Written by: Grayson Thrush

There are a number of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that can increase your search rank. While most are generally considered ethical and fine
to use, there are a number of tactics that fall under the moniker “Black Hat SEO.” These include methods employed solely in an attempt to cut corners and trick search engines into increasing your page rank (PR).

These techniques are widely considered unethical, and should not be used. If for no other reason, keep in mind that if you do use such practices you may get caught and therefore banned from the major search engine indexes. Nevertheless, some unscrupulous SEO analysts do attempt to game the system.

Keyword stuffing is an extremely popular Black Hat SEO tactic. This involves placing keywords on a website with such frequency so as to make to overall content nonsensical and cumbersome. Some analysts will even utilize hidden and random placement of keywords in order to artificially increase keyword
density.

Link bombing, sometimes called link washing, is an attempt to increase your search ranking by having a large number of sites link to a page with identical anchor text. For example, link bombing often occurs in blogs, where a site owner replies to multiple blog postings linking to their website.

A doorway page is low in actual content, and is instead stuffed with repeating keywords and phrases designed to increase the search rank of the page. Doorway pages contain little or no content. They are instead optimized for a number of terms that aren’t connected to the site’s primary content.

There are many Black Hat SEO methods for increasing search rank, and these are but a few. These and other such techniques should be avoided as a point of pride and honor. Moreover, they should not be used because in the long run they are not likely to be successful. Search engines such as Google are becoming increasingly sophisticated when it comes to detecting Black Hat SEO tactics.  Make sure you speak with your SEO company to ensure they are not using these tactics to protect the future or your company's domain!

By: Cade Lee

Most of the sites we have worked on that have been built by “website designers” are not effectively producing leads for that business. We have seen some of the most beautiful websites but without traffic and without new customers what good are they? Your online business should be another source of income and customers. If you trust the right people to work with your website designer than you might have a shot of obtaining both.

Please do not misunderstand what I am saying here. Website designers are very useful if their services are used in the correct capacity. Most web designers do not have a clue how to build a website that is developed to convert traffic or drive floods of traffic to the site; most developers that I have talked with would agree. Usually web designers are focused on aesthetics, navigation, look and feel and not placement in the search engines.

So why do you have a website?

Most business owners that I speak with have a website so that they can develop more online business. When I say this, what I mean is they are looking for more prospects or customers online. They definitely want to see some type of return from their website as most of them have spent a small fortune on developing the site to begin with. So if that is the case for you, it is probably best to make certain that the web designer you are working with owns a successful online business and knows also how to run it. They should be able to show you some successful online campaigns that they have led and give you references for their work. Simply showing you websites that they have built is not enough. I know that you want a “pretty” site
but I am certain it is more important that you are able to develop new customers from your site, right? It only stands to reason that your website designer should have the same experience that would deliver the results you are looking to achieve yourself!

Your website is your business online!

Sure it is nice to have a charming storefront, one that customers constantly compliment. Does it bring in cash flow? Is your office, store, garage or retail space built for sales?

By Cade Lee

Search Engine Optimization is much more than just optimizing for the first page of Google. If you have read through our previous posts than you already understand this concept. As a matter of fact when I go to review my monthly analytics a good 26% to 30% of my traffic comes from other sources than the search engines. Granted a good 54.44% of the traffic we obtain comes from search engines but I definitely would not want to give up 26%! In order to get the referral traffic we are exposed through various social networks online as well as several different social bookmarking sites. The whole goal of Guerrilla SEO or Guerilla search engine marketing is to bring traffic to your site without blaring a direct commercial for your services or product.

A good example of Guerilla SEO tactics would be marketing through article marketing to the major article repositories like Ezine Articles. By obtaining an “Expert Author” status you are allowing Ezine Articles to publish your content which in turn allows other users to use your content as long as they post the article “as is” with the links in the resources box. Those links of course (you are usually allowed to links within the resource box) are directed to your website or URL. By establishing yourself as an Expert Author you are accomplishing two things. First you are establishing yourself as a credible source for your service or product and secondly you are not directly selling your services. In this “shared planet” paradigm it is almost forbidden to come right out and ask for business. So by giving you information away without any expectation of reciprocity you are showing your dedication to your profession and opinion on the matter that you are writing about. A good example of this would be an article that I most recently published on SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking. This article has generated a fair amount of hits already (100 views in the last 60 days). I know that is not groundbreaking; however, if I have 20 of these articles generating the same amount of interest as this article than the math is pretty easy, I would be looking at 2,000 views on my articles every month! The conversion of that traffic is at about 2% meaning that I am getting almost 2% of the viewers of this article clicking through to my site, so that is an additional 40 visitors that I am obtaining. If you search for “SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking” you will see that my article is at the top of the rankings for this search term. There are not enough searches for this search term to obtain any kind of data from Google, at the same time obtaining that number one page rank for the search term took little or no effort at all. This is a small added bonus for the article; most of the traffic definitely comes through the article repositories.

Written by: Nick Hantge

You want people to find, choose and use your website, not your competitors’ websites. This means that you need to appear high up the rankings on the search engine results pages – ideally in the top half of page one. But how do you do that?

Search engines aim to respond to their users’ queries by producing a list of websites that are relevant to the keywords that the user has entered into the search engine query box (e.g. Google toolbar) and high-quality.

Your website will be highly-ranked if search engines judge it to be a high-quality site that is relevant to queries for your type of product or service. If they cannot work out what your website is about or they judge it to be poor quality then it will appear low down in the rankings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply doing the things that search engines, especially Google, look for so that they rank you higher on their results pages. Part One of this article explains how search engines and keywords work. This part describes some practical things that you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

Website Content

The content of your website should be very clear so that search engines – and people – can work out what it is about. The quality of the spelling, copywriting and structure will be judged by search engines too.

Keyword rich

The most effective places to use your keywords are:

• page titles
• headings and sub-headings
• bold text
• the anchor text of the links within your website
• the first 25 words of your html document (which often includes navigation items as well as some of the text that appears on the page)
• your home page.
• Longer search terms with 3-5 words (known as long-tail searches) are increasingly used by people when they are looking for a website. So try to:

• use all the keywords in common searches for your type of product – e.g. if someone is searching for “Gordon Brown” then a website with “Gordon” and “Brown” will beat a website with just “Brown”
• closely associate the keywords in common searches – e.g. if someone is searching for a website selling “English goats cheese” then websites using all three keywords together will beat websites using those words in separate places.

Not keyword stuffed

Keyword stuffing is a meaningless list of words that are put on a webpage to trick search engines into ranking a website more highly than it really deserves. Nowadays, search engines are programmed to detect these lists and penalise sites that use them. People also hate keyword stuffing. It almost guarantees that visitors will leave your website quickly and never return.