Spamming is Not a Good SEO Technique

Perhaps very few things can illustrate competition as vividly as the Web. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites just like it?



If the attention span of an average Internet user is as expansive as a search engine’s listing, then there’s nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Very likely, a person conducting a search on the Internet will probably just browse through the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Website that get buried in the 10th page and onwards will probably not get too much attention if certain measures are not undertaken.



Those measures are what are called search engine optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures which may be seen a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form that will compete in the top rankings of a search engine.



However, as it is with almost everything else, some shortcuts exist that are able to “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, despite the fact that it offers no real information. These sets of shortcuts are called “spamming”.



SEO spam (or spamdexing) is a set of techniques that manipulate a website for the purpose of creating an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just some examples of some SEO spam:



1. Cloaking

When a website presents a set of information to a search engine different from a set the user is seeing, then cloaking has been done. What usually happens is that the web page’s code is relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that particular web page, he user sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.



2. Artificially networked sites

There is really nothing wrong with creating links between one site to another so long as the links are relevant and serve to connect useful information.



However, spammers who perform this technique set up several web sites and link them together even the sites contain no real and useful information. The purpose for doing so is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its density of links. If this is the case, then it can be considered spamming.



3. Blog and Forum Spam

Online blogs and fora are a great source of information since it these formats are built to be updated within short intervals. This, in itself, what makes it a good reference for information, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank it well for the quality of information it holds.



However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and fora with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading a user to irrelevant information, they also interrupt the bloggers and the forum participants, which is downright rude.



4. Hidden text.

Similar to cloaking, hidden texts are meant to make search engines think that a page is about one thing, while it is actually about another. But it fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine is able to reads is camouflaged by making the text font color the same as the background. What happens is that the user is unable to read what the search engine saw, and therefore may be looking at a document that is not related to the user’s search.



Other techniques are to create small, imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click on, thus generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intentions of visiting that site at all.



By this time, you probably already know why spamming is done. It is a shortcut used by some unscrupulous website owners to make their website rank high on SERPs. Folks who pose as SEO experts use these spamming techniques to get money for doing little to no work.



Now that you know who they are, and how they do it, here’s why you should have nothing to do with spamming and the people who condone them.



The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The whole idea was to be able to create a place where information can be created and shared with others so that it can foster understanding despite physical borders.



Other results of this information have led to the development e-commerce and online businesses, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to a community of information and sharing.



However, spamming is fundamentally profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others without taking the necessary time and effort to make his website useful and relevant as what others have done.



It speaks poorly of website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It is basically exploiting the trust and the willingness to share, which made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.



Finally, it demeans honest SEO experts who take the time and effort to produce quality website and make it a point to follow the rules. Search engine marketing is helping to level the playing field so it can allow businesses of any to advertise right along side each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.



Search engines, on their part, are developing smarter technologies to detect spamming techniques in order to give users the best list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the spam methods mentioned above may be eliminated. But it is very likely other more sophisticated ones will come up. On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you who do this, the easier it will be to apprehend these cheaters and make it more difficult for spammers to do their thing.

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SEO Tips for Blogs

Originally conceived to be something like an online journal for individuals has become yet another tool businesses can use to market themselves online. Web logs or blogs are now being used not just for the sheer purpose of writing, but also as means SEO (search engine optimization) experts use to increase a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERP).



An interesting thing about keeping and maintaining a blog (also known as blogging) is that anyone can blog. What will make a blog more successful than most is simply a keen sense of its target readership. Of course, it will not harm the blogger (a person maintaining a blog) to possess a few basic skills navigating the Internet and creating links to other websites and blogs.



Bloggers today are finding that they can not only write and publish their thoughts for free, but also can find themselves getting compensated for writing. This is because one of the techniques in SEO is to create content that is rich in keywords, which is basically what search engines look for in ranking web pages in its SERPs.



That said, here are some tips to make your next blog an effective SEO tool.



1, Choose a Theme (and Stick to It)

Most blogs never gain a real readership because it simply is a mishmash of a writer’s thoughts, with very little coherent theme to bind the entire blog together. If the blogger does it for the sheer purpose of a journal, there’s really nothing wrong with that.



