Tuesday, February 06, 2007
An Overview of Unethical SEO SPAM Techniques, Be Aware of Black-Hat SEOs
SEO SPAM techniques are practices and tactics, which are banned and strictly prohibited by search engines, you may find few websites applying these SPAM techniques and having good positions, it doesn’t mean that search engines have allowed those websites, it may be because those sites are not yet caught, I would like to mention one thing here that I’m writing about these techniques to create awareness in Young SEOs so that they can avoid using them, I would highly recommend everybody to avoid using these SPAM techniques.
List of the SEO SPAM Techniques
- Hidden Text
- Doorway Page
- Hidden Tags
- Useless Meta Tags
- Search Engine Specific Pages
- Redirection
- Keyword Stuffing
- Duplicate Content
- Cloaking / IP Delivery
- Link farming / Un-natural Linking
- Over Optimization
- Mini-Site network
- Blog / Forum Abuse
- Link Exchange / Reciprocal Links
- Excessive CSS Playing
1. Hidden Text
There are two types of hidden text, the first type of hidden text is invisible text to human visitors by keeping text color same as background, the second type of hidden text is text that is hidden behind images or under document layers.
2. Doorway Page
Doorway is one of the oldest SEO SPAM techniques, in this technique web pages are developed keeping search engines in mind, they point to website but they are not linked with website that’s why they are called doorway through which website will be accessed.
3. Hidden Tags
There are plenty of tags used by webmasters to perform variety of functions such as “comment, style, noframe and http-equiv tags”. Unethical SEOs use these tags by inserting keywords to them.
4. Useless Meta Tags
There is a huge list of meta tags but search engine spiders don’t read all, using all meta tags probably won’t make your website penalized but it could badly hurt your website ranking, since all those useless meta tags will occupy initial characters of your web pages and search engines gives lot of importance to initially used web content.
5. Search Engine Specific Pages
Search engine specific pages are multiple but similar documents, specially designed to focus the requirements of various search engines algorithms. This SPAM technique is no longer applicable, today search engines are more intelligent and enough efficient to catch this technique.
6. Redirection
Redirection is a technique in which one page redirects the visitors / search engine spiders to another page or domain, redirection is a SPAM technique and it is usually done through JavaScript or meta refresh tag.
7. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is 100% SPAM technique, in this technique bunch of keywords are kept at webpage it may be in anchor link, alt tag or at bottom of the webpage.
8. Duplicate Content
There were days, when you can copy content from other website and keep it to yours and even bring good results in search engines, but search engine are getting smarter everyday. It’s even hard to have duplicate content on similar domain these days, search engines are extremely intelligent to recognize either the content is original or copied.
9. Cloaking / IP Delivery
Cloaking is a SPAM technique, in which one set of information is served to search engine spiders and another set of information is served to visitors, it’s mostly done by IP tracking that’s why it’s also called IP Delivery, search engines don’t like webmaster to treat them different than visitors.
10. Link farming / Un-natural Linking
Link farming or un-natural linking is a technique in which webmaster try to have more incoming links pointing to their domain unethically by FFA or link buying. Search engines are very smart these days, they can easily recognize un-natural linking by link monitoring.
11. Over Optimization
After Google’s Florida update, there is a new term called “Over Optimization” introduced to SEO industry, in that update, those websites got penalized which have excessive optimization. There is no criteria to measure search engine optimization efforts either they are balanced or over, but one thing is for sure and that is excessive optimization or implementation of SEO techniques comparatively than your competitors.
12. Mini-Site network
Google gives huge importance to qualified incoming links to any domain that encourages Black-Hat SEOs to create multiple relevant websites pointing back to a central sales website. The primary purpose of those multiple relevant websites is to win Google Trust and get good PR because they can control everything on all these domains, since they belong to same company and behave as mini-site network.
13. Blog / Forum Abuse
Blog / forum abuse is another SPAM technique, in this technique unethical SEOs try to get link back to their domains by posting their links to blogs and forums, it may be through their signature or through their own promotion.
14. Link Exchange / Reciprocal Links
Link exchange is Black-hat technique in which two or more websites exchange their links to influence Google, these links can be two ways and three ways, and this technique is also called reciprocal linking.
15. Excessive CSS Playing
Excessive CSS playing is very hot technique these days, in which webmaster controls website formatting through CSS. Actually search engine likes heading, bold, italic, paragraph, hyperlink, anchor link tags but sometimes utilizing all these tags can spoil the look of the website, that’s why webmaster control formatting through CSS.
