Enormous amounts of code on the page. For some reason, even some new designs are coming to us as though they were out of 1998 as far as the page code is concerned. This just gives the directories a lot more to dig through to find what they want – the content. I'm not even going to get into tables as that opens a whole other can of worms. If your site is table-based (your designer or SEO will be able to tell you this if you don't know) there are some basic practices to insure that the code these tables add is minimized. Unfortunately I can't get into the myriad of different situations this can entail and will have to save it for a future article (so be sure to bookmark our SEO blog to keep up-to-date on that and other developments in the industry). Fourth, you could avoid the bully. This is not the same thing as ignoring him. You simply make sure you aren’t where he is. In terms of SEO, you start targeting keywords and phrases that the black hat isn’t using. By using this approach, you can narrowly target your audience and start picking up traffic from “long tail” searches. You can also work on making your site more inviting to visitors, so when you do get that traffic they’re more likely to convert. Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the keywords you're targeting. In short, you need to link to them with text and you need that text to include the keywords. This isn't some deep, dark mystery of SEO and has been well documented and commented on but we've seen tons of instances where internal links are image only or worse, an unspiderable script-based navigation system. Third, you could report the offender to Google. Unfortunately, like the adult aides monitoring recess in the schoolyard, Google can only act on behavior it actually sees. As Aull notes, “there’s no guarantee they’ll do anything about the miscreants quickly – or ever, for that matter.” It could also encourage a black hat SEO to start using even sneakier techniques. If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that's fine. In fact, it'll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily.You can certainly get away with something shorter and with fewer key words (remember, ideally, that you should use only one key phrase per page). You might want to use the “View Source” command on a variety of web sites, especially those that score high in the SERPs, if you need to get a better idea of how the META key words and META description tags are used. Second, you could take up negative SEO yourself, fighting fire with fire. That might be satisfying for a while, but your success will ring hollow after both sites are banned from the SERPs. Like a high school principal, Google isn’t going to care who started it. Over-optimized pages. I love seeing websites that were developed by a web designer who “knows SEO” and has stuffed so many keywords and header tags into the pages that it reads more like an eye chart than sales copy. I can't list all the abuses that exist out there but here's a quick sample of what your page shouldn't read like (and I'll use digital cameras as the example again): Digital Cameras Digital cameras are very useful. When you need digital cameras to take digital pictures you'll want to look for our cameras first. Our digital cameras are the best digital cameras you can buy online. So when you want to buy digital cameras online be sure to visit our store and buy digital cameras online from us at the lowest prices. Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Dealing with Black Hat and Negative SEO So what do you do if a black hat SEO is directly or indirectly attacking your site’s position in the SERPs? Diane Aull came up with five possible approaches, based on how one would deal with a schoolyard bully. There is no telling which approach – if any – would be successful. Her suggestions would probably work best when dealing with someone who is not targeting your site with negative SEO, but rather engaging in black hat SEO to increase his or her own site’s ranking in the SERPs, thus driving yours down. Can you see what's wrong there? Well so can the search engines. Your pages should read like your writing for a visitor and not a search engine. Yes you need to make sure your keywords get in there (which should be easy since that's what the searchers is looking for information on) but you're not looking to cram them in with a density of 30%. If you can get a density of around 3% and kept the content easily read by your human visitors then you've done well. So Rooy’s company simply saw to it that emails were sent to all the webmasters, telling them not to take the email from the scammer seriously. He observed that “a large number of links have fortunately been replaced. Despite this, it remains an annoying problem.” I mentioned that I couldn't possibly list all the horrendous issues we've encountered from designers in the past but I also promised to list some other resources you can visit for additional information. Here they are: * Great article by Sheri Thurow on the Clickz site titled, “Top Five SEO Design Mistakes * A top 10 list on the Webconfs site, “Top 10 SEO Mistakes * Another top 10 list – this time by Eric Enge on the directory Watch site titled, “The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes If you see your web designer doing one or all of these then know in advance, you or your SEO is going to have some major hurdles to jump through. Rooy summed up the attack as finding out who is linked to a well-ranking rival site, sending them threatening email and waiting for the response. This particular scammer also sent a follow-up email if the link was not removed quickly enough. So what did Rooy do? First, he tracked down the scammer but chose not to force their host to close their account – it was located in Tajkistan, no WHOIS information was provided, and “the scammer can just as easily create another address and continue his work, against whichever website he chooses.” Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk directory Positioning. Beanstalk offers SEO, consulting, training, copywriting and link building services to clients from around the world. We would like to thank Moonrise design, a San Francisco web design company, for allowing us to use our experiences with them as an example. Be sure to visit our SEO articles archives for more information on SEO and web design best practices. One of the most brazen attacks I’ve heard of involved social engineering. Lenny de Rooy, an SEO specialist at Tribal IM, reported this attack back in March of 2007. 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!” The email went on to threaten that if the link was not removed, “I will write an ABUSE MESSAGE to your Internet Service Provider and your hosting company and will complain that your site gives a harmful traffic to my site!” 34.directory Optimization is a Continuous Process Many of us must have heard the saying 'Plan your work and work your plan', and that the one who actually believes and works on it succeeds in the rat race of proving his or her worth. This certainly stands true for the corporate world which is continuously upgrading itself with the latest technology and where every organization faces new competition in every aspect of the business world. Marketing is an integral part of all these aspects. No business enterprise can survive without marketing and promotion of its products and services. The main reason for this promotion is the fact that 'out of sight is out of mind'. This is why, it is essential to maintain the visibility of the business enterprise in the eyes of the potential customers. He notes that he was very lucky that Google didn’t crawl his site while the DNS poisoning was going on or he would have been in real trouble due to no fault of his own. The attack probably came from a malicious hacker who was trying to get his malware onto other computers rather than harm subzero27’s position in the SERPs. It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that certain kinds of nasty attacks can also hurt your position in the SERPs as a side effect. With the Internet coming up with new conveniences and benefits, both for customers and for business enterprises, it has become a perfect marketplace in the present-day scenario. Along with many benefits such as the potential to find customers worldwide, it also has many drawbacks to it. The challenge involved in online marketing is to combat the competitors from all over the world. The internet has meant that restrictions of geographical boundaries do not hold true anymore. This is where the visibility of the website comes into question. directory optimization (SEO) is the process that rates the website based on various factors and delineates their rankings. Business organizations therefore have to recognize these factors that affect their rankings with directories and make the required amendments in their websites accordingly. Once a website has achieved a higher ranking, one can say that the business organization is almost halfway through on the path of success. We can say that diverting traffic to a website by way of higher SEO ranking via directory optimization is a key to reaching the zenith of success.
Favorite Oil Painting Studios™ All rights reserved