However, as an SEO, a blog has to have a theme that will tie all the posts (individual articles) together. This is because instead of just looking for keywords, a search engine will also assess whether the page just happens to have a lot of keywords mentioned in the post or whether the entire blog is about the topic it is searching for. The former will rank less than the former in the SERPs. Given this point, it will do you well to pick a theme that you are interest and won’t tire of writing about.



2. A Place You Can Call Home

Working alongside the idea of a theme, When creating your blog (whether with your own domain name or an a free blog site), give it a URL that has words related to the theme. For example, if you are going to blog about bonsai making, try to use words that are related to that in your blog’s URL (such as www.bonsaienthusiast.com). Name your blog using words that are relevant to your theme as well. Search engines look at these things as well to determine how high your blog could possibly rank.



If you are blogging on a hosting site, it is possible to have your blog delegated into a proper category. This will help make a search engine easier to find your blog given that the category is strongly related to themes and search keywords.



On a related note, your individual posts should also be titled with words that are closely related to your theme. Again, working on a blog with a bonsai theme, one post could be titled “Miniature Trees: How to Get Started” while another one could be “Selecting the Right Pot for a Bonsai”. This will give your posts a URL that is rich in keywords, which helps in a page’s ranking on SERPS (but you already know that, right?).



3. Link And it Shall Be Linked Unto You

Another thing about blogs that SEO experts are finding to become a great advantage is the fact that blogs make it easy to link to other blogs, which in turn makes it easy for other blogs to link to you.



This is yet another criterion a search engine uses to rank a particular page in the results pages. The more incoming links it possess about the keyword in search will increase ranking status because the page shows that a lot of people think what you’ve written is a good source of information.



So when writing on your blog, be sure to take the time to read other people’s blogs and other online articles related to your theme. Create links to them so that you point your readers to more information. This will increase the chances of other people creating links that will point to your blog.



4. Keep it Coming

Since blog content is so easy to create, search engines scour blog sites very regularly. That means if you keep on creating new content on a regular basis, search engines will have to keep up with what’s new on your blog.



By regularly creating fresh content on your blog, search engines will tend to look to your blog first before others that are not maintained and renewed as regularly as you do. It helps in the rankings as well, which is the whole point of this article, right?



These tips are just to get started on using a blog for SEO. As you go along, you’ll find more tricks of the trade that will help you push you up the ranks on SERPs. Of course realistically, don’t expect to rank on the top 3 pages on your first try. But give it a few weeks. And for as long as you keep to the tried and true principles, it may not be that far until you’ve captured a good ranking for your blog.

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SEO Technique: Link-building

With many businesses engaging in advertising wars in order to win over the majority of the Internet’s viable market, it’s easy to deduce the intensity of the competition. After all, the Internet and its network of information grow exponentially by the minute, while the increase in the number of users more or less takes a little slower.



Some businesses employ paid advertising on major commercial portals in the Internet, in hopes that the traffic generated by these pages will eventually flow into their own company website. Others make use of the ingenious pay-per-click (PPC) system, which virtually requires no start-up cost on the part of the advertiser. He or she only pays for the amount of traffic that he or she generates through the public’s accessing his or her website through that particular link; no payment is made at the initial ad placement in various media.



These two means of advertising are aimed towards trying to be greatly accessible to a potential viable consumer market, because only then can profit be possibly made. These two methods of advertising, however, gain greater ground because they have the capacity to push up a website’s ranking in the query results in search engines.



Query results in search engines, or the matches found by a search engine to the keywords entered by the user, are important because of the fact that these are the most effective tools through which users try to access information on the Internet. The volume of information existent on various topics is simply overwhelming, which is the reason why people make use of search engines to do for them the dirty work of going through Internet clutter and give them results ranked on the basis of relevance to what they are exactly looking for.



PPCs also increase the probability of finding the website ranked higher. Google Adwords, for instance, already creates an innate ranking system within their advertising system, so that even in prioritizing which advertisements are published in a particular page, the ones with greater relevance is made accessible to the public.



Another technique by which to hike up rankings is by providing quality information that is both highly relevant and targeted towards a particular set of keywords pre-determined by the website. With careful market study and a study of consumer behavior, businesses can study just what keywords yield traffic, and subsequently shape their business website in order to best address the demand.



