SEO

Black hat optimization is self-defeating

If content is the bread of Internet marketing, then search engine optimization is the butter that draws traffic to the content. There are ethics to be considered in the practice of SEO, and most of that covers SEO strategies that fall under either white hat or black hat optimization. Optimization techniques that are considered unethical are put under the black hat category, along with all the demerits placed upon them by search engines such as Google. Black hat optimization should be avoided to prevent search engines from imposing penalties on perpetuators.

The techniques that qualify under black hat optimization are typically, but not limited to, violating search engine rules and regulations, causing poor user experience to visitors either intentionally or not, and grabbing the attention of search engine users and spiders through visual or non-visual forms. These techniques were once considered to be white hat, until people started using them unethically to the point of being ostracized. It has to be noted that while black hat optimization techniques are in fact effective in achieving higher ranking, it does so only at a limited time.

One of the most common forms of black hat optimization is spamming. People resort to posting their comments in many different websites without due approval of the website owners, or duplicating their content and posting it several times over in their own website. Not only is this unattractive to search engines, but it also creates poor user experience for visitors who are looking for meaningful content.

How Google Scribe affects Search Engine Optimization

With Google being considered the most important search engine for a long time now, understanding the art and science behind search engine optimization has become imperative if you want your website to be at the top of the list whenever someone searches for a keyword that is related to your site.

But not even one SEO expert can consider themselves truly so in the field of Search Engine Optimization. And even as people continue to decipher the most important aspects of SEO, each of the tools such as Personalized Search that Google has released in Experiment Labs has been giving us a different take on the algorithm that goes into understanding how the Google search engine works.

One of the latest tools that Google has released recently in the Experiment Labs is the Google Scribe, which takes a page out of the much-raved about Scribe SEO software that works across several platforms. But not necessarily in the same way!

Google Scribe actually is a text suggestion tool that uses words from your previous phrases to guess what you want to type next, and these according to Google, are correct or most popular phrases to be used.

And of course, in being able to use the most popular phrases if it is suitable, one should be able to increase their keyword placement in an article apart from giving you possible suggestions for words that you might be stuck with, especially if you are a writer.

And while the focus of this software switches from keyword density to how search engines view keywords from the aspects of semantics, relevancy and context, there’s no doubt that the use of Google Scribe can turn out to be an important tool in the business of Search Engine Optimization.

Learn More Social Media Tips at the Performance Marketing Expo

It’s important to be strategic when expanding your social media presence. It’s important to act quickly, but you also want to act strategically. Simply setting up a lot of different social media shingles and making a lot of posts while hoping that something sticks is a recipe for disaster.

That’s why you need to learn from the experts about what the best practices are for social media. The Performance Marketing Expo in Miami offers you an amazing opportunity to meet with some of the leading minds in the industry and discover how their best-in-class deployment of social media technologies can also help your business.

The show is being held at the Eden Roc Hotel from September 27-29. For more information about the show, please visit http://www.performancemarketingexpo.com.

Tips to Succeed in Article Marketing

Article marketing can be an effective tool for you to improve your website and generate more traffic. Article marketing is an investment because you will be spending a lot of money and time to write these articles.

There are a lot of people who are using this type of strategy to make it big in the Internet industry, and so far most of them have succeeded. If you are one of the aspiring businessmen who want to make their website a success, follow these tips:

Create a Resource Box

Writing articles is like sharing a piece of your mind to other people. On the other hand, you should make sure that you marketing message reach the readers and visitors of your site in return for the effort you have exerted in giving them free information. You can do this by investing time on resource boxes.

Outline Your Articles

When introducing a new product, you should be able to outline your articles ahead of time and pick noticeable titles so that they are all set. You can have these articles outsourced or you can compose them yourself.

Take Advantage of Your Articles

You should strategically post your articles to sections or pages of your site which has not been updated for a while. This will make the site more searchable and has a great potential to attract traffic.

