4 SEO Trick Schemes to Avoid

With the increasing influence and change of marketing focus to Internet, we have the usual unsavoury characters arriving on the scene. Where there is money, there is a scam. SMEs are particularly vulnerable to this as most do not have the resources, the time or the knowledge to distinguish a genuine SEO company from the fraudsters.

Let us start at the beginning and explain to the uninitiated what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is. Search Engines use a technology known as 'spiders' to seek out websites, making a record of the website content and then using their unique algorithm to judge whether or not the content of the website is relevant to the search phrase requested by a web user. Each search engine uses a different algorithm, putting different emphasis and weighting on different factors such as content, word density, meta-tags, usability, together with a range of qualitative and quantitative measurement matrices.

Search Engine Optimisation is a method which improves the visibility of a website within the results pages of free search tools such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and so on, by strict compliance to the search engine's algorithm. SEO actions should enhance the relevance of your website for your chosen keywords/keyphrases, improve usability and therefore increase the relevant traffic to your website.

Here are the telltale signs that should send the alarm bells ringing in your head and therefore avoid falling for one of the many scams that is plaguing SEO industry.

SEO Company Trick number 1.

'We have a last dedicated (reserved) slot left on the 1st page of Google!'

Don't just take my word for it; here is what Google says on their website on this claim:

" Google never sells better ranking in our search results...Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice...be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

Google's own website tells you loud and clear that there are no reserved places for any organisation on their first page. First page organic slot is earned by satisfying the complex algorithm that Google uses to judge whether your website content is the most relevant to the search term. There is no magic wand to achieve this other than being relevant!

The second opportunity for you to be on the first page is presented by Pay-per-Click (PPC). Google's paid results appear on the right & top of the page, which are clearly marked as "Sponsored Links". For those who are not familiar with how PPC works, let me demystify it. The highest bidder gets on the top of the page, with the 2nd highest on the 2nd place and so on. To take part in this live auction you have to have an AdWord account, specify the terms you want to bid, and then set the maximum bid you are willing to pay for a click. Google does the rest for you. You can set daily budget for your bidding but in essence you are signing a blank cheque to Google.

So part of this plan is the unscrupulous SEO Company will take a monthly fee from you for so the called 'management' of your PPC. They take a cut from the fees paid to Google, so in effect not all the money you pay for your PPC ends up being used for advertising as a percentage of your money goes on feeding the SEO Company's bank account!

Let us just work this out by some simple mathematics and see how much this can really cost you. Let's say you are targeting 5 keywords/keyphrases with each averaging €1-€1.50 per click. Now assume that you have picked 5 popular keyphrases (why would you pick unpopular ones?!), which each generate 1000 hits per week, with your click conversion ratio of 3% giving you 150 clicks per day. This means minimum of 600 clicks per month, translating to a bill of €600-€900 per month (gulp!). That is a whopping €7,200 or €10,800 per annum at the top end. No wonder Google has announced record profits! Now do you see how the offer of getting you on their 'allocated' slot can cost you well over their claimed €150 per month? Remember this is before they take their 30% cut from your expenditure!

SEO Company Trick number 2

'We are a Google Reseller and have preferential slot for our clients that guarantees your page 1 placement'.

Here is a direct quotation from Google's Public website:

"Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google."

This is as clear as a day and is directly from Google telling you there are no 'preferential' or 'special relationships' with any company. Your website appears on the organic search on its merit or you will pay to appear on PPC. There is no 3rd way.

SEO Company Trick number 3

'We can guarantee your first page appearance'

Once again the answer is the wind my friend, or should I say Google website:

"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."

There is no explanation necessary here, so thank you Google for saving my typing fingers!

SEO Company Trick number 4

'Our methods are secret and we do not tell anyone how we do our job'

Well there may be some truth in that but lets face it, if they cannot explain to you what they are doing and why they are doing it, you should not allow anyone near your website. We can accept that as a commercial business a SEO Company can not be expected to disclose to the client exactly what you are going to do. This sounds like free consultancy to most of us, but they can at least give a broad-brush explanation such as the areas they will look at, the areas they will rewrite, the general approach they take in addressing your website issues, etc. As Google rightly advises:

"Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site."