However, with the Internet being as competitive as it is, it is not enough to employ just one of the many methods to increase traffic. Another means that has been acclaimed in truly delivering increased traffic into the website within the framework of SEO is link-building. Link-building is the process through which one website is advertised in another website dealing with a similar field of interest. Usually, an exchange of links can happen, which can provide mutual benefits to both businesses.



Link-building, and being in productive link exchanges, can make or break a SEO campaign to optimize the search engine. It requires a degree of experience and loads of interactive communication in order to make sure that the link does end up published in another website. When this does happen, one’s website can already appear on the search engine more than once—the first is the direct page of the website containing it; the rest are outside access points from links by other pages.



This can be done first, by creating the impression of expertise in a particular field. By creating this impression both among colleagues and clients, the website becomes respected. Moreover, this can create a level of marketability on the part of the website, which will give people an easier time to trust the content of the pages. In effect, it becomes easier to build links with another website who may wish to be affiliated to the image and reputation built by the business.



Another way to do this is by soliciting the help of affiliate web pages. Businesses try to make affiliates by constantly reviewing products, articles, and services offered by other companies on their websites that could serve to complement the service or products to their own. This gives the other company greater impetus to provide links to the business because after all, it features their product. This also results in mutual referral, especially in the case of two complementary products.



Integral to the decision of building links with websites is the determination of the suitability of a particular website to become a link partner. Emphasis is placed on decent linking partners that more or less practice the same brand of ethical SEO as one’s own. Moreover, targeting possible link partners who actually will be amenable to the idea of exchanging links is very important. By targeting invitations for link-building, the business gets a better opportunity to actually gain real link partners who will eventually link the business to their website.



Relevance, congruence, and even similar reputability are just some factors that can make link-building campaigns more effective. With effective links, a business’s search engine appearance is maximized and magnified.

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SEO—What It Can Do for Your Business

Businesses that have found homes on the Internet find it more difficult identifying their target market, and even more defining the course of action in order to best take advantage of the market trends vis-à-vis the spending behavior of their markets. This phenomenon took place when the Internet became a hodge-podge of constant created websites and content pages, each to serve a particular purpose or to target a particular market.



Without the limitations set by languages, geography, and even a huge overhead start-up capital, businesses are left to reach out almost blindly to a market and hope for a favorable response. Left boundless, some businesses tend to put behind the importance of finding a loyal niche market. This market, with its constant patronage, helps translate web traffic and hype into tangible profits.



This is where SEO comes in. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process by which SEO providers enhance a website by beefing up the content pages, cleaning up its codes, and making it more consumer-centric, in order to gain a better standing in the listings yielded by search engines. This is most especially important in an age where search engines are the most popular tools for users to swim through hundreds of Internet clutter in order to find the particular information, product or service they are looking for.



Search engines take on the task of sorting through Internet content in order to find something as close as possible to the keywords entered by the user in the search field of the search engine. In crawler search engines, for example, the search engine simulates the crawling movement as it moves through pages studying relationships and relevance to each other of links and pages available online.



On the basis of popularity among Internet users, quality of service, and relevance of keywords to website content, various website content are ranked according to how they match up to what was queried. Obviously, top-ranked websites usually generate more traffic than those found in the other pages, and as such, it is every company’s goal to become top-ranked one day.



Making sure that content is useful, written effectively, and relevant is an imperative first step. Often, various websites tend to claim information on a certain field or topic, only to find that they cannot deliver these promises to their customers. Instead, when content is useful, relevant, and written in a manner most effective, users are benefited in that they find exactly what they are looking for, maybe even more. This will solicit greater patronage from users and clients.



Moreover, streamlining content by making sure that it is closely related to the keywords help keep the page relevant, and increases its chance of ranking higher in listings. In addition to this, steps also have to be made in order to make sure that the website is updated often, and that the links are all working properly. This measures the usability of a website, and if it doesn’t do well in this category, it will likely not be ranked as high by search engines.

Why should ranking in the query listings matter at all?



It matters because if the website is not ranked into the first couple of pages of the matches found by the search engine, chances are, customers who could be benefiting from its content and from whom the business could be generating profit are not getting to the page. This would deem the website completely useless; after all, what is the use of a published website in the Internet that is not viewed by visitors and web surfers?



Moreover, effective SEO that translates to better rankings actually defines the nature of traffic that gets generated by the website. With meaningful and useful content made available to the public, the website gains patronage from individuals who value satisfaction and service offered to them online.