Optimize Your Articles

Make use of appropriate keywords so that your articles can be easily searched by search engines and readers. This way, you will invite more traffic to your website.

Tips to work with Google Caffeine Algorithm

Google has a upgraded its search engine with a new algorithm called Google Caffeine. This algorithm will improve the accuracy, load speed, search range and index size of the search engine. Web developers must take advantage of these new features or else all their SEO efforts will be in vain.

· Expand your site – Create lots of pages but ensure that you fill it with quality content. This will contribute vastly to your page rank.

· Implement a blog – One of Caffeine’s priorities is to find fresh and relevant content. Add a blog to your site and make sure that you constantly add articles to the blog. The more you write the more visibility you will get. Consistency is key here because indexing takes place much faster than before.

· Get into Social Networking – Twitter is real time, as you know, and this is especially useful when it comes to Caffeine. Since indexing takes place faster, plug links to your blog and website here so that it shows up on the index better. The same goes for Facebook, MySpace and all the other Social Network sites. Everything will be indexed, so make sure you show up in all of those sites.

· Increase your changes – Updating more has huge benefits now. The update visibility lag has been cut down from a massive three weeks to just one day. This means that you can measure your performance and figure out the impact that the changes have had on your site quicker.

SEO Blunders That Could Ruin Your Business

Getting your website search engine – optimized comes with the ultimate goal of acquiring better attention in search engines’ results pages. But if you feel that you are only getting mediocre results, then you might be committing some deadly SEO blunders which could kill your online business in the long run. Here are some of them:

Optimizing wrong keywords

If you are using keywords which are too generic, you may find it rather difficult to optimize them for your website. Why is this? Generic means you are using the same keywords as your competitors are, so what are the chances of you getting ahead? Slim. To come up with lesser competition and effective keywords, do your research first. Remember that they must not only be specific, they must also be relevant to your content.

Irrelevant tagging of key phrases for pages

Webmasters often commit this mistake. Title tags are what you call the words you can find on your browser’s top left corner, and works like a book’s title. It is meant to tell a website viewer what the website’s theme really is. However, many webmasters simply put their company name in their title tags, so there really isn’t any info about what the website is about. A search engine will find it difficult to give your better rankings if your title tag does not show specific keywords that relate to your website’s theme. Aside from your company name, include specific keyphrases and words relating to what your website actually does.

Poorly written or duplicate content

Search engine optimization includes not only the title but more importantly, the content, where specific keywords and phrases are scattered logically. Using duplicate content that appears on other sites may mean lower rank in search engine rankings. Also ensure that you post fresh content on regular basis to gain a competitive edge. Give your website a quick review and see how it’s doing in terms of search engine rankings. Study how you’ve used keywords and look into how your competitors use keywords. Then, create fresh content, or simply update content on you website for better visibility.

Using  Spammy Techniques

Some of the techniques you use for SEO could be outdated and considered spam by search engines. Make sure to review the search engine webmaster guidelines on their websites for some advice here. For example having too much keyword or repeating same keyword many times on your page could be considered spam. Also, having too many links from unrelated websites or low quality sites may also be bad as this may confuse the search engines in trying to categorize your website topic.

There are just too many other factors that cannot be listed in detail in this article. It is best that you use an SEO firm to get advice or have them do the work for you.

Some SEO Myths

No one can tell you the exact formulate to make SEO work perfectly. It is a constantly evolving subject and as a result it has spawned quite a few myths. Here are some of them.

1. Keyword density – It was true that at one point keyword density mattered a lot. Keyword density basically meant that you had to have a certain ratio of key words to the amount of words on the webpage. But now none of the big search engines place much weight on this factor so you are free to write in any style that you wish.

2. Submit it everywhere – People used to believe that their URL had to be submitted to every single search engine there was. In fact there were and there still are some services that offer to do this for you. In reality, there are only three search engine you need to care about – Google, Yahoo and Bing. These three have the most market share and are the most sought after.

