Friday, May 21, 2010

Avoid Getting Banned in SE


Most of webmasters do know the importance of having high search engine rankings. High rankings means high traffic, translated into increased profit.. Webmasters look for all sorts of tactics to improve a website’s position in search results.. However you need to avoid some tactics, generally termed Black Hat SEO, because it may cause a website to be penalized/Banned from search engines.

So below are the six popular Black Hat search engine optimization tactics:

Keyword Stuffing

The more often you use your keywords on a page, the higher you keyword density. However, search engines don’t look for exceptionally high keyword density, but reasonable keyword density. If you repeat your keywords too often, search engines might think that your website is spamming.

Cloaking
Cloaking is when websites serve one web page to search engine spiders and a different to human visitors. This can be used to mislead the search engine with regard to the content on the website. There are, however, some methods of cloaking which are not regarded as a deceptive, such as delivering unique content to users based on their location, or allowing search engines to index password protected pages.

Hidden Text
Another method of deceiving search engines with regard to a website’s content is by including hidden text. Text can be rendered invisible by setting it as the same color as the background, using negative margins, or placing it in an invisible containing element.

Gateway Pages
Sometimes additional websites or web pages are created with the sole purpose of ranking highly in search engines and generating traffic for another website. If these pages provide no value to visitors and are only used for rankings, your website may be penalized.

URL Redirection
This occurs when a user, or search engine, is unknowingly redirected to another website. Sometimes this practice is used to acquire the pagerank of the destination page. At other times, it is used to redirect users to a malicious website.

Link Farms
Google Pagerank and other similar ranking algorithms for other search engines place a lot of weight on link popularity. Black Hat search engine optimizers often take advantage of this by creating something known as a link farm, which is consists of a community of websites which link to each other.

Search engines have gotten progressively smarter in their quest to deliver highly relevant search results. So even if these tactics give you some success, it will only be temporary and could result in an indefinite ban of your domain name.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds,blogging. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

1. Increase Your Linkability
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
3. Reward Inbound Links
4. Help Your Content Travel

Ref: http://dailyseoupdates.com/avoid-getting-banned-in-se/

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

An introduction to Google Analytics

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Saturday, January 9, 2010