So it is not the search engines that determine the good guys from the bad guys. Neither is it the industry (my tribe of web designers, programmers, web hosts and marketers and online business owners); you can say what you like. It is your motivation that makes you a Black hat or a White hat.Let’s start with search engines king Google. Everybody wants their website rankings on the top pages of Google because we all are very well aware about Google search criteria, vast exposure and online marketing. If you can see from Google side, this directory changes very rapidly in terms of updates. That time is gone when Google made updates every 3-4 months. But now, it is unpredictable.it may not have kept up with the most current trends in the field. You need to know what keywords searchers are using to find whatever your client offers. If the sites look like doorways you can also get penalized. There is, however, an increasingly thin line between "micro sites" and "doorway" pages. If you create a mini-site to funnel traffic, endeavor to get some content on it. If you insist on tying multiple URLs to a single location despite my educated opinion, strive to keep your multiple domain names to less than ten. You should ideally stay with subdomains to funnel traffic to your targeted pages (the rule on the Internet is that a page is a page is a page). You know your options and you’ve decided to hire a writer or two for your site. This is primarily because this is the basic requirement of the user. The content should always be relevant and easily comprehensible. Plagiarized content is not required at all. Ensure that you do not stray from the topic or repeat points. To a Black hat SEO, the ends justifies the means. S/he does not care if the web site's content is poor or the visitor is inconvenienced; all of these are secondary considerations. The user is brought in by dishonest links. All the Black hat cares about is results (translate into hits). All SEO experts want a high ranking and lots of hits. In this respect, all SEOs manipulate SERPs (and all search engines assertions are proved right). I submit that is the duty of SEO experts to deliver traffic if they get paid. All SEO experts worth their shingles would practice Black hat techniques if they would not get penalized. The Black hats are here. So what? Myth Two: Multiple Domain Names Pointing to the Same Site Increase Rankings If you have multiple domain names pointing to the same site, the search engines call them "mirrors" and will penalize you (the mirrors won't get listed). So if you have multiple domain names and you want to remain in the SERPs, build sites to correspond to each separate domain name. The real problem people have with Black hats is political correctness. It is not politically correct to cold call and badger people into buying things, it is not politically correct to be a "bible thumping" evangelical. And it is definitely not politically correct to be a "Black hat" SEO. It is however politically correct to call Bush an idiot (you get the drift).SEO Consult firmly believes through folllowing any guidelines a directory sets down, can only strengthen our clients website, and also our relationship with the client. The websites that get penalized most on search engines are not Black hats (real Black hats do not know what spamming means, they only understand viral strategies). They are small websites that can't afford a professional and use optimization rules that the search engines consider forbidden.Good Web development tools such as Macromedia DreamWeaver or Microsoft Expression Web can scan your project for broken links within the project, ensuring that the correct pages are addressed by every link. Unfortunately, they don't take the next step, providing no tools for you to check your outgoing links for validity when published. Link farms won't come up and tell you "hey, I am a link farm and just have thousands of links to totally unrelated sites." Instead, you'll get an offer from a third party site or via email. But we did pull out income by some of the countries for which we had enough responses (at least 30 responses). The data for each country is normalized so we're looking at percent of responses (and not absolute numbers) for each of the distributions below. Some high-ranking websites use pop ups that you cannot close and other unethical practices (such as unsolicited emails, which the pop up forced you to subscribe to before it goes away), and nobody bans them. They also buy text links on millions of sites and nobody accuses them of unethical linking practices.Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase. Black hats keep search engines awake at night Off Page Myths Myth One: Linking is Everything Despite everything said about link farms, people actually engage in them without being truly aware of it. The fact is, linking IS important. Linking and content alone will probably do more work than rigorous scientific techniques and automated methods. But it can be dangerous to get overly attached to linking and not know that indiscriminately linking (reciprocally) to a link farm can get you grey listed and banished from Google's SERPs until you come humbly clean (give them a few months before you get relisted). Two things keep search engines awake at night: Google and SEO practices (Google only stays awake because of SEO). SEO practices enable search engines to remember their primary clientele: the man with the mouse. And the SEO expert is the man with the better mousetrap.Someone had sent an email to a number of webmasters that linked to BabyNamesWorld, one of