Oct 12 2009
Web positioning:”Black Hat” and “White Hat” SEO
Web positioning:the quest for Page Ranking
If you’ve been involved in Search Engine Optimization, Web positioning or internet marketing for any length of time you realize the importance of Page Ranking (getting your site pages ranked as high as possible by the Search Engines), in order to get more traffic which in turn creates greater profitability.
“Black Hat” S.E.O
As with any other human endeavour there are the right, acceptable and honest strategies to do something (“White Hat” strategies in the SEO context)-or ,more precisely, strategies that follow Search Engine stipulations and rules; and then those that don’t:the dubious, unethical and downright dishonest ways of getting people to come to your site and have your page rank artificially inflated- these are known as “Black Hat SEO”, for obvious reasons.
Keyword Stuffing
Confusingly, some of the bigger search engines do allow a number of web sites to operate counter to the stated rules. I do not know enough about the subject to comment more, but I have learned that “keyword stuffing” is one of the older black hat tricks-where the “meta tags”, and other tags are crowded with the keyword and synonyms to a ridiculous level. But now this is easily decipherable by search engines looking for “spam” sites. In fact, they look for cyclic activity and posting of content that makes little sense, its only purpose to repeat a number of keywords over and over again.
Duplicate Content And Cloned Pages
Sean Rasmussen in his Internet marketing forum that I joined as a newbie only a few short months ago warns in an article he entitles “Avoid Spamming the Search Engines” :
“Another way for your website to be viewed as spam is to post the same content on more than one page. An occurrence metric used by search engines can find duplicate content pretty quickly. For a true spammer, this is done in order to increase the amount of content with the same keywords and achieve a higher page ranking. For an innocent site owner, this is pure laziness.
Similarly, cloned pages could be seen as a problem. Spammers do this to inundate the net with their keyword-stuffed content. It could also occur if you are trying to get a site online quickly and clone your pages before making adjustments – never a good idea as it could cost you a lot of time in the Google sandbox.”
Link Farms
Another Black hat technique Sean mentions is Paid Links, or paying to get links to your site. Getting a lot of inbound and outbound links is one primary way a web page can be selected by the Search Engines for a higher Page Rank, if there are many links. Black Hat practitioners pay what is called “link farms” to get these links. Wikipedia see here defines these as :”a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing). Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.”
Conclusion: write good content and keep keyword density down
He concludes with a piece of advice I will pass on . He says the way to avoid being censured is to “write quality content and keep keywords to an overall density of less than 3%(italics mine). This is not an exact figure applicable in every circumstance, but it does fit with the amount of keywords you would naturally expect to find in a well-written article.”
Surprise surprise! When I was interested in submitting manuscripts for books I came to the same conclusion : too much material out there, whether in the Book publishing arena or Internet marketing is spammy, badly written and /or downright useless.
If you would like to learn more about Affiliate Marketing and Web Positioning and you are an “S.E.O Dummie” like me, I recommend Sean Rasmussen’s “Year of the Affiliate” e-book which you can get simply by clicking below.
John Reason,
Brit currently living in New Zealand.
Salesman, teacher, article writer, Internet Marketer.
© 2009
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