Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

SEO is all good, right? Not Black Hat SEO. SEO tactics that are banned can take your site right down with them if you get caught. It’s best just to avoid anything that could be construed as shades of gray, and stick with proven white hat tactics to get your site moving up the SERPs.

Whether you are doing your SEO yourself by listening to the advice of various ‘gurus’ or hiring it out, you need to watch your back and not get pulled into black hat measures just to see fast results. In the long run, you will only hurt your site, and could end up penalized severely for trying to game the search engines.

You don’t want to pay for any links, spam search engines, blogs or forums, pay for dishonest reviews, link to disreputable mass linking schemes, use white on white text, keyword stuffing or other activities. It’s just not worth it.

Instead, concentrate your efforts on the tried and true business of organic linking, article marketing and judicious social book-marking. Produce plenty of relevant, informational content and carve out a niche for yourself of which you are the leading expert.

Articles, press releases, web content, blogging, Squidoo lenses, Knols, videos graphics and other types of content can be optimized with a common goal - making the signposts on the web point to you as the most relevant result in your field.

This means research - choosing a niche, finding long tail keywords, running an effective ad campaign, and optimizing content as well for any affiliates you might wish to partner with.

It also means hard work - you have to follow through, even if you are using a company to handle a lot of it for you. You want to be sure that they are not using any uncertified methods to get fast results and make you pleased with their work, only to be banned three months later!

Once you have your head straight about white and black hat SEO, you can ask yourself every time you get ready to do something new, “Is this relevant? Is it helpful? Anything that helps the USER is usually agood thing.

If you keep your nose clean and watch your step, you can build a solid foundation for your site. Anything else is bound to crumble away. White hat SEO is the ONLY approved way to build a site!

Did you know you can backup your site in case of a hack, and have a chance of restoring it in case of an awful event? Backups of your site should be taken at least once a week, and all of your scripts should install security updates as soon as they are released. This will cut down on your chances of being destroyed by a madcap hacker.

A hacked website can effectively be hijacked like a car, and could be used for illegal activities - so some form of security system is a must.

A hacker could use your hosting account to add deep web pages like user information “phishing” sites. These sites usually consist of a page which looks like a login page for Paypal, Ebay or any bank. If someone fills in the form their details are sent to the hacker who now has access to their account! You get the blame and possibly a fraud investigation to sort things out while the hacker vacations in Jamaica.

If you have any user information stored on your server, you just handed that to the hacker too, and personal information is a high ticket item on the black market. Keep an eye on your site for any unexpected activity, new pages or stats that seem out of whack. Most accounts have some kind of statistics module built in to the control panel or you can use an easy program offered by one of the major search and software providers. Make sure any scripts you use are secure, and update them with any available patches to keep the hackers at bay.

Blog and Forum Spamming Can Kill You, Too

Forums and message boards are an easy target for software which will autopost to thousands of sites in minutes. If your blog is able to accept comments, set it up with a captcha or other way to ensure that the commenters are human - this can be as simple as asking them to type the answer to a simple question in a box and hit enter.

If you don’t ask for registration, however, you leave your blog open to excessive advertising done by software, which will not be relevant in many cases and ruin the tone of your blog, The same goes for forums - perhaps to even a bigger degree. Allowing guests to post without registration is open to abuse, especially if you allow urls in the sig line.

Don’t let hackers and spammer ruin your day, your week, month or even your year. Protect your website today!

Time to talk about spam again. Google, Yahoo and MSN are huge. They employ thousands of people, spend billions of dollars and use untold amounts of computer power and server space to give you and me accurate, relevant search results (and yes, to make money on advertising. Don’t everyone comment on the greed of the search giants, that is not what this post is about. We can discuss corporate greed and non-altruistic motives later.)

That being said, they can’t catch all of the spam out there. Despite their manpower, their goal (especially where Google is concerned) is to automate as much of the process as possible through algorithms and complex ranking systems. This means that if someone can game the system, they are going to try!

We are the next line of defense. If we see a site rising through the SERPs that obviously is a spam site, we have to speak up, and bring this to the attention of the powers that be. Often if Google or one of the others is notified of a problem, they can have a human check it out and make a reasonable determination as to the intent of the site.

Spam is easily identifiable. The bright paper wrapped around the distinctively shaped can is - oh, wait. Wrong spam. Do-over!

Spam is identifiable by obvious connections to bad neighborhood linking schemes. If a site seems to have a gazillion ads and links that have no relevance to the supposed topic, it might just be a spam site.

Spam is identifiable by white on white text that when revealed reads like a research list of keywords. If a site has a lot of white space at the bottom of each page, right click and drag your mouse. If words start lighting up, it might just be a spam site.

Spam is identifiable by mass emails sent out in an effort to hoodwink you into clicking on a link by promising a free something or other or asking you to take a test or participate in a poll. If you find out they want your credit card info before they give you the results, it might just be a spam site.

You can report spam to the appropriate search engine, and wait to see if the site is booted or penalized. Sometimes the search engine will give a webmaster a heads up that they are violating guidelines, and give them a chance to clean up their act. Sometimes they simply deep six them to the planet Shubunkin.

A note of caution - don’t worry too much about being falsely accused by a jealous competitor. Remember what we said about real humans? Give them a little credit. If you have kept your nose clean, you should haven nothing to worry about. Don’t be evil, and you don’t have to worry about being caught!

If you have done something a little over the line, however, take care - you might just be a spam site.

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

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