Hats

Andy Beard asked:


Black Hat SEO

A fairly common black hat search engine optimization tactic is to build multiple websites on a general theme. The sites are then cross-linked to other sites in the same network, and would also include one-way links to the primary site with varying anchor text. The whole aim is to give one or more sites a huge boost in search engine results pages (SERPs), and for it to also benefit from additional traffic flowing from the various network sites.

People undertaking such methods generally create the websites with automated tools, use scraped content from other peoples websites, and most of the sites have no purpose other than to drive traffic to the primary site.

White Hat SEO

First it is important to understand a little about linking structure. I am not going to go into excessive details.

It is widely understood that internal linking on any website can represent as much as 50% of the page rank attributed to any single page within a site. How your pages are linked together, for which terms, and whether links are reciprocated all play an import role in the calculation.

If I told you that there are hundreds of websites on the internet, with very high page rank on multiple terms themselves, who would be willing to create a niche portal within their pages, highly optimized for your website, niche and keywords, it is something you would probably be willing to pay for.

We are not talking about a simple directory site. We are talking about high quality content pages, that will pass on pagerank to your site, plus a central hub, similar to a home page, that benfits from all the content pages linking to it, and that in turn also points directly to your website.

Of course:-

- You will have complete control over the content of each of these sites.

- You will be provided with an interface for managing the site’s contents.

- You will be able to add content whenever you like, on almost any subject.

- They will even act as brokers to encourage other people to create hubs which will also point directly to your website

- Most of these sites have powerful linking structures, that magnify the value of your content, and the links both to your website, and to the central hub.

This is all “white hat”. You will never be penalised for using this tactic by the search engines, and it is permanent! Your traffic hubs will be a permanent fixture. Some of these hubs will disappear, but many more will appear to replace them.

Is this something you would pay for?

You can get this highly powerful promotion of your website for free!

Simply write and submit articles to article directories.

Every day I see questions on multiple marketing forums along the lines of:-

“Does article marketing really work?”

“I submitted an article 2 weeks ago and my search engine results have stayed the same, why?”

“When I submit an article, how long until I will see traffic to my website?”

Describing exactly how this all works in words is very difficult, but lets look at a very simple math formula.

1×1x1×1x1=1

It is not very impressive is it?

You have to remember however that an individual article you publish gains incoming links in a number of ways.

- Snippets from your article will appear on the pages of other articles in the same niche.

- You will have a link in the main topic.

- you will most likely have a link for some time in the RSS feed.

- if a website uses that RSS feed for content, the article on the directory site would gain at least a temporary link, but quite often a permanent one.

So we may be looking at more like

1.3×1.3×1.3×1.3×1.3=3.71

Some of the numbers however are going to be bigger or smaller, depending on the authority of the page linking to the article, the number of links from that page etc.

You might well have to use addition rather than multiplication when regarding many aspects of a real formula.

What is important however is that not only is each individual article you publish gaining in pagerank, but also your author profile.

Lets take some examples.

These are the current top 5 article authors listed at Ezine Articles:-

Lance Winslow 2029 Articles Jeff Herring 340 Articles Tim Gorman 306 Articles John Mussi 303 Articles Dennis Siluk 286 Articles

Now do a search for any of those author names in Google.

Every single result has a reference to their Ezine Articles profile within the top 3 positions.

This isn’t true in every case. Well known (and popular for good reason) internet marketer Willie Crawford’s profile only appears at the bottom of the first page, but he has hundreds of links pointing to his popular websites, and has a baseball player competing for ranking.

Profile pages concentrate and magnify the linking benefit of every article you publish, thus the links from a profile page carry a lot of weight.

Some author bio pages allow a lot of customization. Most allow you to have some text (which can be keyword targeted), along with website links. A few even allow you to set anchor text for every link in your profile.

Thus to answer all the questions I see every day on various marketing forums.

- Yes, article marketing does work.

- the more articles you submit, the more effect you will have from using articles as one form of marketing. A hub with a single page has very little weighting. A hub with 10, 20 or even 100 articles will carry an immense amount of weight, and having lots of hubs pointing to your websites will have a massive effect on search engine results.

- you might see an immediate burst of traffic within a few days of when you submit an article, however article marketing is a short, medium and long-term solution.

Short term it can be a fast route to having a website spidered by search engines. Medium term, you will gain some exposure within your niche as other sites and ezines publish your content. Many of them don’t write about your topic every day. Long-term is really up to you. The more quality articles you write, the larger your hubs will become. Large article hubs pick up traffic from a larger variety of search engine traffic, but also make your author bio more prominent, thus magnifying the value of external links placed there.



MARLIN

Andreas Sundstrom asked:


Search engine optimisation, or “Seo”, has for quite some time been the ultimate goal for many webmasters. To begin with there really was not all that difficult, but as the Internet is evolving exponentially so does the competition - especially for any term that has money making powers.

Based on what you do to promote the search engine rankings of your site, it could be summed up as white-, black- or grey hat methods. The first mentioned being allowed things like putting only genuinely usable for your site, while the black hat tactic would be strategies that the great search engines like google, yahoo and msn are not going to like one bit - spamming other people’s blogs and forums with links to your site, for instance.

