Search Engine Marketing Blog

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is a term used to describe so-called ethical search engine optimization, as opposed to black hat SEO. The basic premise for white hat search engine optimization is that the methods used to increase the ranking of the web pages will be consistent with search engine guidelines. Good SEO techniques mean that what the viewer sees is pleasing to the eye and is a response to the basic query posed on the search engine.

Probably the most important thing to remember when optimizing search engine results is that consistent efforts to comply with basic web design factors will get better results over time than will high risk techniques commonly known as black hat SEO. There are both on page and off page white hat techniques that should be utilized. It cannot be overemphasized that search engine optimization should be the overriding reason for presenting a web site. The most effective approach is to prepare and present a web site that is understandable and agreeable to human viewers that will also be perceived well by the search engines.

Since ‘white hat’ has the connotation of ethical as opposed to ‘black hat’, many web site developers use the term incorrectly to refer to others methods as being somehow less ethical than their own. Generally, the term white hat has been used to mean if it the SEO results can be seen by the visitor to the web page it is a white hat SEO. If it cannot be seen by a visitor, or is something that is not an integral part of the whole, then it is unethical or black hat.

The major reason for adopting white hat methods is that the search engines provide a lower ranking for pages that use black hat methods. A web page that consistently uses black hat methods will receive a lower ranking or will be banned completely. If banned, the web page results simply don’t show up in search engine queries. It’s important to remember that using methods that search engines don’t approve of is not morally wrong, just a violation of what may be arbitrary rules.

So, assuming you don’t want to be ranked lower than you deserve, or banned, how can you use so-called white hat techniques to improve your search engine placement? Review your web sites and check for things like dangling links. Dangling links are those that don’t go anywhere else. Each page in your website should link to at least one other page. Make sure all the links off site work and go to pages that you are proud to be associated with.

Review the use of keywords and phrases in your META attributes. Use ALT attributes where appropriate. Google in particular looks for relevant links so that the viewer who is sent to your page is going to find material that matches the search queries. The search engines also want to see your page titles match the content on the page.

In short, the following white hat methods have been proved to be effective in improving search engine rankings.

 Select your keywords carefully, distribute them throughout your web site and don’t overuse them
 Make sure internal links get the viewer to the search term with no more than 4 clicks and 2 clicks is preferable
 Try to use good incoming links appropriately to match your keywords and pages.

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Robots.txt

Robots are programs that wander the web automatically performing functions and gathering information. They are also known as crawlers, spiders, or web wanderers. Sometimes they are called web worms or web ants. Robots are the generic name, spiders sounds more impressive when referred to by the press. Crawlers are robots that perform a specific function. Web worms usually are replicating type programs and Web ants are distributed and cooperating robots. These robots do not physically visit the sites, but simply request documents from sites, and thereby from any links to the sites.

Robots perform many functions, but the most common duties are indexing, mirroring, HTML validation, what’s New monitoring and link validation. Most people are familiar with the robots that perform indexing functions. By using the computer to collect and categorize large amounts of data, more effective use of human analysis can be made.

Robots are created to automatically perform the functions for which they are identified. The choice of which pages are accessed by robots is the dependent upon the type of robot and who the sending agent is. Robots may use an historical list of URL’s, server lists, or popular web sites in order to get a starting place of sites to visit. You can submit a list of the pages that you want to have crawled by a robot.

By reviewing your web log, you can determine if your site has been visited by a robot. If this is something you want to happen, then you need do nothing further. Once you see that your web site has been visited by a robot, the rest is automatic. The robot automatically schedules revisits, looking for anything different. The material that is retrieved from your website is stored on the search engine site where it can be used to perform the specific function for which the robot was created.

If you have pages that you don’t want the robot to access, there are specific coding and files which can be set up to accomplish the desired exclusion. If you can’t write a robots.txt file, you can choose to insert HTML information into your source code that will accomplish the same result. Exclusion of robots from access to any or all pages on your website is at best a ‘Do not enter sign” rather than a locked door. There are forums that have been set up to talk about various issues and problems in dealing with the whole subject of robots.txt.

