
Combine the above with search engines whose only loyalty is to traffic towards themselves, and who periodically change algorithms and indices used in indexing sites. It's easy to see how somebody could get very desperate to get traffic by "any means necessary"Whatever you keyword phrase is, make sure you give it prominence within a page component (TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION meta tag, body text, etc.). A word at the top of a page is more prominent than one at the bottom. The same goes for a word at the beginning of a tag compared to one at the end. Search engines look for prominence when determining what a particular page is about. Concluding There are a few other myths, especially concerning professionals, the tools they use to optimize, and the search engines themselves. These myths are spread by pseudo experts and some other SEO "experts." Hopefully with time we will cover some more myths that have not been treated on SEO Chat before.If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, and click on "File a Complaint Online Does your marketing strategy have a preference as to which sort of prospect you seek? Is it a mixture of both? If so, what is the percentage breakdown? Your search engine optimization company should be asking you these questions in order to bring you the most qualified prospects. In addition to blog entries, it offers a newsletter and other resources to help you optimize your web site.If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO. Joke Break Here are a few myths that are truly hilarious (and hopefully are just jokes). I found them on various threads and discussion boards across the net, especially here.They actually find ways that are acceptable to the SEO averse search engines to optimize their sites and get a high page ranking. *Google hates me. *The only search engine is Google. *There are a million search engines. *AdWords are moving to the left of the screen. *You won't get caught for spam. *Matt Cutts hates me. *All SEO wear hats. It means your website is being popular to the online visitors. 3) Link Building – the techniques includes one-way link service and link exchanging services. One way links are those link directed to your website on any other website which is not so easy to gain and helps in making more back links to a website. Second one is link exchanging which is a partnership between two websites. We can simply say it exchanging of links which is also good method to increase website back links. So, by both methods in link popularity services, we make our link listed on other website, means giving website links to get popular to online customers and visitors. There are so many websites that are looking for link exchange campaigns for the their websites and also buy one way links with web pages that have a higher Google PageRank. *Matt Cutts is leaving for MSN. *People on SEO forums actually ALL know SEO. *Hidden text works. *Black hat SEO and White hat SEO are easily distinguishable. *SEO guarantees number one ranking. *SEO is rocket science. *SEO doesn't take time. *My competition hates me (okay, that may not be a myth). All SEO is evil The search engines view any attempt to manipulate your rankings as bad. It shows up the weakness in what is supposed to be an impartial or perfect ranking system. It may allow a poor, irrelevant site to become number one. This will make traffic go to other search engines, seeking more relevant results. Search engines don't see Black hat or White hat. All they see is a man or woman with a mission to show up their system. However, you could not get business if your clients could not understand the SEO processes and failed to persuade their bosses. In addition, SEO firms should apply optimization techniques with a consideration of usability of websites. Do not make the site look silly or unprofessional. Also, clients would not mind your using of optimization software such as Webposition Gold and they do want to know how you would serve them. 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 search engine 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 search engine 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!” Apart from SEO, redesign is necessary to improve your users' experience on your site. Forms, layout, interactivity, aesthetics and more all need to be updated as web standards and usability change and improve. You can't afford to assume it's all about SEO when your users get to your site and flee at the quickest opportunity. Now that we have finished with the On Page Myths, let's look at some Off Page Myths in SEO.Check out the source code of successful sites and compare it to the unsuccessful sites and try to spot differences. If you cannot, then it is the linking strategies that make the difference. Search engines worry that SEO practices will let low quality content drift to the top of their pages, and therefore strive to develop ways to insulate their SERPs from the practices of the SEO adept. However, the search engines are playing catch up. All search engine optimization practices are rigged around how the search engines work, and undergo review every time the search engines change their crawling and indexing algorithm. 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 search engine 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 search engine 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 search engine 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 search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not.Eliminate Broken Links and Maintain Your Web Site Error-Free