Couldn't put it better myself! This is your website, your company's image and your company's reputation. You have a god-given right to know what is going on your website!

At Cognisant Associates we provide clean, clear and concise SEO services. We fully explain our practices, have a clear Service Level Agreement, and provide you with monthly reports (or quarterly depending on your contract) that explain our actions, results, website performance and our action plan for the next period. We do not use unethical methods or practices that are considered to be 'black hat tricks' within the industry, and we comply fully with Google's guidelines. Contact us to see what we can do for you.



Ali Zartash-Lloyd is Managing Partner at Cognisant Associates (http://www.cognisantassociates.co.uk) a business consulting partnership. He is a management graduate from the University of Leicester and was European Director for major US and Korean multi-nationals for over a decade. Cognisant Associates specialises in consulting on Business Management, Business Grooming and Marketing.




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ali_Zartash-lloyd

SEO Expert Guide - Black Hat SEO - Activities to Avoid (part 810)

In parts 1 - 7, you learnt how to develop your proposition, identify your key words and optimize and promote (for free) your site and pages on the world's search engines. You were also introduced to our mythical Doug (who sells antique doors, door handles, knockers, door bells or pulls and fitting services) in Windsor in the UK.

There are some search engine optimization and promotion techniques I did not cover, as they are unethical. In this part of the guide, I outline this techniques, so you can recognize and avoid them!

(a) Search Engine Ethics

Borrowing from the wild west, white hat SEO generally refers to ethical techniques, whilst black hat SEO is unethical techniques. Search engines are designed to help people find genuinely relevant results for the key words they enter, in a ranked order. Relevancy is a mixture of the "authority" of the site generally and the specific relevance of the page content to the search made. Anything which undermines this (ie. by creating false impressions of authority or relevance) is unethical because it undermines the key purpose of search engines.

Black hat practitioners tend to see search engine optimization as a war, and search engines and SEOs as the enemy, to be beaten by means fair or foul. White Hatters tend to view search engines as friends, who can help them get business.

(b) Hidden Page Text

Blackhatters create hidden text in page code (not intended for humans). At a simple level, this could be white text on a white background. The text is generally hidden because it does not fit with the rest of the page content but does help with search engine results. This by definition means that - as a human searcher - you are likely to be disappointed by the result when you land on this page.

In their Guide for Webmasters, Google implore you to "make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users. " The guide goes on to specifically recommend you "avoid hidden text or hidden links". If you want to avoid being blacklisted by Google, then I would recommned you pay attention to this advice.

(c) Buying Inbound Links

In their Guide for Webmasters, Google ask you to "avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, 'Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?'"

You can find on the web links from PR8 sites on sale for $200. From our earlier exploration of PageRank, you'll understand why such a high price can be supported. As you can imagine, Google and others frown on this activity, as it undermines the whole principle of democracy that underpins PageRank. Buying votes? Unethical!

The consensus in forums is that Google look out for unnatural linking patterns, including substantial cross linking, sharp growth in backlink numbers and same anchor text in most links. I would advise you avoid this sort of activity altogether!

(d) Use of Link Farms and IBLNs

In their Guide for Webmasters, Google say "don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

In practice, Google identify 'bad neighbourhoods' by devaluing back-links from the same IP subnet. Where a site is simply a link farm site (that lists loads of links to other sites, in exchange for links back or money) Google will eventually identify it as a 'bad neighbourhood' and remove the links from it's index.

Independent Back Linking Networks (IBLNs) are a network of sites that all directly or indirectly link back to your site in such as a way as to promote it through the search engine rankings. The way IBLNs get around Google's IP monitoring is by using a completely different web-hosting plan for every site you want to link back directly to you.

This is very time-consuming and will cost you a lot of money. It is also not fool-proof and (if detected) can lead to Google simply wiping out all the direct referrers from their index (the sites they find flagrantly built simply to link to your main site) or, worse, dropping your entire IBLN - including the main site your were trying to optimise for. Don't be daft - keep it clean!

(e) Use of Cloaking Pages or Sneaky Redirects

In their Guide for Webmasters, Google recommend you "avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other 'cookie cutter' approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content."

