26 February 2010

Debunking SEO Myths

Search engine optimization or SEO has been used widely across the internet as individuals and companies try to create and establish the right image and reputation that will entice their target market. If you want to gain long term stability in the industry, you have to understand which methods are working and which ones are just wasting your time and money. Debunk organic SEO myths and improve the way you attract your target clients.


SEO Myths
Some people say that you should submit your URLs to search engine first. This used to be true, but now, submitting these do not really lead to increased search engine rankings. Some individuals also require you to get a Google Sitemap. If your web site was created the right way or is crawler-friendly, you do not need to do such. The sitemap can be an added bonus, but you can also indulge in other tools online to help you rank better.

Banning SEO Myths
It is a myth that your web site can be banned if you buy a lot of links. Search engines do not find anything wrong with buying advertising on web sites. Another myth involves having your web site banned for ignoring the guidelines of the search engines. Guidelines actually provide you with helpful tips on how to rank better on search engines, but you have to be careful not to use the methods that they truly despise. If you go for black hat SEO techniques, you may be penalized. Banning of sites requires a lot of negative feedback that may involve several actions during different times.


On Words and Limitations
It is a myth that words in the meta keyword tag have to be incorporated on the same page. It is true that you can improve visibility of your site by using the right meta tags and keywords in the title, but you should not try to overstuff the page with the keywords. Invest in secondary and tertiary terms instead to stay visible. There are also no rules on which number of words is optimal for better search engine ranking. Some say that SEO copies have to be at least 250 words long. It is good to use just enough words in your content to provide sufficient information. A marketing copy that can be optimized for 3 to 5 key phrases or keywords is ideal. Go straight to the point in your articles and pass on the message of your company with each one.

19 February 2010

The Practice of White Hat SEO

The Practice
If you are still deciding whether to use black hat or white hat SEO, you have to determine the main functions and goals of your business. What are your plans for the long term? White hat SEO is ideal for businesses and companies who expect to boost their reputation and maintain credibility for the longest period of time. Black hats only wait until search engines discover their methods and eliminate these. Your manipulation tactics may be limited but you get more quality customers and visits by ensuring that your site or page has good and sound content. You should also incorporate all other important elements when trying white hat SEO. Find out how each approach works for you then determine which ones you should heavily invest in. You can rely on other webmasters and web site owners to help you find the best white hat SEO tools and methods that will sell your product or service better.


Boosting Reputation
Using white hat SEO provides you the benefit of having a solid reputation in the industry. People will start referring to your brand or company more as synonymous to quality and reliability. You get to gain your market's trust thereby keeping your company secure for the long term.

15 February 2010

The White Hat SEO

SEO approaches are divided into two namely white hat and black hat SEO. White hatters are known to follow the stringent guidelines in driving potential visitors into web sites. They also abhor the methods used by black hatters and try to find more ways to avoid problems in searches and page rankings. White hat SEO can be very effective, even if you are not allowed to use some techniques. Here are some more details about the type.


Definition of White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is known as the good or the hero in online marketing. It is also called "the good guy" among webmasters. The individuals who practice white hat methods are penetration testers and ethical hackers who aim to maintain the security and protection among IT systems. The ethical hackers are generally computer security experts, who ensure that information systems of different sites and companies are kept safe.
They use testing methods and other penetration practices and drills to keep black hat practitioners away. The professionals may also be called sneakers. Groups of the individuals are referred to as red teams or tiger teams. The security specialists can use different methods to perform various tests, like social engineering tactics, attempts to avoid security and gain entry to protected areas and the use of hacking equipment and tools. Defensive teams are called blue teams, while red teams are the aggressor teams.


More on White and Black Hat SEO

In SEO or search engine optimization, both white hat and black hat have been applied widely. Black hat SEO methods include spamdexing, wherein search results are redirected to different target pages. The approach is highly against the rules and stipulations of search engines. White hat methods strictly follow the rules and guidelines given by search engines to ensure that internet users are driven to the right content and pages that rank high in the search results page. White hats lead to results that you can continue to expect over a long period of time, compared to black hats that only find short term opportunities.

08 February 2010

SEO - Effect Of Duplicate Content

There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.


What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.


What are considered as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilised by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings. One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter. Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.


Product descriptions from many ECommerce sites are actually being utilised by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilised by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam. Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.


How do a search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analysing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.  Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.

01 February 2010

The Best White Hat SEO Techniques

If you intend to be a hero or the good guy in search engine optimization, you should only use white hat tactics. There are certain limitations to the approach in the beginning, but you can be sure that your reputation stays stable for the long term. People will refer to your company more as a reliable source of products and information. You can get to your target market without having to resort to unacceptable means. Here are some useful tips.


The Use of Links

Internal linking is one of the easiest methods to help make your web site more visible to search engines. A lot of web sites use a type of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation and other complicated functions, thereby keeping search engines from crawling on the scripts easily. Your pages can become unindexed as a result. The effects can boost the visual appearance of your web site, but you have to be concerned about staying visible too, or else there will only be a very limited number of people who can appreciate the work. You can add text links and link internally to improve spidering to your web site because of the sophisticated scripts. You can put text links at the bottom or at your homepage that links all main internal pages. Also include a site map to all internal pages.



Reciprocate

You should also start swapping links with other webmasters to have additional links leading back to your web site. The value of reciprocal linking has reduced over the past several months, but you can still expect good quality traffic by investing in the approach. When you build reciprocal links, make sure that you only place these in areas where you target market will most likely be lingering. Link to sites that are highly related to your own and sites that have good content that your target market will be interested in. It is a risk to place links in sites that have been penalised.



The Content

Content creation is highly different from doorway pages and the like. You have to make good quality and unique content that will grab the attention of your potential clients, thereby boosting value to the site and your reputation and credibility as well. The more content-rich the site is, the higher its value will be to search engines and human visitors. You can invest in professional writers and ghost writers to update the content of your page every now and then. This is a good strategy in becoming a good resource in the industry. Having good content also means that you get to display keywords that will lead more people into the site through search engines. You can post articles, blogs and posts in forums, blog sites and discussion boards online. People will want to read your works if these are related to their chosen topic. You can also build links back to your web site without having to reciprocate the deed.



Boosting the Site

Manipulating the content, site structure and words can improve the ranking of your web site in search engines. You should make solid meta tags and titles to boost SEO. The optimisation attempt should not go far from the main message and content quality contained in the web site. Always include the potential to sell and the quality of articles to maximise exposure on search engines.