There are several disadvantages to using robots.txt software applications. First is the undue strain it places on bandwidth resources. Particularly where users have low bandwidth quotas, a ‘rapid fire’ robot can be extremely threatening to the network. Robots will also place extra demands upon the server as well.

Other issues arising with wider use of robots include determining which pages should be included or excluded. In the past, almost everything collected by the robot was retained, which can be very wasteful and very expensive; Progression toward a standard across the industry has resulted in the web standard of exclusion. This is robot.txt. It tells the robot to ignore specific pages or blocks of text.

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Title Tags

Title attributes or title tags are additional information in the HTML coding to tell the search engines that this is the subject of your web page. Whether it’s a blog or a web page, each page should have a title so the search engine crawler can determine what it is the page is intended to say. When search engines crawl web pages, they view the META title tag and then determine how well the content of the page matches the title. A good match will cause the web page to rank higher with the search engine, while a poor title, a misleading title or a false title will cause the page to be ranked lower or not indexed at all.

In order to increase the web traffic to your page, one of the simplest things you can do it to maximize the effect of your title attributes. For example, if your business title is , it’s a catchy title for a used book store, but probably won’t win you many points in the ranking, simply because there’s nothing to tell the viewer what it is you sell. If you were to make your business title , you have a much better chance of your title attributes being ranked by a search engine spider.

In the first example neither the viewer nor the search engine would know that the page or the business is about. In the second example, it’s clear that the page is about used books or is a used book business. In the second instance, the search engine has a better idea of what the page is about and you have a better chance of receiving a higher ranking when the page is indexed.

Another point to remember is not to attempt to up your rate of key words by adding them to a title. Using the above example, your title should not be . Because with this example, the title of your web page becomes: Endless Pages - Used Books Rare Books Out-Of-Print Books and Antiquarian Books, a viewer seeing that returned as a search result would probably be annoyed and not bother to go to the site. There’s nothing wrong with using all of those keywords in your web content, but don’t attempt to put all your keywords in the title of your page.

Your title shouldn’t contain any unnecessary words. A web page title of is too wordy, and contains several words that will not strengthen the page to the search engine crawlers who visit there. Even necessary words can make a title too long to be attractive to search engine crawlers and viewers alike.

A good title to your web page can be a key factor in bring visitors to your site, so it’s certainly worthwhile to spend adequate time in thinking about and planning for an effective title.

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Site Maps

Site maps are graphical representations of the way pages on a web site relate to each other. Site maps or site indexes are often prepared in planning a web site, particularly is the web site is large or complicated. This planning helps to ensure that all web pages are linked to the correct other web pages for the purpose of search engine optimization. Site maps or indexes are also used as a directory for web users to be able to more easily find the particular materials for which they are searching.

Site maps are important in determining that all pages in a web site can be found, not only by the human viewer but by the search engine robots. Site maps are even more important when the web site uses JavaScript or Macromedia Flash, neither of which can be viewed by the search engine robots. In this case, HTML code must be added to direct the search engine robot to additional pages.

Most search engines limit the number of links which they will follow from any one page, so you’re far better off to give the search engine robot a list of all the web pages which are associated with a site so that each one can be indexed in the search engine results.

Google Sitemaps was software developed to allow web masters to publish lists of their site. Without Sitemaps, only about one hundred dynamic page links would be followed. With Sitemaps, nearly one million links are listed. This means that much material that would otherwise not have been available to web users is identified on search engines.

Users have been slow to recognize the value of using a site map to find information on a site. Recent studies indicate most people will not perceive a site map as a road map to the website. They seem to be unable to comprehend information from a particular page. Many user’s cannot even find the site map with it is clearly market.

The same studies shows that most web site maps could not be understood by the user. Whether this is the fault of the programmer or the user remains to be seen. It’s important that the site map also reflect the purpose and mission of the search end game. At the same time, the site map should not just repeat the titles or descriptions of the balance of the web page. The site index doesn’t have to be boring, but it should definitely be informative and clear.