When Doug reads this, he begins to understand why doorknockers.com fails to rank higher in the search engines. That domain simply redirects to a different site (with a regular business name) which also fails to rank well in Google. This poor business-owner has clearly become an unwitting and almost certainly innocent victim og Google's policy to catch out Blackhatters.

He also understands why having his content on antique-door-knockers.com will be preferrable to redirecting people to a domain based on his company name (Doug Chalmers Limited).

Next we turn to tools you can use to monitor your ongoing optimization effectiveness...

Navigate the guide

Previous:

SEO Expert Guide - Paid Site Promotion (Marketing) (part 7/10)

Next:

SEO Expert Guide - Ongoing Monitoring of Results (part 9/10)



David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the SEO Expert Guide; how to get to the top of the search engine rankings and stay there.

Find out more about David's SEO services or purchase the full copy of the book from the SEO Expert site.




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Viney

Things to Avoid in Search Engine Optimization - Black Hat Methods

A few search marketers use unfair methods or Black-Hat methods to get to the top of the search engine rankings. However Black hat Techniques are sure to make you act in haste and repent in leisure

In this article I will be highlighting a few techniques to Optimize your website ethically without using Unfair or Black Hat Optimization Techniques to get good rankings in the organic search engines.

So what exactly is Black Hat SEO ?

Black Hat SEO refers to all those optimization activities that violate the basic search engine guidelines. Black hat methods are adapted to manipulate the Search Engine Result Pages and get to the top of the search engines as soon as possible and with minimal efforts.

If Black Hat gets result, then what's the harm ?

It's true that some black hat methods will get you desired results. The only problem with adapting black hat methods is that the results are temporary and causes major damage to the web site. There is something known as the New Site Boost which every new website gets in the search engine result pages. If black hat methods are applied to such new sites, they may come up pretty well in the search engines and may out pass major players. But that's only temporary, that site will soon start falling in the Search Engine Result Pages and gradually vanish from the search engines.

Once search engines figure out that a site has adapted black hat methods to manipulate the rankings, they will not only penalize the site but might also ban them from the search engines result pages, which means that you will no longer be seen in the search engines even if you search with your domain name.

What are black hat methods?

The following is the list of some commonly used black hat methods:

Keyword stuffing - This is one of the most commonly used black hat methods practiced by black hat SEOs to get faster results. Keyword stuffing refers to redundancy of targeted keywords in the page title, description, body, images etc. This is a serious violation of search engine rules and may result in penalization of your site from the index.

Cloaking - Cloaking refers to pointing one page to the search engine spiders and another version of the same page to the web site visitors. This is done so as to get the spiders to the optimized page while the visitors get to see a different page. Cloaking is another black hat method which will surely ban your site from the search engines. In fact, this is the only reason why major car manufacturer BMW got their German site banned from Google recently.

Hidden Text - Hidden text is a way of plugging in additional text so as to increase the keyword density of a page. Texts are hidden by using a font color that matches the one used in the page background. Hidden texts are hard to be seen by humans but it's a mere child's play for search engines to find them out.

Using Redirection - Many webmasters optimize a page for the search engines and then redirect those pages to some other destination using a META REFRESH tag which redirects a visitor to a new destination after a fixed period of time. This is considered as spam by the search engines and may lead to serious penalties or even permanent ban.

Another way of redirection which, if kept for a long time might raise some red flags in the search engines is the 302 temporary redirect. This is a redirection which is made at the server level of web sites and such redirection are meant to redirect visitors to a new page on a temporary basis. But if such a redirection lasts more for than 6 months, it raises some red flags in the search engines and thus the site gets penalized or banned by the search engines.

Another redirection which will surely get your site in a soup is the one using Java Script redirection. Such a redirection is made using Java Scripts and is a serious violation of search engine guidelines.

Take care not to use any of the above methods to optimize a website. Using any of the above means to optimize your website may result in your website being banned in Google and many other Search Engines. Use fair methods of optimizing your site by following proven Search Engine guidelines Remember you are making a site for a human not a robot.



Michael Ringwood is an avid internet marketer and an expert on a variety of online marketing Techniques, search engine optimization , social media and web2.0 marketing. He has worked for several start up internet Companies and currently does consulting work for several top digital media online properties including 123greetings.com.

He also writes on Holidays and Events round the World




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Ringwood