Friday, March 8, 2013

You might be a black hat SEO if…


Black hat, white hat. Do this, don’t do that. It’s all so serious.
We’ve decided that the whole black hat SEO issue needs an injection of humor, so we created this funny list of tell-tale signs you might be a black hat SEO.
(For the record, we’re 100% against black hat stuff. Unless it’s a really cool top hat you want to wear with your tux. Then we’re all for the black hat.)

Black Hat SEO – 5 Things to Avoid


No, I will not going to advise you to use black hat SEO in your strategy! But in order to evaluate what you should be doing, it is important to know what you shouldn’t do in any circumstance.
This list of Black Hat SEO brings together underground strategies that actually could work in the past, but due to so many Google Updates this list is no longer a smart choice.
But if this list is not a choice, why am I addressing it right now?
I am doing this just to help you analyze your own strategy in order to check if you are doing something that can hurt your rankings.
I honestly hope you are not doing anything from the list, but if you are still using these Black Hat SEO tactics, please, do yourself a favor and stop using them.
If you want to know what you should be doing instead, just read my article about top SEO strategies for 2013 and you will have a better idea about what works and what doesn’t.
But, here we go:

5 Black Hat SEO Tactics that you should avoid

  1. Ask anyone you know that has a website to insert your link on it. If some of them don’t agree offer them a payment. And if they still show some resistance, tell them that you are OK with a link in the same color as the background – invisible link.
  2. Forget your targets or relevancy. Add a lot of animations and entertaining videos just for the sake of doing so. High quality content is definitely NOT your higher priority. Remember, you are using black hat SEO!
  3. Use instant pop-up capture pages to collect email addresses. I said instant, at the moment a visitor lands on your website nothing else matters, he has to give you his email address, and you don’t care if it annoys the visitor, because that is not your problem.
  4. Start to include Ads on your webpage. But no, I am not saying just 2 or 3! I am talking about tons of Ads of any type, it doesn’t matter if the Ad is relevant to your page or not, because the most important thing for your website is revenue, right?
  5. Forget about maintenance or analytics. Who cares about broken links anyway? And once again, if the visitor cannot reach one of the pages in your website, whose fault was that? Not yours, of course! You have more important things to do, right?
Well, I hit the end of this article about Black Hat SEO tactics, and I don’t know why, but it seems a little bit sarcastic, don’t you think?? lol :)
But being serious, I hope you are not doing anything cited in this article! And if you want to know more about SEO just connect with me or read some of my articles. I know them can help you!
If you like this message, even if it is a bit controversial or funny, tweet it, like it, and share it with your friends.
Take care and visit my new website to learn more about making money online.
see you next time!

Black hat seo techniques and tutorial


  • Automatically generated content:- Automatically generated content is content that’s been generated pro-grammatically. Usually this can contains paragraphs of random text that produces no sense to the reader however which can contain search keywords. Automatically generated content is black hat SEO techniques.

  • Participating in link schemes:- Any links supposed to govern a sites ranking in search results is also thought-about a part of a link schemes. Buying or mercantilism links that pass Page Rank. Reciprocal link exchange to an other site. Linking to net spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to govern Page Rank. Building partner pages completely for the sake of cross-linking. Exploitation automatic programs or services to make links to your web site.

  • Cloaking:- Cloaking refers to the follow of presenting totally different content or URLs to human users and search engines.

  • Sneaky redirects:-Sneaky redirecting is the act of two URL, one for a visitor and second for bot or spider.

  • Hidden text or links:-Using white color text on a white background, Locating text behind a picture, victimization CSS to position text off-screen, Setting the font size to zero and concealing a link by solely linking one tiny character.

  • Doorway pages:- Doorway pages square measure generally massive sets of poor-quality pages wherever every page is optimized for a particular keyword or phrase.

  • Keyword stuffing:- Keyword stuffing refers to the follow of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an effort to govern a site's ranking in search results.
  • Abusing rich snippets markup:- Avoiding rich snippets and structure data web page designing.


  • Sending automated queries to Google:- Sending automated queries and spam e-mail to consumes resources and includes using any software to send automated queries to search engine to determine how a website or web page ranks in search results for various queries. 