It’s important that the site map be easily accessible from one page. While drop down menus are certainly popular among many, in practice they can be much harder to prepare and design. They make it more difficult to see how the individual pages work together. Shorter site maps are generally just as informative as longer site maps and make it possible to better perceive the overall picture.

Site maps also should not attempt to present a moving view of a page. It should reflect the composition of the web site at a given moment in time.

Please view the search engine optimization services provided by ComCorp, Inc.

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Monthly Submissions

There are two schools of thought about the frequency for submission of web page URL’s to search engines and directories. One group says that web pages should be submitted frequently, even monthly to all the major search engines because the search engines such as Google drop as many as 60% of URL’s each month in order to make way for updated web listings. Proponents of monthly submission state that it keeps your URL at the top of Google’s index list. Another reason for monthly submission is that it reminds you to update and check links, content and structure of your website on a regular basis. Finally, with most sites except for Google going to a pay per click, pay for ranking, pay for listing, monthly submissions are required to keep your web pages in the indexing queue.

Many of the search engine optimization and ranking companies offer package deals at various levels promising to submit your web pages monthly for an entire year to x number of search engines. These submission packages range in cost from $49 to hundreds of dollars per year. Generally the paid inclusion sites cost up to $300 per website per year.

When you look at the other side of the picture, there is a preponderance of anecdotal and logical evidence that monthly submission not only are not necessary, they are not recommended for a number of reasons.

First, if your web site is submitted once to the top three web search engines, including Google, Yahoo Panama and MSN Search, you will be reaching over 95% of all web searches. You should think about it and determine if the efforts to reach 5% of the web surfers are really worth the cost.

Second, submitting a large number of web pages from one IP address during a short period of time can result in the search engine spider regarding your web site as spamming the internet and could result in your being banned from submitting at all.

Next, submitting a website for indexing through one of the ‘pay for submission’ programs does not necessarily mean your web site will be accepted and indexed. Even it is is, there is no guarantee that the indexing will occur in a short time frame. And if you are accepted and indexed, there are no guarantee that your ranking will be high enough to do you any good.

Since building content rich web pages with good quality links to high performance sites will get your web pages noticed quickly by the search spiders, and since Google is a high link focused search engine, you should follow this submission schedule for your web pages.

 Submit your finished and polished pages ONCE to the search engines. This can be to the free submission services. The search engine spiders will find your site either way, and once found they will not forget to visit you in the future. Essentially, that’s all a submission is–an invitation to the search engine spider to visit your site and review it.

 If you need to make significant changes in your website, you can resubmit but not more often than once or twice monthly. Spiders don’t check your site more often than that anyway.

So, the bottom line is don’t submit your URL’s monthly. Use your time and money to revitalize your content pages and to avoid unfinished sites which affect the health of the search engine spider.

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Using ALT Tags for Search Engine Optimization

Alternative text, commonly known as ALT tags or ALT attributes are used to present to the viewer when graphics are turned off, or the browser is not graphics capable. This can happen with hand held browsers, where the viewer has low bandwidth capabilities and so elects not to use graphics, or where there is assistive technology such as screen readers or Braille displays.

ALT attributes are particularly helpful in search engine optimization because the search engine spiders rely on the ALT attributes to determine the attributes of the graphics or of the object referenced. The ALT attributes were widely used in the early days of Internet growth, since many people did not have graphics capability. Even though we take graphics as a matter of course today, the ALT attributes are extremely helpful to those with accessibility requirements. ALT attributes are also commonly used when web page designers are looking for ways in which the bandwidth use on their network can be best exercised.

While descriptive ALT attributes are important in order to comply with accessibility standards set up by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Standard statement so that people with certain types of disabilities which require assistive devices will be able to gain an understanding of what is being displayed as an object or graphic; graphics which are used in a purely decorative text should be recognized by an empty ALT attribute such as alt = “”.