Logically enough, the grey hat methods land in the middle of “wrong and right” and are things that you could quite possibly bring through, on condition that you use the guidelines with care. For your plain vanilla webmaster distinguishing between these methods is not regularly all that simple, particularly with so many gurus offering to sell us their most up-to-date superior suggestion when it comes to achieving rankings and making money online.

If money is all you care about…

The ethics of the matter aren’t maybe as clear cut as some would have you believe either.

On the one hand it’s by all means clear that super seo’ed adsense sites filled with no-good text - that could equally well read “ga ga ja da” or some resembling blabber - are of zero value to the committed Internet user, and no one likes to have their pet bulletin board or blog spammed with barefaced advertising for dodgy merchandize that promise to increase sexual potency. As the search engines make their living on serving up relevant and priceless education, it’s purely rational that they do nit interpret on these black hat sites and methods with forgiving eyes.

On its side, the Internet is literally made up of it’s users and provided that you aren’t breaking any real laws, you are free to produce content in whatever way you wish to. If you desire to engineer a blog farm consisting of hundreds of blogs that has zero value to human visitors, there is nobody but time and cost constraints stopping you from doing so.

Those who do this are in it completely for the money - they quickly produce large amounts of webpages that targets any one keywords they can monetize in some way. The ambition of these sites isn’t to give the visitor anything of value, but to get him or her to click on an advert that will take him somwhere else where he will hopefully spend some money instead.

So in a way, this is in fact nought but a marketing tactic, and some people are reportedly making a most good living using similar business model.

For the “friendly and polite webmaster” though, who just have the desire to tell folks about his hobby or wants to offer folks real products and services, it is presumably an adequate idea to be careful with anything that could be accused as black hat search engine optimisation.

Not due to the fact that it’s morally a bit thin, but seeing that it most likely will hurt his bottom line in time.



IRVIN

Harvey Robinson asked:


Black Hat techniques are unethical techniques that some web masters use to get their site to rate higher in search engines. While Black Hat techniques temporarily do work, in the long run, they never pay off. Your temporary high will be a crash dive when the search engine spiders find out what you are doing and all your hard work will be a waste. If you want long term, high search engine listings, don’t use Black Hat techniques.

Why use unethical techniques when you can legitimately increase your search engine ranking? This is the question which this article will answer. After you’ve read this, you’ll know what techniques will get you in trouble and which ones are safe to use.

Black Hat techniques you don’t want to use.

Don’t use keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords in your content. This can be as extreme as repeating the same keywords over and over to try to achieve a higher ranking for that keyword.

Don’t use invisible text. This involves making keywords the same color as the background. Search engine spiders can see this text but people cannot.

Don’t use doorway pages. These are pages that your visitors cannot see, but search engine spiders can.

Black Hat techniques are cheesy because they go against the search engine’s rules. Not only do they go against the rules, they also do not do much for visitor’s.

Black Hat techniques do work.

That is the reason why web masters use them. I never recommend using these techniques. The problem is these techniques only work temporarily. Eventually the search engine spiders catch on and your site will be permanently banned.

If you want to use these techniques, do it on a site that you can use as a throw away. If you are good you can get away with it for possibly a few months. You may make a lot of money on that site for that time, but if you want to build for the long term don’t do it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

If you should not use Black Hat techniques, what techniques can you use to get a flood of targeted visitors? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving search engine traffic to a web site from “natural” search results. There are several techniques that you can use to do this.

Keywords.

While keyword stuffing is not a smart thing to do, the natural use of keywords is proper. Spread your keywords throughout the article in a way that is normal and does not look like it has been seeded.

Keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total words of a document. You want a keyword density of 1-3%, if your content is 600 words, you’ll want to use the main keyword between 6-18 times.

Before you write your content, pick out some keywords that are relevant to your site. Then, begin to write the content. Try to incorporate the keywords you have picked out in a natural way throughout the content. One thing to keep in mind is that actual people are reading your site. Thus, you should make sure that the use of keywords does not distract your readers from the reading of the content.

Writing articles to get links to your site.

Article submissions can bring a huge amount of traffic to your web site for years. Write a series of articles, with a resource box at the end containing a link to your site. Search Google for, “article directory”. You will find several directories that list articles. Submit your series of articles to as many article directories as you can. If they are good, web masters looking for content for their site will use your articles. People will read these articles and see your link at the bottom of the page. Spiders will find these one way links pointing to your site and this will help your rankings in the search engines.

Linking to help your search engine rankings.

Developing a successful link strategy can take some time and effort. Search engines move at their own pace, anything you do to your web site today can take weeks to show up. It helps your rankings every time a search engine spider visits a page with a link to your site on it. Exchanging links is a very common practice. It is very easy to do. Search Google for, “link directory”. You will find several directories that list sites that want to exchange links.

Pay Per Click Advertising.

This is the easiest way ever to get to the top of Google and Yahoo. Pay per click advertising, if properly done, can give you an increase in web site traffic and an increase in sales. Pay per click advertising may seem tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. Two programs that you may want to look at are Goggle Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, both come highly rated and recommended. They both produce results.

If you follow the above advice, your site will get listed high on search engines for the long term with no danger of being pulled. There are of many approaches to increasing your traffic, but the main thing is to take action and to keep it going over the long term.



BOB