TOP 5 WHITE HAT AND BLACK HAT SEARCH OPTIMISATION TECHNIQUES

Search engine optimisation, as with all things in life has a good, wholesome, fair and right way of doing things and a bad, unfair, downright naughty way of doing things. To describe the two SEO methodologies the terms “White Hat” and “Black Hat” SEO were coined.

We sit very firmly in the white hat camp believing that while black hat SEO techniques might have some short term positive effect, the long term implications can be disastrous for your website and in turn your business.

In this article we’ll examine the top 5 black hat SEO techniques in a bid to help you determine whether the SEO firm you’re currently using are potentially compromising your business website. Then we’ll examine the top 5 white hat SEO techniques that we believe will have a positive effect on your search position without putting your business website at risk.

TOP 5 BLACK HAT SEO TECHNIQUES
1. Hidden Content

Top of our list of black hat SEO techniques is hidden content. Hidden content comes in many guises but the basic principle is that within the code for the site there will be content stuffed with keywords, this content will not be visible to the end user of the site.

One way of doing this is by using comment tags.

Comment tags look like this;

<!– Comment Tag –>

The real purpose of comment tags is for developers to add in useful reminders within their code explaining what that piece of code does.

Here’s an example of the comment tag being used correctly,

<!– Start of the Main Content –>

Here’s an example of a comment tag being used incorrectly in a bid to promote a hypothetical page targeting search engine optimisation,

<!—Search engine optimisation, SEO, professional search engine optimisation company, spamming search engines –->

Another popular way of hiding content is the use of the <noscript> tag. The <noscript> tag should be used to inform a user that a script is being used but their browser either doesn’t support the script

language used or they have that function turned off.

Here’s an example of the <noscript> tag being used correctly,

&ltscript type=”text/javascript”>

<!– document.write(“Hello World!”) //–>

</script><br />

<noscript>Your browser does not support JavaScript!</noscript>

Here’s an example of the <noscript> tag being used as a black hat SEO technique again in a bid to promote a hypothetical page but this time targeting car hire,

<noscript>

Imaginary Car Hire Firm do Car Hire which is very affordable so if you want to hire a car call our car hire firm because we are the best car hire firm in the world

</noscript>

Other HMTL tags misused in similar ways include the <noframes> tag and hidden inputs in forms.

Content can also be hidden from the end user by using CSS, excessively small text and coloured text on the same coloured background.

All of these techniques are frowned upon by search engines and if detected can mean your website will be penalised or even banned. To the untrained eye it can be very difficult to spot the use of some of these techniques which is why we offer a free website MOT test at PushON.

2. Meta Keyword Stuffing

There are two Meta tags that are generally used to inform search engines of the content on the page. They reside between the <head> tag of a page and when used incorrectly they can alert a search engine that a site is using spam techniques in an attempt to improve its ranking.

Meta Description

The meta description should be used to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely and be 1 or 2 sentences, 3 at most.

Here’s an example of the meta description being used in the correct manner,

<meta name=”description” content=”PushON are an Online Marketing agency providing a full range of digital marketing services throughout Greater Manchester and the North West UK. If you need Search Engine marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Pay per Click (PPC), we can help you. Contact us now.” />

Here’s an example of the meta description tag being used incorrectly for a page promoting a restaurant called “MadeUp”,

<meta name=”description” content=”MadeUp restaurant website is the best MadeUp restaurant website, our restaurant is better than any restaurant,great restaurant,best food restaurant,visit our restaurant” />

3. Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords should be a short list of words that inform of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so misused in the past that there are few if any search engines that take any heed of them.

Here’s an example of the meta keywords being used in the correct manner,

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”Online marketing, digital marketing, search marketing, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, SEO” />

Here’s an example of the meta keywords tag being used incorrectly for a page promoting a restaurant called “MadeUp”,

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Restaurant,restaurants,food,feed,take away food,fast food,junk food,eat,eating out,dinner,dining,meal,eating,MadeUp,steak and chips,chicken and chips,pie and chips,pudding,desert,big restaurant,small restaurant,best restaurant,great restaurant, exclusive restaurant,cocktails,wine,drink,pizza,sandwhiches”>

4. Doorway or Gateway Pages

Doorway or Gateway pages are pages designed for search engines and not for the end user. They are basically fake pages that are stuffed with content and highly optimised for 1 or 2 keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page.