The ALT attributes are not intended to provide tool tips, screen tips or pop-up text when a cursor is passed over an image, but they are commonly used for the above purposes. Tool tips are often used to explain a term or a hyperlink with some web browsers. Screen tips are used in the same way with Microsoft end users and Macintosh users call them balloon help.

So, although the ALT attributes in HTML was originally intended in the past to facilitate web browsing where the browser did not support graphics images, such as Lynx, it has expanded to include those who are visually impaired and cannot see the images, as well as those who assistive devices such as those converting text to Braille or text to speech.

There is a growing debate as to how to use ALT attributes correctly, but some guidelines that should be adhered to include:

 Make the ALT attributes a textual equivalent of the images, NOT a description of the image. The ALT attribute should be short. Lengthy descriptions appropriately belong as a longdesc or (d) link.
 If the graphic is used as a link, then the ALT attributes should state that it’s a link and where the link leads.
 Use text in the ALT attributes that would make sense if read aloud.

The main concept in using ALT attributes is to make your web page content understandable to a blind person. ALT attribute text used inappropriately only confuses and obliterate the enjoyment of the information used by a blind person or by a screen reader.

Please view the Search Engine Optimization services provided by ComCorp, Inc.

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What Is Alexa?

Alexa is a search engine currently owned by Amazon.com. It appears to be a popularity based ranking which is achieved by users loading a search tool on their website. Alexa then tracks where you go and compiles the information into rankings based on the number of hits to each site.

The Alexa toolbar installed on your website provides you with certain additional information about the sites you are visiting. For example, Alexa automatically conducts a search when you type in a keyword query and provides you with the same results as you would receive from other search engines. When you submit the keyword, you will get two options along with the search results. The first option will take you directly to the site. The second option will take you to automatically generated information about each of the search results site. You can find out such things about the listed result as a thumbnail picture of the home page, a short contents description, its average traffic volume, a review of the website, links to related sites, the beginning date of the web site’s online exposure, how popular the site is as evidenced by the number of incoming links to the site, and the name, address, phone number and email address of the owner.

Secondly, the Alexa toolbar allows you to view site information about the ownership without actually entering the site. It’s presented as a drop down menu from the Alexa toolbar.

Next, Alexa presents a page ranking based on the number of visits to the website in question by those with Alexa tracking tools. This is the key point about this feature. It only tracks usage by Alexa users. It doesn’t include statistics from visitors who use browsers other than Internet Explorer, or those who don’t have Windows installed as their operating system.

The ‘Related Links’ category on the Alexa toolbar provides you with links to other web pages similar to the one in which you are interested. This feature also provides web sites where you can go to get directory type lists of the categories you’re interested in.

You can click on ‘Tell your friend” on the Alexa toolbar and enter the email addresses of someone that you want to inform about a particular link. This feature is like sending an email without having to open your email server and compose a letter.

You can look at pages from Internet archives that you’ve looked at in the past that have gone missing temporarily. This is helpful when the side is under construction or is temporarily unavailable, but you really need information from the site.

Finally, you can visit the Alexa site and view the movers and shakers list, which is a report of web pages that experienced drastic changes in popularity from one week to the next.

The negative side to Alexa is that while you are browsing, it’s collecting a lot of information about your likes and dislikes based on the web sites you visit. Increased advertising for products in these categories often follows this, particularly if they are related products carried by Amazon.com.

Please view the search engine optimization services provided by ComCorp, Inc.

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What is Page Rank?

PageRank is Google’s proprietary software for defining the relative importance of a web page as compared to another page. The software was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University who holds the patent on PageRank. Page and Brin went on to found Google which continues to use PageRank as an important–but not the only–component of its search engine page rankings.

According to Google statements. PageRank indexes web pages and updates its PageRank report about 4 times each year. The individual web pages are reviewed by the Google software to determine not only the number of links incoming to a page, but the importance of the page providing the incoming links. So if page A links to page B, PageRank says B must be more important than A. But, if A has incoming links from X, Y, and Z, that makes B even more important, because A is more important than if A had no incoming links. Another critical thing to remember is that if A has outbound links to B and to ten other sites as well, it is less important to B than if A only had one outbound link.

