don’t get up in arms if you are a fan of processed meat. We’re talking about a different type of spam!

Spam in the internet world is a term used to describe several types of undesirable practices - most of which are geared towards underhandedly mass ‘marketing’ yourself into getting results. Spamming is in direct opposition to the golden rule of SEO: ‘Don’t be evil’.

If you wake up one morning and your email inbox is full of offers for free this and free that, ads for Viagra, quotes for car insurance and unsolicited loan or credit card offers, you have been spammed. This is what we have spam folders for, and if you are like me you delete them without even reading them.

Spamming is accomplished by hurling a lot of unnecessary junk at something in the hope that a tiny percentage will end up sticking. Often this is an automated process set in motion to bombard you without effort beyond the initial setting up of the spamming system

If spammers don’t have to do anything beyond set the system in motion, they are perfectly OK with the fact that they may have to spam thousands of people just to find one that is curious (or stupid) enough to open the email.

Another way to spam is by visiting a forum or blog and commenting on posts just so you can leave your website address (url) as a link in your signature in the hopes that people will click on it. This runs counter to most blog and forum rules, and you can get banned for soing so. That is not to say don’t use blogs and forums to promote your site, just to do it responsibly.

If you hit every blog you can find, and comment on every post “Cool! - (check out www. Blah blah blah) signed King of Blah, you are engaging in ‘link-spam’ and are going to get blackballed from the web quicker then you can say Jack Robinson.

If, however, you have a site devoted to (what else) pet clothing, you can visit a pet lovers site, a dog breeders site and a cat show enthusiasts site to comment in depth and intelligently on familiar topics and no-one will mind if you leave a relevant link behind in your wake.

Spamming doesn’t happen just to email boxes and forums. Sophisticated spammers will enable a robot to get into your site, join your subscription list and use it to generate even more addresses to spam for. This is when spamming crosses the line and turns into hacking!!

Some sorry souls even try to spam consumers by using Google. They learn that Googlebot looks for keywords, utilizing them to determine relevance, so they ‘stuff’ their text with keywords to the point that the site no longer makes nonsense, and accept back links from any source they can. Then they sit back and hope that the spider will see the links and keywords and assume you are a relevant site!

They will use such tactics as white on white text, so that the Googlebot sees the appropriate keywords but you the consumer can’t. That’s when you get surprised when you land on a poker site after initiating a search for finger puppet games. Another trick is ‘cloaking’, where the unscrupulous webmaster shows the search engine a landing page or home page that looks like good content but redirects traffic (you) so that you arrive on a subscription page that asks for your personal information.

You can get good results without spamming. You will do better to do solid SEO and spend your time and effort producing high quality content to generate good traffic than to chase your tail trying to bully people into it.

Spam is evil. Don’t be evil!

Tomorrow: Content Writing - the Beginners Manual

It started as a half page story on a UK financial site, under the header, “Only in America”. It told a tale of a 13 year old boy from a Texas town who used his father’s credit line to hole up with buddies in a motel and play X-Box with call girls he ordered from room service.

Less than a two weeks later, it had been picked up by the Daily Telegraph, Fox News, and various other media sources, and broadcast across both sides of the water.

I’m from Texas. I was shocked, fascinated (OK, I’m gullible!) and mildly appalled. Later, I was mostly offended when I found out it had been an elaborate hoax to artificially increase Page Rank.

Lyndon Antcliff, an online marketer, devised the story as a way to generate over 1500 inbound links for his customer, Money.co.uk. The story is still posted, though a disclaimer at the tail end now reads: This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously.

Yeah, now they tell me. Meanwhile, the story has gotten nearly 2,500 votes at Digg.com. I wonder, how could I make this work for me? Lets see…

I have this fictional pet clothing site (I know, I know, again with the doggie coats) so how could I implement this tactic? I know! I’ll doctor up a photo of a dog so it looks like he has two extra legs, and say I was contacted by the owners to custom design a special outfit just for him.

I’ll add a quote by a “veterinary expert” and throw in some incomprehensible jargon about the particular genetic anomaly that caused the dog to grow extra legs - wait, I’ll go one better and say the owners live near a former radiation fallout area! Extra shock value.

This will get me a ton of media exposure, I will be Dugg by the thousands, and a bazillion people will link to me. This will increase my Page Rank and I will shoot to page one of the SERPs. The biggest advertisers will seek me out and I will become a millionaire.

I don’t think so.

This obvious manipulation of SEO tactics was tentatively denounced by Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam expert, who stated that this would probably fall under the “other misleading practices” section of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Lyndon Antcliff, meanwhile, removed an article he had posted that gave insight into his tactics - tactics which many would categorize as unethical. Lyndon stated he removed the site because it gave away too many of his secrets, he was being bombarded with comments, and didn’t have time to deal with it. He asserts that he doesn’t worry about ethics when it comes to ‘linkbait’, preferring a “If it works, do it” approach.

That’s not to say all linkbait is bad. Cutts himself has been known to comment on different ways to snag attention for your site. But a blatant hoax isn’t the way to do it.

Not only does spreading false information lower your image, it also decreases the amount of trust people will have in future information originating from your site. In the long run, you want people to take you seriously for what you have to offer, not assume you are just the best storyteller around.

Let’s take a closer look at ‘bad’ links; where they come from, why there are considered ‘bad’ and how they can negatively impact your site.

Many web entrepreneurs leap on the link band wagon with a loud hurrah, and immediately start contacting all their friends, family members and co-workers to ask them to link to their site. Then they move up the ladder to contacting other websites in the same field and requesting them to do so as well.

These links may add up fast, but there is one tiny problem. Most of these sources are going to expect you to return the favor by linking back to them from your site. Search engines are wise to the ‘friends’ network, and discount the value of these reciprocal links when judging the worth of your site.

Another concern is that the quality of these sites might not be up to par, and that will reflect on you as well. The assumption is that your site is probably only as good as the sites that link to you, and if they have a low page rank you will not be viewed as very valuable either.

An idea you may be tempted to try to obtain links for your site is inclusion in an automated link management system. These basically consist of pages of web addresses all hyperlinked to each other, and often the sites will not even have any relevance to your field.

The search engines will generally discount these as they really are just more reciprocal links. Having your site included in one of these will not really help you and could possibly be viewed as a spam attempt.

In the same vein, excessive outbound links from your website to a friend’s may not be a good idea if the other site is completely unrelated to yours. Save the buddy linking for your blog, and keep your website business oriented for the best results.

Paid links are the topic of much bitter controversy. If you pay for links, or are paid by someone to post their links on your site, be cautious. There are a lot of scams out there that promise to increase your links and page rank, or even guarantee a top ten spot in search results, but they may not deliver and they could use banned practices that will reflect back on you. Other scammers may offer to pay you to write reviews or testimonials for their products; you will want to be sure you actually endorse the product before attaching your name to it.

If you think you need help with linking and other web building techniques, you will be much better off hiring a reputable ‘white hat’ SEO to guide you down the right path. Make sure they tell you exactly what they plan to do, and how they plan to do it. If the answers are vague, you might want to keep looking.

SEO is not bad; it’s the cornerstone of good website performance! You just need to be sure that you always use appropriate linking tactics to build trust in your site and your product.

Matt Cutts needs no Introduction. Matt Cutts is engineer with Google and is been with Google from last 8 years. I don’t think there can be anyone other than Matt Cutts to talk about SPAM and how to avoid Spam on your website.

See this fantastic video on “What Google knows about spam” by Matt Cutts and ten minutes of your investment can improve your search engine ranking.

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