Tribal’s clients. The email was spoofed to look as if it had come from BabyNamesWorld, and was signed BabyNamesWorld Administration. It demanded that the webmaster remove their link to BabyNamesWorld immediately, “because I’m getting a lot of spam traffic and a lot of scammers visiting my site using a link from your site!” directory Roundtable says that its mission is “to provide you with a single source to locate the best directory marketing threads on the Internet.” Each post is a brief summary of the thread, with a link back to the original forum and thread. In addition to the nearly dozen forums they cover, they have their own forums. SER is where you’re likely to find out about problems that other webmasters are experiencing, weird behavior from the search engines, major sites getting penalized, who does local search better, and more.7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced directory optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website. Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit. Conclusion Matt Cutts’ blog is always worth a look, and many SEOs seem to start their day by reading him. For those who don’t know, Matt Cutts has been working for Google since the beginning of 2000, and currently heads the search engine’s Web spam team. He sometimes posts about SEO and answers SEO-related questions online, though he emphasizes that “The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.” Cutts has been posting to this personal blog very regularly since June 2005. “Google/SEO” is one of the specific categories you can check in Cutts’ blog. If you insist on unfriendly design then you should include a Pay Per Click program; you will need it. Please note: SEO firms check all sites linking to you on a monthly basis; that's one reason why they collect a maintenance fee.Be polite and courteous; you and your client will see a better site emerge from this job if you're working as allies than if you're butting heads. Black Hat SEO, a Necessary Evil - You say tomato... The question of people saying White hat, Black hat, is largely one of ethics. And ethics like any other branch of philosophy is subject to schools of thought. However, due to the "political correctness" of certain views, right now, reality is being overshadowed by doublespeak. The reality is that customers want results. You will do anything as long as you won't get banned or taken to court for it. I could summarize the above statement in one word: cheap! If you can't afford to redesign, say so. Don't say it's not necessary. Sometimes a site is just not directory friendly; for example, you build an AJAX-powered site, and then call an SEO expert who tells you to move the text away from the AJAX windows. If you tell him that "that's not necessary" you just made his job a lot harder. This said, content must be relevant; if you are optimizing for the right key words your key words appear more important when emboldened and in headers than when all over the place. Avoid key word stuffing and spamming, you will get penalized. Myth Three: You Never Need to Redesign Your Site If I have an opt in database, and send emails to all of them using an automated system, Microsoft and yahoo would call me a spammer if they had their way.Or it can be used to attack competitors, dragging down a rival’s site. It’s enough to make many white hat SEOs and site owners furious. I suggest all webmasters and directory optimizers using different anchor text for directories submissions and link exchanging. Following are the Off-page SEO checklist – 1. Good SEO strategy. 2. Please go for ethical directory optimization services. 3. Post press releases and classifieds. 4. Directory Submissions – can be free or paid. 5. Different anchor text for making ads and for link exchanges. 6. One-way inbound links. 7. Continuous link exchanges with higher PR pages. That will be really good if that page have some back links too to which you link. 8. Don’t use link farms – Link Farms are usually website having web pages with hundreds of irrelevant links. 9. Use social bookmarking and tagging like Digg and Slashdot. That will help. 10. Also use article writings and article submissions but from my view, they can’t be useful for long-terms. 11. Use Pay per click campaign advertising like Google Adwords, Overture PPC and MSN sponsor listings if you want instant traffic to websites. So who is a spammer? Or is spam just a bad word because it sounds like it? Google compliant Black hats Most real "Black hat" practitioners are Google compliant, and will never be banned by Google. They operate by putting links back to their sites in comments, and posting these comments in high-ranking blogs worldwide. Lots of people are active Black hat practitioners, making loads of money for Google and driving traffic to Adsense campaigns. Excuse me?! That was the actual text of at least one custom-designed 404 page. Jordan notes that the page contained “No apology for the missing page, no recommendation to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the user of being an idiot.” If I ever encountered that error page, you can bet I wouldn’t be returning to that site any time soon. If your company handles any kind of personal information for your users, it should be secured so that it can’t be accessed by the malicious – and it can’t be published by the unwitting. Speaking of “unwitting,” make sure that anyone who publishes information to your web site – your website designers, for example – knows what should and should not be published. You may want to keep sales tactics on an “internal only” section of your web site that your customers never see; after all, you probably don’t want them to know the tricks you use for up-selling and cross-selling your products. This is because Black hat SEOs seem to be the only SEOs who explore every possible way to optimize for search engines, due to their " by any means necessary" motto. Combining these with the traditional techniques of SEO (keyword density, use of meta tags and flat website design), they bring mediocre sites with low content to top ranking positions. I personally dislike purely sales sites with no content. So can I call them spammers?Ensure Clean Coding To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal profiled a company, You should never have to link to an SEO. Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive. The search engines discovered that their SERPs are fallible, and in an effort to play God, they say "unethical practices," and end up giving SEO practitioners a bad name. The search engines need the adepts of Black hat SEO techniques, since this will be the only way they can work on their ranking strategies and eventually give the users a search experience which is rewarding and fulfilling "Knowing yourself, and not knowing the enemy, one defeat for each victory, knowing yourself and the enemy, in a hundred battles no fear of defeat."Select Correct Keyword Phrases Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your directory optimization effort can improve business result or not.Eliminate Broken Links and Maintain Your Web Site Error-Free On Site Optimization Myths Myth One: Just Put Up Meta Tags to Get Your Ranking I didn't want to put this one here at first because everybody else mentioned this in their articles, so I thought that it was an open secret. Then I met a businessman who optimizes his blog via writing key word meta tags and doesn't do much else as far as SEO. I told him to "try and read a bit more about SEO," then I cleaned up his tags for free and offered to help with linking (for a fee). 28.The SEO Analysis: What it is and Why You Need it One of the very first things we do when we start working with a client on a directory optimization project is perform a head to toe site analysis. In fact, more often than not, we won’t actually even quote a price for SEO unless we’ve already done an analysis. Implications to SEO firms SEO firms should spend time and clearly explain to clients the SEO techniques and methodologies that they would use. Some SEO firms might fear that they would expose their “top secret” techniques. So, do what you can to understand what directory Optimization is. What it really is a€“ not what some would want you to believe what it is. Again, a rating scale of 1-5 was employed, with 5 means Very important and 1 means very unimportant. The respondents expressed that they concerned the possible high cost (4.8), potential fraudulent clicks (4.9), delivery of message to right persons (4.7), and time required to manage the campaign (4.2).About Meta tags -- please DO write relevant keyword and description Meta tags into your code. It gives spiders something to cache in the database. Without them, you will be left with no description when listed in the search engines. If your key word Meta tags are irrelevant to your content you may get penalized. I addressed this question first because it is the foundation of all SEO myths. It comes from the idea that "SEO is easy, just submit your site to so and so directory and so and so directory and you are on a roll." Do-it-yourself SEO gets its processes crossed. We will come back to common myths that exist about SEO professionals (although some have been discussed in previous articles on SEO professionals).SEO firms should assist clients to devise a measurement matrix for the campaign. This helps the decision maker to make judgment and explain to his/her colleagues and boss. Clients would feel more comfortable to do business with you. Moreover, SEO firms should define clearly what would be delivered to clients and the delivery schedule, e.g. how many ranking reports, keyword research result, etc. Most business firms lacked the knowledge and tempted to use an SEO firm. However, quality of SEO firms varied. In order to select a good SEO service, business firms should define clearly their objectives. E.g. some firms might simply define that they wanted a better ranking than their rivals or that they wanted a better conversion rate. Then, it was suggested that the business firms talk with the SEO candidates and try to differentiate which one was more knowledgeable. Moreover, business firms should discuss with the selected SEO firm in order to get an agreement on the number of deliverables and project schedule. While this might appear at first to be not a particularly earth-shattering revelation, it surprises me how many so-called SEOs don't actually do an initial site analysis. But first, I want to show you a few so-called SEO analyses that quite frankly have me hopping mad.Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop directory spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your directory optimization effort. What Does SEO Really Do? Some SEO professionals don't help because they get mysterious and go cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. That's pretty absurd when everybody over here at SEO Chat is willing to blab SEO state secrets. Obviously some people think if you tell the client what you do, they would do it themselves. I sometimes wish it was that easy.In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well.
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