The second important factor to remember in looking at PageRank listings is that page content is also important. For example, if Page A has inbound links from 10 other pages and all the web pages deal with real estate loans, and they link to Page B which is about scuba equipment. Page A will not help Page B as much as if Page B was also about scuba equipment.

So, by utilizing both links and content when indexing web pages with the PageRank software, Google and other search engines which use the same or similar software, attempt to provide a balanced view of relationships between web pages and how important they are to the web page rankings.

Even though Google appears to rate links higher than content in its algorithms, in fact, the pages which have the best content are ultimately the ones that will get more visitors, both because they provide answers written in an informative and interesting way, and because as more visitors discover the information, the number of ‘hits’ increase as well. So, over time, the best way to improve your PageRank is to provide good content throughout your site. The PageRank doesn’t rank a site, it ranks individual pages.

Another word of caution against depending too much on PageRank numbers is that they lag well behind real time. Sometimes they change for no apparent reason. The web page author cannot rely on a finite formula that if you link to x number of sites who link to y number of sites each your PR will equal Z. It just doesn’t work that way. Your best plan of action is to utilize your web page development time wisely in preparing content laid out in an effective and logical manner which can be easily indexed by the search engines. By following this procedure, your PR number will improve over time.

To increase your PageRank, please view the Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization services provided by ComCorp, Inc.

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What is Pay Per Click?

Pay per click is a type of advertising medium used on advertising networks, search engines and websites. The advertiser selects certain keywords related to his or her product or service that are expected to be used as query terms by people using search engines. The advertiser agrees to pay some minimal amount, ranging from $.01 to $.50 for each time a searcher clicks on ads containing the selected keywords placed by the advertiser.

The expectation is that pay per click ads which appear within the top few listed to the right of the search results are more likely to be seen by and used by a searcher. In theory, a top pay per click ranking will result in increased web traffic and by extension more sales revenue visitors.

Popular keywords placed on one of the well-known search engines will cost more than more unusual key words. The three largest search engines who provide pay per click advertising at present are Google Adwords which captures about 50% of the market, Yahoo Search Marketing with about 22% and MSN Search which just completed beta testing.

A primary problem with the use of pay per click advertising is the potential for click fraud. Click fraud is illegal in many jurisdictions and search engine companies are the target of increasing litigation since they are the beneficiaries of the revenue generated by click fraud. The usual tactic of click fraud is for an unscrupulous merchant to click on his competitor’s ads even though he has no interest in purchasing a product. Depending on the price bid for the pay per click ad, such methods can rapidly deplete the competitor’s advertising budget with no real benefit in sales.

Search engines including Google and Yahoo have indicated their programming can detect and eliminate fraudulent pay per click transactions, but in fact, it’s difficult to determine if a transaction is genuine or not.

Pay per click engines usually are of one of three major types, product, service and keyword. Product search engines use databases supplied by their advertisers. When a customer uses the search engine to inquire about a particular product, the search engine pulls the appropriate information from the database of the advertiser and displays it as a search result ranked by the amount the advertiser pays per click.

Service search engines work in the same manner as product databases; only the feeds provided to the search engine are those of services rather than products. Search results are returned to the customer ranked by bid price, with the highest price paid by the advertiser at the top of the list.

Keyword search engines are the most commonly known and used of the search engines. This is the standard pay per click methodology where the advertiser selects and pays for keywords and the placement of the keywords on the search results list.

There has been some consideration to obtaining revenue from advertisers for displaying the pay per click ads, but at present revenue is generated only when the consumer actually clicks on the ad in question.

Please view the Pay Per Click Management services provided by ComCorp, Inc.

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the ranking of a website in the various search engines formulas or algorithms in order to increase the web traffic which is directed to the site. This can be accomplished by revisions in the underlying coding, structure and presentation without much being apparent to the human visitors to the site. Other efforts concentrate on adding content to the pages, which will be favorably perceived by the search engine spiders, while at the same time increasing the interest by the human visitors.

