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Black Hat SEO

published by Dan in Black Hat SEO with No comments

Black hat SEO techniques are the quick and dirty way to get search engines to notice your website. However, they are also the quickest way to getting a website banned and to losing your reputation.

Some people just learning some SEO basics come across techniques that sound really good and unwittingly use it not knowing that it actually falls under black hat SEO. To avoid using these unethical methods you should know what the unacceptable methods actually are.

Here are some of the black hat methods that are most commonly used:

1. Cloaking - Cloaking is simply putting up web pages or websites in which its contents that are seen by the visitors are different from the contents “seen” by search engine spiders. There are legitimate reasons for cloaking (even Google uses a form of it to deliver results!) but if you use it mislead the search engine and mask the real content of your site then THAT is plain unethical.

2. Keyword Stuffing or Spamming - This doesn’t pertain to email spams but spamming or stuffing your content with so many keywords that it lends your webpage unreadable. Some webpages that do this does have readable content but there is still too many keywords that the content, though readable, is definitely senseless or repetitive or just not palatable. In short when you keyword stuff your main aim is to insert as much keywords as possible in your content instead of delivering relevant and well-written information needed by your visitors. Keyword stuffing can also be found not only in the content visible to your visitors but in the code as well. Inserting keywords and phrases will surely get your web page noticed by a search engine but it will be a negative kind of attention if it turns into keyword stuffing.

3. Duplicate Content or Websites - You might have a good reason for having a duplicate or mirror website but if you are doing this and infringing on someones rights you might of course get caught and your website banned. The problem with duplicate content and sites is that Google and other search engines are not able to distinguish which one is the original copy and could end up penalizing the original instead of the one who is guilty of plagiarising the original site.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Top Two Mistakes of Pay-Per-Click Marketers

published by Dan in SEO Strategy with No comments

One way to get traffic to your site is by not just optimising your page through common SEO methods and building links completely organically. Many marketers do NEED to resort to paid search ads to be able to get more traffic FAST. However, it’s such a shame that even when posting paid ads a lot of web marketers commit simple mistakes that if corrected would automatically send them more customers. Here are two of the most common mistakes web marketers commit who have pay-per-click campaigns.

Submitting ads and then just letting them be - Some marketers think that after having set up their AdWords campaign in Google all they need to do is just sit back and wait for the customers to come flocking at their site. This is obviously a mistake. When doing an ad campaign constant refinement is needed to optimise your ads and bring in bigger revenue. You should always analyse the incoming traffic (Use Analytics! Hello we just finished a whole series on that) and find out some of the long tail keywords that are actually sending traffic to your site and use those keywords in your ads. Do the necessary tweaking so that you won’t be wasting your money on focusing on keywords that don’t bring you any revenue or just very little.

Thinking that the number one spot is always the best - Sure being on the top spots is really good. But being number one doesn’t always convert visits to sales. Many customers actually like to do a bit (if not much) of research before buying any product. This means that many do not buy on the first website they visit but simply use it to get an overview and some background on what they want. Igor Mordkovich suggest that the number three spot is actually a lot better position it is about that time (on the third site they visit) that visitors know enough and are ready to buy.

Popularity: 8% [?]