Apart From Content Apart from content, other things that affect your web site's organic SEO campaign include linking, navigation, and information architecture. We will delve into the other aspects so that we can use them all to promote our sites.The good news is that most black hat SEOs are too busy with all of their own sites to directly attack their competitors’ sites. When asked about blackhat SEO tactics, dzine, a regular poster to the SEO Chat forums for the past two years, said that proper black hat SEOs “can’t be [asked] to (willingly) lower competitors’ ranks. They just churn out website after website.” Does it work? Well, Maximum Tadpole used this strategy for his client, and Google search referrals went from an average of three per day to 164 per day in one month. That’s a nice increase. Your results may vary, of course, but it’s good to have a plan.It's an informal way to convey information to your visitors that they'll find helpful. The key point, though, is that the blog must be maintained. A web site with a blog that hasn't been updated in a while looks neglected. If that folder wasn’t password-protected, anyone who knew that such a folder existed could read it, which meant that “many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet,” Jordan explained. Organic SEO is Worth the Work - Navigation Navigation helps your web site's usability. Usability improves your searcher's browsing experience. A good browsing experience makes the user comfortable with coming back to your site. To know the kind of navigation that keeps a user comfortable, you have to think like a user. The lay out of your navigation is not supposed to be written in stone, it should be comfortable and make it easy for the user to get around your site. So, after you have gone through all of these steps, now what do you do? You take the information you got from Google Analytics about your traffic, analyze it and assess what you need to do. Choose wisely. While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. So, we can easily assume this big online competition. Keep in mind that the Google search results page often includes paid advertising and free organic search results. Again, that’s a lot of work. Many highly-visited sites employ a full staff of writers whose sole purpose is to continually churn out new, engaging online content. When going this route, it’s important to establish all the business details of the relationship up front. No matter how casual or friendly you want your writer-employer relationship to be, lay some groundwork first. A site with poor navigation results in poor interactivity, and if you lose your interactive features, you become no different from a static brochure or a catalog. Easy-to-use navigational tools make visiting your website an interesting experience (assuming you have great content). Also, your links should be replicated as many times as possible, to ensure that the user does not have to unduly strain him/herself to find a link. Use those to decide if you should create entirely new pages to target JUST those words or to write content targeting those keywords. As you move into top positions for the easier words, go after the hard ones.” That may perhaps sound strange; wouldn’t it make more sense to change the existing content by using the terms for which more people are searching rather than adding more pages? Not necessarily; it depends on what they’re searching for, and why they’re searching for it. As an example, Maximum Tadpole noticed 300 searches over one week on his site for a piece of equipment used in eye surgery. He’d mentioned it once in an article that actually had little to do with the equipment. A little more investigating revealed that people were searching Google for the equipment, finding his site, then searching his site for it. Obviously, this was an unfulfilled need just begging for help. So he dedicated an entire page of his site to that piece of equipment. It is now one of the best pages on his site. He focuses on competitive industries such as online gaming, banking and finance, insurance, travel and investments, so he knows what he’s talking about. The content must be organized before the design and programming is brought into place. Dumping loads of information on a web site designer who has zero interest in how the information is arranged, and who simply puts all the information in general segments for his own comfort's sake, will definitely defeat your SEO strategy. What I am saying is that the web designer should be the last person to be brought into a project which has search engine optimization as its primary aim. The information should be grouped and organized into categories, then the web designer simply builds the site around said information. If you have a site that lends itself well to using social networks to help promote, by all means do so. Here on SEO Chat, you’ll find a number of articles that explain how to use this web 2.0 method of building interest in your site. Granted, these are very old and barbaric techniques, but they have proven to be effective in the past. For example, hiding keywords is usually done by making the text the same color as the background and using a very small font size. You can also use hidden fields, hidden layers (use a style sheet to put a text layer under or outside of the visible layer), or simply place text inside of a tag. You can often check for hidden text by either checking the source code or clicking the top of the page and dragging to the bottom, highlighting everything in between. What is the worst that could happen in SEO? Would your web site survive if Google was no longer the number one search engine? What if all the search engines changed their algorithms? If you do not constantly evolve and constantly grow, then you are guaranteed to be on the next list of web sites ruined by the changing tides of SEO.You’ll find Matt Cutts’ blog on that list, as well as several that I’ve mentioned in this article and others that I’ve been meaning to start reading (Marketing Pilgrim, Stuntdubl, etc).Checking with the monthly Employment and Earnings Report for February 2008 from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average weekly earnings for information workers in the U.S. is $879.55, or about $44,000 for a 50 week work year. Most web sites want to offer their visitors something of value. If you can show a site owner how a link to your site would help its users, you stand a good chance of getting a link from that site. You shouldn’t actually request a link so much as focus on the value your site offers so the site owner will think of linking to you himself. Maximum Tadpole said he has seen a favorable response rate of five to ten percent with a simple email that reads like so: “I have created a web site for nursing students called which could be very valuable to your graduating nurses. It is a free site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. If you find time, please visit our site, and consider linking to it from your site, as it would certainly be a resource for your students. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks for your time and have a nice day!” Who would find it most valuable? Where do these people “hang out” online, and how can you get them to come to you?This is great if you have an unusual type of site, or niche content. But there is a good chance that if you’ve thought of it, someone else has too. There is nothing wrong with guarantees like this, however: “We guarantee a x percentage increase in traffic by x date.” That is a far more reasonable guarantee to offer. Unfortunately, that kind of specific guarantee usually can’t be offered until the SEO firm has a good handle on what your site is doing in the SERPs and where its flaws might be. Sites that were built with millions of dollars of venture capital went belly up with the first dot-com bust, simply because they refused to change when faced with new challenges. The list of such sites goes on indefinitely; I won't bore us by reciting them here. But let me say that the churn rate for failed websites has increased.You must reinvent yourself. You will need to use constantly changing technology to keep your web site on the cutting edge and avoid looking like you just came off Noah's Ark. Organic SEO must be truly adaptive, able to change to accommodate changing needs. At this point you’re ready to do your on page optimization. Using your key words, place unique targeted title tags on each page. This is the title element. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a title for the page, Maximum Tadpole suggests a way to think about it: “If each page of your site is a book, what would you title it? Make sure your title matches the content of the page.” He also suggests trying to keep your title tag under five words. It’s very important to make sure that your title matches the content of your pages; if it doesn’t, change either the title or the content until they match. In general, we can see that most respondents are self-taught, followed by on-site training and formal classes. However, this graph breaks down responses by the type of company a respondant works for, and helps to answer questions like "If a respondent works at an SEM agency, how likely is it that he or she learned SEO and how does that compare to respondents at other types of companies?" The chart indicates that respondents from SEM agencies, and non-self-employed respondents in general, received on-site traning more often than, for instance, self employed consultants. As for other tags, you’ll want to use Meta and key word tags for your home page, but the jury’s out as to whether those are valuable for any other pages on your site. But there are other details you’ll want to tend to – doing a 301 redirect to send non-www pages to the www versions. You should also optimize every internal link on your site with relevant text, including alt tags for images. Broken links, faulty images, HTML errors and even missing meta-tags are accounted for and reported in a clearly legible way. Maximum Tadpole gives an example of having a site focused on soccer with a soccer ball logo in the upper left hand corner that takes visitors to the home page when they click on it. Rather than “home” as your alt text, you might consider making it “soccer.” You can probably come up with something even better, perhaps “soccer home.”* No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever. The difference between failed websites and successful ones is growth. One of the biggest success stories of recent times is that of (a company that provides video game emulators for the PC). But Ngemu kept growing, and after close to three years in obscurity, they can now boast of 58,000 registered users.But if you can see the rapid changing algorithms, uncertain updates with tough guidelines from search engine makes the tasks harder and complex with every update. It’s like you should be consistent with your research work and more actively involved at some good SEO forums.So…how is such a thing done? Considering Keywords At this point, you need to start thinking like the people you’re targeting. When they search for the valuable products and/or information you’re offering, what kinds of keywords are they likely to use? Temper this by also considering which keywords the site even has a chance of competing for, at least at first. You can go for the more competitive ones later. To use the example of the free web site on which Maximum Tadpole was working, he explained that “I decided ‘Nurse Careers’ and ‘Nursing Job Advice’ were better choices than ‘Nurse Jobs’ and ‘Nursing Careers’ for the home page.” The secret behind this is that, by “first optimizing for less competitive keywords” you’re actually in a “better position to go after the more competitive ones in the future.” Don’t limit yourself to the home page, of course; you want to write down the best key words for each page of the site. Building Relationships and Making Money Using great content and having an easily navigable site ensures that you will grow relationships with your customers that will translate to long profitability. Ethical practices, ethical hits, and long term relationships will bring you long term money.Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. Indeed, the next steps in this phase of your campaign involve figuring out how to get in touch with those people – and figuring out how to get them to come to you. After you’ve thought about all these points for the site as a whole, you want to think about them again (though not in quite as much depth) for the parts of the site to which you will want to build links aggressively, such as category pages.Checking with the monthly Employment and Earnings Report for February 2008 from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average weekly earnings for information workers in the U.S. is $879.55, or about $44,000 for a 50 week work year. We all know practitioners of black hat SEO use techniques to outrageously manipulate the SERPs so their sites, all undeserving, reach the top of the rankings. They're clearly evil. Every SEO analysis, just like every SEO project, should be customized and geared toward that company's specific needs at this very moment in time. Examples of vague findings would be "You're not in the top ten results for this keyword." "Unless you understand the way of other schools, you cannot understand the way of my individual school." Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings Now that you know what value the site has to offer, you need to figure out who would benefit from that value. Maximum Tadpole was working on a free web site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. Clearly, this information would be of most benefit to nurses, especially nurses who were just graduating from nursing school. Keep this audience clearly in mind, because much of the rest of your strategy is going to depend on them. The Black hat "Black hat" techniques, unethical and (perhaps) illegal SEO practices to generate search engine traffic have spawned feelings of fear among website owners seeking to optimize and lawsuits against search engines by companies who have had their websites banned or penalized by the search engines. Companies live in fear of being penalized for an error in SEO that is perceived as an unethical practice. Articles are written to tell us all how bad spamming is. Meanwhile a fringe group of SEO practitioners have embraced "Black hat" techniques. As surely as shadow is where light is, the Black hat has come to stay. We all have, as Internet users, without a doubt experienced email spamming. As website marketers, we may have indulged in some email spamming, or in key word spamming, or article spamming, or search engine spamming. Once you have that account, the next few steps involve some serious site contemplation. What value does the site have to offer? Is it selling products or offering content? What kind of content – articles, classified ads, what? To use SEO Chat as an example, our site offers articles, SEO tools, and a set of forums with plenty of networking opportunities. The Black hat is maligned by the press and public, hated by White hats, and viewed with fascination by website owners. Sites optimized using Black hat techniques are banned (when found out) by search engines. Email providers have spent time and money shutting out spam mails, search engines routinely invest in new technologies to catch search engine spammers, and spam blockers are now second to pop up blockers and firewalls on the Internet. Black hats are unquestionably "evil." Or are they?Nowadays, Blogs, articles and social bookmarks sites are also a good source in website promotion. We are saying search engine optimization process is website promotion. So, we have to understand what really website promotion is – promotion of website means promotion of your website link. The very first step he took for the site was opening a Google Analytics account. This free service from Google is designed to help you discover where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This important information can help you make changes to your site to increase your traffic and make your site friendlier to visitors. Black Hat SEO, a Necessary Evil - Search Engines Play God What makes a website designer or marketer explore the dark side? It is a journey that begins with the request of a client for "traffic." My search engine experience began when my first client for my web site skills (my dad) requested hits. I discovered the CONTENT and DESCRIPTION Meta tags soon after, but by the time I had gone up a few grades in the school of hard knocks (actual time spent building dozens of websites for "I want it done by yesterday" clients who weren't my blood relatives), I started looking for the code to Google's page ranking algorithm. This article will hopefully help beginning SEOs to think more clearly about the SEO process, and veteran SEOs to communicate more clearly with their clients. I owe most of the information you’ll read here to SEO Chat forum member Maximum Tadpole. He noticed that many of his clients wanted a step-by-step guide to the SEO process. To help answer that need, he recorded what he did for one recent site that he took on as an SEO client. Why would I say the Black hat SEO is a necessary evil? I don't care for keyword stuffing, nor tiny text; So do politically correct people, who try to manipulate others to their way, or try to cover up their own shortcomings by giving a dog a bad name. Gary recommends using a full sentence. To put it simply, if you want lots of traffic online, you have to optimize for search engines. Search is the number one activity online, and it is the major way people find content, products, and businesses. Website Usability and SEO - Clean Design and Usability Clean Design A clean and uncluttered design is usually a win-win situation for both your visitors and the search engines. The simplest and most cleanly coded websites are usually the ones that are visited and crawled the most, since many people know that they will find what they are looking for and where to find it; 22.Starting Off Your SEO Campaign By: Terri Wells If you have been doing SEO for a long time, you may have an almost intuitive sense of what you need to do to optimize a web site. You may work on several things at once rather than following a step-by-step process. Since search engines tweak their algorithms all the time, what worked a year ago may not work today. There are certain parts of the field that will never change – content will ALWAYS be king – but the keywords you use in your optimization and where you put them for the best effect, for example, is the kind of thing that has already changed and will probably continue to change in the future. That said, let’s take a look at some more specific SEO mistakes. But when you’re learning SEO or trying to understand what your SEO is doing to your site, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially when it’s your first campaign.
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