Almost as soon as the first search engine spiders were crawling the web sites looking for new pages, which had been indexed, i.e. submitted for placement on the web. The web master or developer for a certain site would submit the URL to the various major search engines who would in turn send a search engine spider to collect information from the URL and bring it back to the search engine’s own server where an additional indexer program would categorize the page data according to the words included, where they were placed on the page, and sometimes whether additional weight was to be assigned to any of the words. Any and all links from the page were also stored in a search engine scheduler so the spider would return to the site periodically to re-
index the information.

As soon as web site developers realized the importance the search engine spiders placed on the keywords, some of them began using unscrupulous methods to artificially inflate the number of keywords on a given web page. There were several strategies incorporated to accomplish this task some less ethical than others. For instance, html coding typically includes meta tags, which are inserted by the web developer in order to help the search engine spider determine the subject of a page. This legitimate usage, however, became adulterated when some developers began inserting keywords into the meta text. Sometimes they even included words that had no relationship to the subject of the page. Some of the ‘black hat” methods included things like filling white spaces with white on white text containing keywords or spam information. These words would not be visible to humans looking at the page, but the search engine would see the words and use them to rank site links and popularity counts.

The search engines developers also recognized the opportunity for deception and began backing away from the emphasis on meta keywords. Now, most search engines do not support the use of meta tags and Google has stated they use meta tags as a basis for spam detection. Because of the deceptive practices by some web authors, search engine developers realized they needed to develop more complex search engine algorithms, particularly those that rely less upon the input of the web masters.

The next step in search engine optimization was on the side of the search engines themselves with the development of software that calculated the probability of a given web page being reached by following links from one page to another across the web. This probability was stated as a PageRank. The same people who developed the PageRank software established Google search engine in 1998. Programmers liked the search engine and its popularity spread. Web programmers soon saw a way around the Google site with its emphasis upon off page factors and responded to Google by preparing and marketing “link farms” where thousands of links could be bought and sold and entered onto the web sites of the paying clients.

Today, the four major search engines, Google, Ask.com, MSN, and Yahoo use far more complicated algorithms, including both off page and on-page factors. In theory, these algorithms are secret, but SEO personnel are constantly testing and trying various methods of determining what the algorithms are. They are quick to share the information on various web sites, blogs and forums, sometimes for a price. The study and review of any patents or other material published by the search engines, is used to capture additional information.

In addition to capturing better rankings with high rated web pages, web masters recognize that the number of web conversions is important to gain business links as well. Conversions is the number of visitors who actually carry out a desired action after arriving at the website in question. The action might be signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, or asking a question online.
Increasing the web conversion rate may be accomplished by increasing the number of visitors, and improving the meta descriptions of the page to make it more accurately represent the content.

Search engine optimization companies who use techniques considered false manipulation of the results can find their client’s sites banned by Google and Yahoo. Normally, reputable companies would not use techniques considered ‘black hat’, but more and more frequently, those optimizers who rely on such techniques will find their sites banned or blocked by search engine companies.

Most major search engine companies now operate programs designed to help the web master insure that they are being reached by the spiders crawling the web. Search engine companies understand that helping the entire industry grow strong is the best way to retain their own business.

The two main types of search engine optimization are known as white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO is not just a matter of following a series of rules that will guarantee a high ranking in the search engines. White hat SEO focuses on good content, involves no deception and makes certain that the content that the spider sees is the same content seen by the reader. Black hat SEO techniques use methods that are disapproved of by the industry in order to increase the rankings. They may redirect a viewer from a site that is built to attract a spider to one that is suitable for human viewing. They may use very light text fonts on a page that the human viewer will not notice, but will be seen by the search engine spider.

Search engines can and do penalize such black hat SEO sites by blocking or reducing rankings of the sites.

The primary focus of good SEO techniques should be to treat the spider as just another visitor to the site and focus on building strong markets through good content, correcting technical weakness in the way the site is structured and working through other problems with presentation and customer service from increased visitations.

Please view the Search Engine Optimization Services provided by ComCorp, Inc

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