About The Author
Monday, January 08, 2007
Optimizing Wrong Keyword or Phrase for Right Website with all Your Efforts
Keywords are gateways through which your website is going to be visited from search engines users, those visitors can be filtered by keywords. Every single keyword or phrase has its target audience, in fact you can evaluate your visitors through keywords such as your visitor’s mind set, psychology, type, age group, interest and intension. If you have selected wrong keywords for your website, it could hurt your eBusiness badly.
What is a Keyword or Phrase?
A keyword or phrase is a single or group of words which is used to construct a search statement to find information by search engine users. It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites.
Keywords are Gateway of Your eBusiness!
It really doesn’t matter how good your SEO Practices are? Or how good your SEO Strategy is? If you are failed to get right kind of traffic at your website. Keywords are the gateway for any website on internet, and with wrong keywords success can never be achieved.
Wrong Keyword or Phrase
There can be many definitions of wrong keywords, such as a wrong keyword or phrase is a keyword or phrase which is irrelevant with services or products of website, which has poor conversion of visitors into paying customers, and which is failed to bring targeted and focused traffic to website.
Wrong Keywords are not Bad Keywords
Wrong keywords are invaluable keywords for any website, they don’t have any worth for website, whereas bad keywords are those which are not searched or hardly searched by search engine users.
Why Waste Quality Time on Wrong Keywords?
Selecting wrong keyword or phrase is the biggest mistake for any SEO campaign, even if you have achieved top ranking on those wrong keywords, it will be waste of your energy and efforts. All your efforts are going to lead you no where if you have a wrong direction, keywords set directions for your efforts, selecting them in quick time will end up giving you nothing. Time is the real money, keywords can be updated anytime but what to do with the time spent on promoting wrong keywords, it’s just wasted. One can get frustrated if doesn’t have desirable results specially in the initial stage for any website, that’s why it doesn’t matter how much time you spent on selecting keywords but make sure that you select the best keywords.
Why Wrong Keywords are selected?
Majority of wrong keywords have good search counts, because they are comparatively search better than specific keywords, that’s why they get selected sometimes by website owner or by SEOs. But results come up after the first quarter or session when they failed to boast sales or right kind of traffic. It’s not the traffic that makes a keyword or phrase wrong it’s the conversion that makes it wrong.
Keywords Lead Your Website to Success!
These are the keywords which lead your website a successful eBusiness or eCommerce business, they can lead you to hell too, you have to be very careful selecting them, after all you or your assigned marketers are going to put their all efforts to bring your website on top of those keywords.
Specific and Focused Keywords will pay you!
Why get crazy of traffic and ask for everything, for example if you provide search engine optimization services then you should select keywords like “seo services, search engine optimization services, seo outsourcing, seo outsourcing”. And you should avoid selecting keywords like “seo or search engine optimizer”, because people typing “seo or search engine optimizer” may be searching for freelance seo or searching for definition of seo and won’t be interested in your services, they will come to your website and go without making any purchase.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
SEO Copy Writing Techniques – Why Content is Still King? (Part 2)
It’s a two parts article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about “What is SEO Copy Writing? Why Content is Still King? How to Balance Copy Writing Keeping Users and Search Engines in Mind? Who should I Write for Search Engines OR for Visitors? And Well Targeted Written Content is more valuable”
How to Develop a Successful SEO Copy Writing Strategy
There are five very important elements to develop a successful SEO copy writing strategy, a certain amount of content at website need to be updated periodically.
- Research the best keywords for your business / services
- Analyze the content of your competitors
- Logical distribution of selected keywords through out website
- Writing for those selected keywords
- On going fresh content
All these elements are very important and need healthy amount of time, there can’t be a standard because each strategy is unique and different. The more you study the better you’ll be able to produce.
Dos and Don’ts of Writing
When it comes to write for your website, you need to have your target audience in mind rather to facilitate search engines, respect your site visitors and educate them about your offered products or services. There is a list of dos and don’ts of writing for search engine.