3. Page rank is god – It is not. While page rank plays an important role, it is not the be all and end all of all things SEO. There are many other factors that go into bringing your page to the top of a search result. Work on those and do not worry about getting big PR in the short term.

4. Meta tags – Although they help a little bit, they do not do the magical thing that they are supposed to, which is push you straight to the top. Use the meta tag wisely and lower your expectations.

5. SEO needs to done only once – If you believe this, you might as well quit the business. SEO is a constant operation that needs to be performed on your site. Do not do it once and sit back and wait, you will have wasted your time.

The importance of Page Rank

Blocking Spiders

When everyone is trying to get spiders to index their websites and increase their SEO, you may be wondering why anyone would want to block spiders from their websites. But if you really think about it, there are a few reasons why you would want to do this.

1. Keeping your “under construction” pages out of searches
2. Keeping pages with email addresses from being indexed
3. Protecting directories like cgi-bin
4. Keeping your admin panel away from being indexed

To do this you need to implement a “Robots.txt” file. Doing this is not difficult at all. All you need to do is create a text file, fill it with the appropriate code and place it in root of the web server. It’s as simple as that. The file can tell the search engine bots what they can and cannot index. The coding is so easy and versatile that you can block some parts or the whole website off to some or all bots.

The code is very simple and looks like this:

User Agent: [insert name of the bot here]
Disallow: [insert location here]
For example if you wanted Google to avoid indexing the page “confidential.html”, then the syntax of the file would look like this:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private/confidential.html
If you would want to block it for all search engines, then it would be:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /private/confidential.html
If you want to block off the whole site for some reason or other, you can use:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

In addition to above, you may also use the NOINDEX meta tag. To generate this tag, you can use the Submit Express Meta Tags Generator Tool.

There are various ways in which this file can be used. It’s simplicity makes it a very useful and versatile tool. However, you should use it with care. After all, you don’t want to accidentally block off the whole site do you?

If you need additional help in above topic, we recommend hiring an SEO company like Submit Express. In addition, you should check out their Search Engine Optimization Forum.

Choosing an SEO Consultant

Search Engine Optimization is essential for any online business. Implementing it on your own can be a headache. However, if you possess the financial resources finding a consultant is easy. In fact it is too easy, as everyone seems to be an SEO expert now. Here are a few tips on choosing and SEO consultant.

• First of all you should read up all you can about SEO. Get an overall understanding of how the process works. This will help you in the event that your consultant tries to hoodwink you or does a shoddy job. At the very least it will help you understand the jargon being spoken.

• Ask for recommendations from others, such as any friends that may no more than you or other businesses.

• Search on sites like Top SEO Firms and other SEO directories.

• Search for SEO related terms on Google. Only the best SEO specialists will get to the top of that search results page. Now, go to the websites of each of the top ten. Pick the ones that have a good balance between design and content. An accomplished SEO consultant is able to deliver a page that normal people can understand as opposed to one that only search engines can. Some keyword suggestions to search for: Search engine optimization services, search engine placement, search engine marketing, SEO services, SEO company, SEO firm, SEO consultant, etc.

• Take the shortlist you have come up with and look at their history. Check their online reputation in forums and by typing the company name in search engines, plus words like “fraud”, “rip off” and “scam.” Check their BBB rating. Also, check if they are member of SEMPO.

• Call them up and inquire about their packages and pricing. Ask for references and sample rankings. Find out exactly what they do in detail. Make sure they also offer link building and find out exactly how many links they will get you. It might be a plus if they also offer web design services.

With all of this information in your hand, take a smart decision based on it. Do not base you decision on one factor alone, like pricing for instance. What you should finally settle on is a consultant who has a good record in all factors. Then you will have a good experience working with that person and also ensure that your site receives the best possible SEO work.

Finally, one company that we really recommend for all your search engine marketing needs, is Submit Express. But again, do your own due diligence and compare them to other SEO companies.

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