Increased patronage from individuals who actually make use of the information made available on the page can translate to their continued accessing of the website, and can even translate to a higher probability that these people will trust the business enough to make frequent purchases of the product or service.



At the end of the day, what SEO stands for in the light of any business is the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. In an era where customers are offered a huge variety of options, only the ones that give a semblance of integrity through unbiased representation even from the very start when the information is listed in a search engine, and actually end up delivering what they promise, gain the benefit of maximizing the Internet’s business potential.

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Search Engine Copywriting For SEO Without Losing Readability

Copywriting is one significant factor when you want to achieve excellent search engine ranking. Yet, a lot of times website owners think that all that they have to do is to incorporate keywords in page tags and include some keyword mentions in their articles. While SEO copywriting not exceedingly hard, writing for search engines is more complex than that.



“Search engine optimization copywriting” or SEO, is a method of writing viewable or easily scanned text on your web page which is very acceptable and readable for the internet user as well as targets certain or exact search terms, having the purpose of ranking high in search engines.



“SEO Copywriting” generally optimizes and enhances other on-page components for search terms being targeted, namely the title, the description and likewise keywords tags, alt text and headings.



Search engines require and look for authentic content pages, rather than additional pages which are designed solely for attaining high rankings; this then, is the concept of “SEO copywriting”. And for this reason, search engines may not likely consider SEO pages with undesirable copywriting content.



Simply put, your site’s content must follow good marketing standards, having great interaction with your visitors because excellent “SEO copywriting” acknowledges the fact that humans make the purchasing decisions and not “spiders”.



It is recommended that your content comprises of about 250 words that are viewable per page, having a maximum of two targeted keywords or search terms located strategically inside the text as well as in other on-page components.



A good quality and informative copywriting content indeed is the very foundation for a website to be successful. A good content and excellent website setup will direct your visitors to what exactly they desire while collecting or inquiring for information in your website. A well developed and constructed content page really is important for powerful website content and can take a huge bound in your keyword ranking approach.



Always remember that internet surfers do not "read" all the time your content, but rather, their tendency is just to scan through the page, searching for prominent and attractive sentences and words. Meaning that for you to magnetize your visitors, you need to write not only convincing and captivating content, but also scannable.



When a prospect visits your site searching for a service or product, it can be due to fact that they find your information educational and helpful; thus it actually depends on the quality of your content and what type of information that you supply your visitors that determines whether they stay or leave your website. A content rich in keywords will leave an enduring impression for your SEO campaign.



Here are a few guidelines on writing good quality SEO content:



1. Understand and determine your “key phrases” before you begin writing. Returning and then editing an already existing copy so to reach higher keyword concentration can be a difficult task which often results in fragmented sentences, complicated statements and a copy that is stiff sounding. If you already know the “key phrases”, then you are able to construct a complete and flowing stream of ideas.



2. Know who your target audiences are. You need to determine your target clients before writing your content, so that you can address them properly. You can not write a good quality, informative and persuading content without knowing your visitors requirements, problems and needs.



Your content should offer a solution to their problems and you need to first identify that problem before you can determine a solution.



3. Incorporate your “key phrases” in the headlines. Almost all search engines believe that a headline is a significant part of your copy which means that the text that comprises the headlines bears additional effect.



When you make headlines, be certain to construct them so that they also carry the keyword that you have used in your content. Also take note of the “HTML encryption for your title. When you make bold headlines and incorporating them in “

” or “

” tags, they will catch the search engine’s attention.



4. Scatter or distribute properly your “key phrases” all throughout the body of your article. To do this effectively, focus on just a maximum of three primary keywords and let them naturally flow in your article.



There is what is called a "3 percent guideline" which states that 3 percent of the words in your article must be “keywords”. You should take note however, that this is only a guideline; do not ruin a good article just so to achieve the three percent guideline by insisting on the keywords in sentences where it does not fit just so to achieve the “3 percent guideline.”



Just remember that a literature form of writing is not what is required in SEO copywriting; it just makes a poor web content. SEO copywriting demands that you specifically need to write for the internet, something that is very much different from a literature or storybook style of writing.



There is more to web copywriting than merely writing well. Keep this in mind: Effective web copywriting and keywords “search engine optimization” mean the same thing.

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