Dos
- Try to use keywords in upper top 2000 characters including code
- Start paragraph with keywords
- Start sentence with keywords
- Use keywords in headings and sub headings
- Use keywords in bullets or as numbered
- Keep textual alternate navigation at bottom
- Have a breadcrumb at complete website and try to include keywords in it wherever possible
Don’ts
- Avoid using keywords at images or pictures
- Avoid using keywords in deep paragraph, since deeper use of keywords will have lesser value to search engines
- Avoid using pronoun for replacing important keywords, since pronouns won’t be of any value to search engines
- Don’t have link title for text based links
- Avoid keeping duplicate content on different pages of same website
- Never use copied OR pirated content at your website
SEO Copy Writing Techniques
- Search the relevant words (keywords) which are searched the most: Finding right keywords which correctly represent your company/products/services as well as they should be searched
- Try to focus on the words (keywords) when writing: Whenever write, keep focusing on keywords, try to repeat keywords but keeping the visitors in mind, your copy should be written for your visitors
- Unique/Original Content: Writing original and unique content is one of the most important aspect of your successful copywriting, the moment you upload your content try to make your content crawled by search engines, so that you can have the copy rights of that content, since search engines will take that content original which they crawled first, if your original content is copied and search engines have crawled that copied content first they may find your content as pirated, that’s why it’s very important to make your content authorized and copy right by search engines
- Fresh Content: Search engines give a lot of value to fresh content, since more frequently updates make your website more attractive to site visitors
- Focused and Relevant: Focused and relevant content is highly appreciated by search engines comparatively to those sites which are scatter or not focused
- Selectable and Visible Content: Search engines can’t read text over images, they also dislike hidden text, they can easily read selectable and visible content at website
- Proper Formatting Techniques: Search engines are able to recognize text formatting such as headings, sub headings, emphasis words, slogans, tag line, paragraph title, picture title…
- Short and Compiled: Short and complied content is always liked by site visitors as well as search engines, but as far as the quality of the content is concern it should not be compromised on the length of the content
- Keyword Utilization: Keywords should be used in “Title, Description, Headings, Sub-Headings, Bullets, Numbered, Bold, Italic, Underline, Hyperlinks, Anchor links, Alt Attributes, Link Titles, Table Names, Picture Names, File Names, Directories Names”
- Keywords Specific/Topical Writing Technique: SEO Friendly copying writing is a topical writing where keywords should be treated as topics, and writer should write about that topic, so that search engines can get attracted towards that topic / keywords
Now you know what it takes to write for website, you might be one step closer to improve your search engine rankings. You just need to follow the all mentioned guidelines that are listed in this article, if you have any question or want to have a personal training, write to me at asif@asif-iqbal.com
About The Author
Asif Iqbal is a Research Analyst, eBusiness & eMarketing Consultant, SEO Specialist, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in eBusiness, eMarketing, SEO, branding and promotion and has trained dozens of qualified SEOs. He can be reached at asif@asif-iqbal.com Website Design Services, SEO Outsourcing to Pakistan , SEO Training and Consultancy Services
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
SEO Copy Writing Techniques - Why Content is Still King? (Part 1)
SEO copywriting is nothing but just a topical writing where content writers always write for topics / sub-topics and those topics or sub-topics are called Keyword Phrases. There are some other techniques with this, which are kept in mind when writing for search engines, but whatever they write is topical as a result search engines can easily understand them and give them the most valuable positions. There is a proper procedure & technique for SEO Copy Writing which will be discussed later on in this article.
There is a very obvious answer to this question, content is still king because content is the major source of conveying message to search engine. Search engines read the content and then realize the importance of the content, they their-self understand the purpose of the website and then compare it with other related websites in their database, on the basis of your website’s content your website is given some rank in search engines, it could be at 1st page and could be at 100th page. There are plenty of other elements but content is one of the very important aspect of your website optimization, whenever writing for your website, keep in mind that your website is going to be evaluated not only by human but search engine’s bots as well.
Website copy can be liked and disliked at the same time by different human readers, there are plenty of external things that effect on human mind when reading such as mood, time, easy & flowery language and interests. But to search engines it’s entirely a different thing, they are built on artificial intelligence that’s why it doesn’t matter how difficult the words are, how boring the topic is, they have to read your written content time and mood can’t stop them.
Another very interesting question, there are many content writers who are worried to either write for search engines OR for website visitors? The answer is very simple, search engines don’t like them to feed, that’s why focusing on search engines is only a waste of time. But you can’t ignore search engines, since search engines are based on pre-defined algorithm (artificial intelligence) and they are compelled on certain things, such if your website code is not search engine friendly then search engines will be finding difficulty to read and understand website content. Content writers should focus on writing for website visitors but keeping search engines standards in mind, so that their content will have good impact on search engines.
Whatever you are going to write, search the right term to use, it may happen that your written content will get good rankings on certain keyword phrase but what if that keyword phrase is not searchable in search engines. That’s why you make sure that your written content should be well targeted, to search most searched keyword phrase in search engines, and you can use WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
How Important is Validated, Compressed and Optimized Website Code for Google, Yahoo and Msn?
Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engine bots to go through the web pages, and if bots are unable to understand code they won’t be able to access content of the web pages because content is kept within the code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.
