Maximum Tadpole gives an example of having a site focused on soccer with a soccer ball logo in the upper left hand corner that takes visitors to the home page when they click on it. Rather than “home” as your alt text, you might consider making it “soccer.” You can probably come up with something even better, perhaps “soccer home.” The difference between failed websites and successful ones is growth. One of the biggest success stories of recent times is that of (a company that provides video game emulators for the PC). But Ngemu kept growing, and after close to three years in obscurity, they can now boast of 58,000 registered users. Considering Keywords At this point, you need to start thinking like the people you’re targeting. When they search for the valuable products and/or information you’re offering, what kinds of keywords are they likely to use? Temper this by also considering which keywords the site even has a chance of competing for, at least at first. You can go for the more competitive ones later. To use the example of the free web site on which Maximum Tadpole was working, he explained that “I decided ‘Nurse Careers’ and ‘Nursing Job Advice’ were better choices than ‘Nurse Jobs’ and ‘Nursing Careers’ for the home page.” The secret behind this is that, by “first optimizing for less competitive keywords” you’re actually in a “better position to go after the more competitive ones in the future.” Don’t limit yourself to the home page, of course; you want to write down the best key words for each page of the site. Building Relationships and Making Money Using great content and having an easily navigable site ensures that you will grow relationships with your customers that will translate to long profitability. Ethical practices, ethical hits, and long term relationships will bring you long term money. Indeed, the next steps in this phase of your campaign involve figuring out how to get in touch with those people – and figuring out how to get them to come to you. After you’ve thought about all these points for the site as a whole, you want to think about them again (though not in quite as much depth) for the parts of the site to which you will want to build links aggressively, such as category pages. We all know practitioners of black hat SEO use techniques to outrageously manipulate the SERPs so their sites, all undeserving, reach the top of the rankings. They're clearly evil. Or are they? Why are our denunciations of black hatters tinged with just a hint of envy? In this first article in a three-part series, we examine what truths black hat practices bring to the surface that most search engines would rather you didn't know.Every SEO analysis, just like every SEO project, should be customized and geared toward that company's specific needs at this very moment in time. Examples of vague findings would be "You're not in the top ten results for this keyword." "Unless you understand the way of other schools, you cannot understand the way of my individual school." Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings Now that you know what value the site has to offer, you need to figure out who would benefit from that value. Maximum Tadpole was working on a free web site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. Clearly, this information would be of most benefit to nurses, especially nurses who were just graduating from nursing school. Keep this audience clearly in mind, because much of the rest of your strategy is going to depend on them. The Black hat "Black hat" techniques, unethical and (perhaps) illegal SEO practices to generate search engine traffic have spawned feelings of fear among website owners seeking to optimize and lawsuits against search engines by companies who have had their websites banned or penalized by the search engines. Companies live in fear of being penalized for an error in SEO that is perceived as an unethical practice. Articles are written to tell us all how bad spamming is. Meanwhile a fringe group of SEO practitioners have embraced "Black hat" techniques. As surely as shadow is where light is, the Black hat has come to stay. We all have, as Internet users, without a doubt experienced email spamming. As website marketers, we may have indulged in some email spamming, or in key word spamming, or article spamming, or search engine spamming. Once you have that account, the next few steps involve some serious site contemplation. What value does the site have to offer? Is it selling products or offering content? What kind of content – articles, classified ads, what? To use SEO Chat as an example, our site offers articles, SEO tools, and a set of forums with plenty of networking opportunities. The Black hat is maligned by the press and public, hated by White hats, and viewed with fascination by website owners. Sites optimized using Black hat techniques are banned (when found out) by search engines. Email providers have spent time and money shutting out spam mails, search engines routinely invest in new technologies to catch search engine spammers, and spam blockers are now second to pop up blockers and firewalls on the Internet. Black hats are unquestionably "evil." Or are they? The very first step he took for the site was opening a Google Analytics account. This free service from Google is designed to help you discover where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This important information can help you make changes to your site to increase your traffic and make your site friendlier to visitors. Black Hat SEO, a Necessary Evil - Search Engines Play God What makes a website designer or marketer explore the dark side? It is a journey that begins with the request of a client for "traffic." My search engine experience began when my first client for my web site skills (my dad) requested hits. I discovered the CONTENT and DESCRIPTION Meta tags soon after, but by the time I had gone up a few grades in the school of hard knocks (actual time spent building dozens of websites for "I want it done by yesterday" clients who weren't my blood relatives), I started looking for the code to Google's page ranking algorithm. This article will hopefully help beginning SEOs to think more clearly about the SEO process, and veteran SEOs to communicate more clearly with their clients. I owe most of the information you’ll read here to SEO Chat forum member Maximum Tadpole. He noticed that many of his clients wanted a step-by-step guide to the SEO process. To help answer that need, he recorded what he did for one recent site that he took on as an SEO client. To put it simply, if you want lots of traffic online, you have to optimize for search engines. Search is the number one activity online, and it is the major way people find content, products, and businesses. Then Google revolutionized adverts with Adsense and affiliate programs. CPA and PPC programs now ensure that there is a lot of money to be made from just generating hits. 22.Starting Off Your SEO Campaign By: Terri Wells If you have been doing SEO for a long time, you may have an almost intuitive sense of what you need to do to optimize a web site. You may work on several things at once rather than following a step-by-step process. Since search engines tweak their algorithms all the time, what worked a year ago may not work today. There are certain parts of the field that will never change – content will ALWAYS be king – but the keywords you use in your optimization and where you put them for the best effect, for example, is the kind of thing that has already changed and will probably continue to change in the future. That said, let’s take a look at some more specific SEO mistakes. But when you’re learning SEO or trying to understand what your SEO is doing to your site, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially when it’s your first campaign. Combine the above with search engines whose only loyalty is to traffic towards themselves, and who periodically change algorithms and indices used in indexing sites. It's easy to see how somebody could get very desperate to get traffic by "any means necessary" Concluding There are a few other myths, especially concerning professionals, the tools they use to optimize, and the search engines themselves. These myths are spread by pseudo experts and some other SEO "experts." Hopefully with time we will cover some more myths that have not been treated on SEO Chat before. Joke Break Here are a few myths that are truly hilarious (and hopefully are just jokes). I found them on various threads and discussion boards across the net, especially here.They actually find ways that are acceptable to the SEO averse search engines to optimize their sites and get a high page ranking. *Google hates me. *The only search engine is Google. *There are a million search engines. *AdWords are moving to the left of the screen. *You won't get caught for spam. *Matt Cutts hates me. *All SEO wear hats. It means your website is being popular to the online visitors.
Favorite Oil Painting Studios™ All rights reserved