Off-the-shelf SEO software often encourages the use of gateway pages as do SEO firms that don’t know what they’re talking about. Search engine spiders are being enhanced continually to detect these pages and will get ignored or worse still, flag your site up as being spam and ban you all together.

5. Link Farming

In the real world if you were to build your house in a bad neighbour hood then your house would be affected by its surroundings. The same is true of the virtual world. Link farms or free for all (FFA) pages have no other purposes than to list links of unrelated websites. They won’t provide you with any traffic and you run the risk of having your site banned for participating. Don’t participate in link farming.

TOP 5 WHITE HAT SEO TECHNIQUES
1. Quality Content

When we first started looking at SEO as a separate entity to website build there was one phrase that we would continually hear, “content is King”, and it’s true. There is nothing more valuable you can do to optimise your site for search engines than offer unique well written content. A search engines aim is to serve up what it believes to be the most appropriate website for any given search to the end user.

Imagine we are the end user and we are searching for a portable air conditioner for hire. We go to our favourite search engine and search for the phrase “portable air conditioner hire”. In this imaginary scenario let’s assume there are only 2 websites that target that phrase,

Website 1

Website 1 consists of a single page with 3 paragraphs of text. The text tells us that the company does portable air conditioning hire and give us a phone number to call.

Website 2

Website 2 contains 30 plus pages all focusing on various portable air conditioning units that we can hire, costs and technical explanations of how portable air conditioning units work.

Which website do you think the search engine is likely to offer to the user first? It’s a rather obvious example but it illustrates the importance of good content so your priority should be good quality content.

2. Use Structural (Semantic) Mark Up and Separate Content from Presentation

Semantically structuring your mark up helps search engines understand the content of your webpage which is of course a good thing. Making proper use of heading elements is essential because search engines give more weight

to the content within the heading elements.

Using CSS to separate the design elements from the content makes for much leaner code and makes it easier for search engines to find what they’re looking for, which is content. Remember content is king!

3. Titles and Meta Data

Providing pages with proper titles and meta data is essential. As discussed in the top 5 black hat SEO techniques section the meta description and meta keywords elements have been so misused in the past that Search

Engines now regard them as less important, it’s still important to use them and use them properly. Titles however still carry a lot of weight and when we think of semantic mark up it is obvious why. The title of anything is a declaration as to what the content might be, so make sure your page titles are a true representation of the content of the page.

4. Keyword Research and Effective Keyword Use

Create your website with keywords and key phrases in mind. Research keywords and key phrases you think people might use to find your site. Single words are not always the most effective target, try multi-word phrases that are much more specific to your product/service and you’ll be targeting end users that are much more likely to want what you are offering.

Use the keywords and key phrases you’ve identified effectively throughout your website. Assign each page 2-3 of the keywords you’ve identified and use the keywords throughout all the important elements of the page. Those are,

Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
Heading Elements
<H1>
<H2>
<H2>
Text
Alt Tag
Title Tag
Links
5. Quality Inbound Links

Having inbound links to your website can be likened to having a vote for the good but there are good links and bad links so therefore votes for the good and votes that are bad. Good links are links from other web pages

that are regarded highly by the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page. Bad links are links from web pages that aren’t regarded highly or potentially banned by search engines and have no relevance to the content of your page.

For example;

Imagine we have a website that sells telephones.

Link A: Link on the homepage of the British Telecoms website. = Good

Link B: Link on John Smiths Beer and Ale appreciation links page = Bad

The amount of quality inbound links to your site therefore have some relevance on how high up the search engine your site is placed. When sourcing links you should be thinking of quality over quantity and deep linking to pages within your website not just the home page.

Conclusion

To the untrained eye, identifying if your site is potentially at risk from black hat techniques can be difficult, that’s why at PushON we offer a free website analysis which would uncover any potential problems.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss search engine optimisation for your website.

Roy Wilding

Creative Director – PushON Ltd

The Online Marketing People