Three major elements of Website Code Optimization:
- Code Validation
- Code Compression
- Code Optimization
Code Validation
Today web designers and developers, who use WYSIWYG tools to design and development websites. These tools are really a great help especially when it come to time saving, these tools provide huge relaxation to designers and developers. All these tools can be very effectively used by trained and experienced designers and developers, but the real problem is that new designers and developers get trained using these tools that’s why they have very poor concept of coding. All WYSIWYG tools are very easy to use and if they are used improperly they can generate GARBAGE, which makes webpage HEAVIER and MEANINGLESS to search engine bots.
Search engines can’t see your webpage, they send their BOTS to crawl all web pages, and these bots work on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. They ONLY UNDERSTAND CODE, if your web page code is not validated they will stop reading from there and will evaluate your web page on the basis of received information. If you want search engines to read everything you have at your web page, validate your code before putting it online.
Code Compression
There is another very important issue, which can make your webpage more complex and less valuable when it comes to search engine’s point of view. Webpage visitors see only upfront of the webpage, they don’t care either webpage code is compressed or not. But you have to take care of code compression, so that your valuable content can be read by search engine bots and will be able to get good ranking in search engines.
Search engine bots always try to extract content from web pages, they don’t like to read code, though they can understand the code. On-page CSS and JavaScript declaration push your valuable content down, since top 2000 initial characters including code are very crucial to create good meaningful impression to search engines. That’s why you should try to call external JavaScript and CSS and also should try to make short naming for CSS classes, this way your code will be compressed and there won’t be any visual difference to your website visitors.
Code Optimization
Code Validation and Compression comes in Code Optimization, but there is more to do with the Code. Code Optimization is basically using search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) with their PRIORITIES and LIKINGS to search engines. Search engines like “TITLTE, HEADINGS, BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE, ANCHOR LINK, TEXTUAL HYPERLINK, IMAGE HYPERLINK, PARAGRAPH, NUMBERING and BULLETS TAGS”, they also like “ALT and LINK TITLE ATTRIBUTES”. All these mentioned Tags and Attributes will give your content value to search engines. You should try to utilize all mentioned search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) as much as possible to take good rankings.
You should take care of your website code periodically (weekly or at least monthly), check your website code for BROKEN LINKS, MISSING and ORPHAN PAGES. Try to update “robots.txt and sitemap” whenever there is a change at the website. Check your website for CROSS BROWSER COMPATIBILITY, especially for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
About The Author
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Quick SEO Guide! 12 Steps of Search Engine Optimization Process by Asif Iqbal
There are just 12 simple steps to follow basic Search Engine Optimization for SEO starters, expertise and in-depth knowledge of these steps can take you to the expert level as well, this article has just an overview of the basic SEO.
1. Research and select appropriate keywords to target
2. Effective page Title Tags
3. Effective and optimized META Description Tag
4. Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
5. Integrate search keywords within Website copy
6. Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible
7. Effective Alt Image attributes
8. Effective and optimized text navigation menus
9. Link titles and anchor link effectively
10. Set up search engine friendly site architecture
11. Creation of search engine friendly sitemap
12. Robots.txt and its META tag
1. Research and select appropriate keywords to target
- Collect the business terms
- Check keywords relevancy with industry and conversion
- Check competition
- Check count on word tracker and Overture
- Make estimate traffic chart using Google Adwords
- Distribution of keywords on the basis of their weight
2. Effective page Title Tags
Title tag is the most important tag, almost all search engines evaluate webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page as well, and search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.
3. Effective and optimized META Description Tag
Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.
4. Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
Keywords tag has lost its value, search engines keep getting smarter, they have set their own criterion to identify web pages with their relevancies, they take each word as “keyword phrase” that is presented at webpage and they keep those words in priorities with their densities. There is no harm in utilizing this tag for marginally better results.
5. Integrate search keywords within Website copy
Since a very early stage of search engine revolution, search engines were able to evaluate website with relevance to their content, though they were not very efficient and intelligent like they are these days, but they were able to read the content at website and content still plays very important role in top ranking positions.
6. Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible
Usually a website is designed keeping few elements in mind such as user friendliness, attractive design, beautiful flash animation, easy navigation, client specific or functionality oriented. In fact all these elements are very useful and important but what benefit is your web site if it has no visitors, search engine compatible websites are designed and developed keeping search engine policies and algorithms in mind, which enable websites to be easily crawled and understood by search engines.
7. Effective Alt Image attributes
Alternate text commonly referred to as Alt, is a text description that can be added to the HTML tag that displays an image. The ALT text is displayed by the browser when the cursor is moved over the picture. If pictures are turned off in the browser, the Alt text is automatically displayed instead.
8. Effective and optimized text navigation menus
Navigation is a very important part of any website; it gives guidelines to website visitors and directs them to relevant part of the website.
9. Link titles and anchor link effectively
Link title is displayed text by the browser when cursor is moved over the link.
An Anchor link is a little different from a hyperlink, a hyperlink directs to a complete webpage but anchor link directs to a specific area of a particular webpage, it may be at same page or different page or even at different domain.
10. Set up search engine friendly site architecture
A Website's information architecture can greatly affect on its search engine visibility. Specific page elements, such as the site navigation scheme, and design technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, can interfere with search engines ability to spider a site.
11. Creation of search engine friendly sitemap
A site map helps visitors navigate large, complicated sites by showing its entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram of the Web site for Web designers.
12. Robots.txt and its META tag
Robots.txt is a file placed on your server to guide the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.
About The Author
Asif Iqbal is a Research Analyst, eBusiness & eMarketing Consultant, SEO Specialist, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in eBusiness, eMarketing, SEO, branding and promotion and has trained dozens of qualified SEOs. He can be reached at asif@asif-iqbal.com Website Design Services, SEO Outsourcing to Pakistan , SEO Training and Consultancy Services
Friday, August 04, 2006
Improve Link Popularity and Develop a Successful Link Building Campaign (Part 2)
It’s a two part article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about mistakes you should avoid in link building, how to categorized your database and create your own master database for link building campaign.
Few Lessons from Your Competitors!
If somehow you are finished with your database and you require more incoming links for your website, you shouldn’t worry about it as far as your competitors are there to guide you. You can easily see how many links are pointing to your competitors from search engines. Google doesn’t show the real figures but you can take it from Yahoo and Msn, now what you have to do is to find out where exactly your competitors are linked and start putting your competitors’ incoming links to your master database with all required fields.
After you finished with all your competitors, don’t waste your time start submitting your website.
Important Aspect of Incoming Links:
Incoming links are evaluated on certain criteria and weight, there are four major aspect of incoming links on the basis of them each links are considered more valuable.
- Link Age
- Link Text Relevancy
- Link Page Relevancy
- Link Domain Relevancy
1. Link Age
Link age is one of the factors your website or webpage is going to be tested through, the older the links are the better they will be reliable.
2. Link Text Relevancy
One relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, you better guess how important is the link text relevancy, here relevant link text means the title of the link and very next paragraph after title.
3. Link Page Relevancy
Page relevancy is also very important factor, your pointed links should be placed on the relevant pages. The overall page content should be relevant with your page.
4. Link Domain Relevancy
Link domain relevancy is something that can’t be ignore, if your pointed incoming links are placed on the relevant domain and relevant page they will be highly appreciated and have more weight than your competitors.
Incoming Link Types and Styles:
Link type and style are very important, you should try to maximize their effectives and values in favor of your link building campaign, each link has different value and weight to search engine, and I’ve defined almost all types of incoming links with their styles. I’ve distributed links in five groups with descending order.
Title Anchor Links: Title anchor links are area or content focus incoming links on any particular page
Title Hyper Links: Title hyper links are those links where the actual linking area is title
Description Text Links: Description text links are those links where the actual linking area is description
URL Links: URL links are those links where the actual linking area is their website addresses or URLs
Static Links: Static links are placed on plain SEO friendly pages that have plain URLs, they are considered very important links
Dynamic Links: Dynamic links are placed on dynamically generated pages and considered to be less important
One Way Links: One way links can be either dynamic or static but they will be only incoming links, they won’t be linked with your domain
Reciprocal Links: Reciprocal links can be either dynamic or static but they will be linked with your domain, if you don’t put their links to your website, they won’t put your link at their website
Vote/Rank Base Links: These types of links vary with their reputation, people gives votes or ranks to links and on the basis of those votes/ranks their link position vary
Lifetime Links: Lifetime links are those links which will be active for life time as long as the domain is there
Periodical Links: Periodical links are those links which will be active for certain period (such as 1 year or 2 years) after that they will be no more, usually these types of links are paid links
Same Window Open Links: Same window open links are those links which open in the same window or they refresh themselves
Blank Window Open Link: Blank window open links are those links which bring you to blank windows and open the pointed links on them
All these link types and styles have different meanings and values to search engines, being an SEO you should try to utilize your best available resource and try to focus on the right direction rather getting just links coming to your page.
I hope this article will help you in developing a successful link building campaign, since I’ve tried to explain almost all types of links with their values and weight according to search engine.
About The Author
