Tips 4 Web

Search engine optimization methods are divided in two categories: black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Both methods can help you to get high rankings on search engines.

However, one method is likely to get your website banned on search engines and recent developments indicate that websites that use that method will be in trouble soon.

What is white hat SEO?

White hat SEO means that the webmaster doesn’t try to trick search engines. White hat SEO means playing by the rules. Web pages that are created with white-hat SEO methods are beneficial to web surfers, search engines and webmasters.

What is black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. These methods include cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, etc.

Google and other search engines have made it clear that they penalize websites that use black hat SEO methods when they detect them.

Black-hat SEO methods seem to work. So why not use them?

Some black-hat SEO methods can lead to good results. There are quite a few webmasters who obtained high rankings for their web pages although they optimized them with methods that were not approved by Google and the other search engines.

You have probably also seen some web pages in the search results that looked strange or hardly related to what you’ve actually searched. So do black-hat SEO methods seem to work? Should you use them?

Nearly all black-hat SEO methods have been detected by search engines sooner or later. Javascript redirects or doorway pages used to work in the past but nowadays, these methods are usually the ticket to the land of banned websites.

While some cloaking methods continue to work at this time (if your competitors don’t peach on you), it’s likely that Google can detect them soon. The same is true for paid links. Some paid links can still not be detected by Google but it’s only a matter of time until Google has the algorithms that can.

You might get in trouble even if you used black-hat methods years ago

The problem is that things that cannot be detected by Google now might be detected by Google tomorrow. And Google might also be able to find out what you did in the past.

A good example for a spam filter that also considers things that have been done in the past is the WikiScanner. WikiScanner can find manipulations that have been made in the past and it can also associate anonymous changes to the people and companies who made these “anonymous” changes.

Combine such a spam scanner which a web page archive like Archive.org and you have an easy way to track the spam history of a web page.

Things that you have done in the past might backfire on you.

Don’t use black-hat SEO methods. As technical possibilities evolve, it’s very likely that these methods will be detected even if you don’t use them anymore. It’s better to use tools that focus on white-hat SEO methods.

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Anyone can target keywords, but there is a lot more to it than that. If you write a blog on laptops, do you want people visiting who are seeking information on parenting? Probably not. Sure, it’s a page view. But it isn’t a quality page view, and it could result in a bad bounce rate (or the percentage of people who visit your site, only to bounce right back out).

Follow these steps to ensure you are targeting the right keywords for your blog.

List Your Blog’s Appropriate Keywords

First off, you need to decide what keywords do fit. This can be a nice master list to consult when you’re writing a blog post. Do a little keyword research, either through a keyword research program or Web sites.

I like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which includes the ability to scan your blog and suggest keywords. You can also see which terms on your site have the most Adwords competition and search volume.

Examine Current Inappropriate Keywords

You should look at your site’s statistics to examine the keyword phrases people are using to get there.

If you see phrases that have nothing to do with your site’s topics, figure out which article is pulling people and revise the title and the targeted keyword phrase. If you find keywords that are a good fit, look for alternative keyword phrases or similar subjects that fit for future posts.

If you see a particular keyword phrase is driving a lot of traffic to your site or a particular post, edit that post to include more internal links. If this is a popular landing page, you want to give people a reason to stay.

Look for Indirect Keyword Phrases

This can be a little trickier, but it isn’t always bad to get traffic from a keyword phrase that isn’t the precise topic you cover. You may want to leave it alone if it’s working.

What you should consider first is whether the people seeking that information would also be interested in your information. If you run a blog that appeals to teens but is about MTV, you could be introducing readers to your blog even if they found you while searching for information on MySpace.

Why Keywords are Important

You want your blog read by people who are interested. You want people who will visit again, and who will comment and link to it. You might get a quick hit out of a popular phrase that isn’t related, but those won’t be quality visits.

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Having high rankings on search engines is a great thing. However, it’s also important that your web pages are displayed with an attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web surfers then they might not click the link.

How do Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live create the descriptions and snippets that are used in the search results?

How Google creates descriptions and snippets

Google seems to use the description from the meta description tag if you search for a page by its URL, or if the searched keywords do not appear within the found page.

If the found web page doesn’t have a meta description tag then Google seems to use the sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description.

If a web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) then Google might also use the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.

How Yahoo creates descriptions and snippets

Yahoo seems to use only the first part of the meta description which is complemented by a text snippet from the searched page that contains the searched keyword.

If a web page doesn’t have a meta description, Yahoo will use the description of the web page from Yahoo’s directory (if the page is listed there).

If a web page has no meta description and is not listed in the Yahoo directory, then Yahoo will display sentences from the found web page that contain the searched keywords.

How MSN/Live creates descriptions and snippets

MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description. If the searched keyword does not appear on the page, MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that appears on the page.

What does this mean for your web pages?

If you want to make sure that your web pages are listed with an appealing description in the search results, you should use meta descriptions on your web pages. If you don’t want to use the description that is used in the Yahoo directory and on DMOZ.org you should use the corresponding tags that prevent search engines from using these descriptions.

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Since one the best free ways to drive traffic to your site is trough search engines it’s really important to have high ranks for your desired keyword(s).

This post is going to inform you on how you can easily archive your desired keywords by doing the right thing at the right moment.

Is the search volume high enough to drive traffic?

Some keywords are not worth ranking for since they are not popular and never searched for, thus those keywords are not going to benefit you any way or form. A perfect example would be “Pros and Cons of Modern Economics”.

On the other hand, there are keywords, which are almost impossible to archive, and thus you should not target them as well. For example, “Economics”.

The perfect choice would be something that is not difficult to archive and yet people are actually search for it. So the perfect choice in our example, would be “Modern Economics”

So what’s the best way to check for the keywords search volume? There are a number of tools to do so. However, most of them seem not to work now due to unknown reasons.

The best alternative would be, this Google Tool, that perfectly displays keywords search volume.

Learn from your successful competitors

Do a search for the keyword on a number of popular search engines and see who are your competitors. Once, this is done, analyze the sites. In other words determine what those sites have and you don’t. Check their backlinks, anchor texts, places where they are promoted and so on.

There are various tools available on the net to do so. Some of them are Iwebtool tools and SEO tools by SEO company.

Establish linkbacks, as your desired keywords and anchor text

The most important thing you should do whenever you desire to archive high ranks for the specific keywords you should use anchor text to help you.

“Linked Text” Anchor text is the text that you click on to activate and follow a hyperlink to another web page or another web site.

Also remember that if you are promoting your website using banners, it doesn’t help your SEO ranking it helps only your traffic stats. So the ultimate choice would be to place anchor text right under your promotional banner.

There are a lot of places to promote your resource and I am sure that you are fully aware of them. All I want to bring up to your attention is List of Forums to Announce Your Directory, which is going to help in your promotion.

In conclusion, I would like to mention that you should try to be as much ethical as possible so don’t use black hat SEO and link spamming techniques.

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Last week, Yahoo announced that they now support the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. This new tag allows you to influence how Google and Yahoo index your website pages.

What is the X-Robots-Tag?

Google introduced the new X-Robots-Tag directive in 2007 to allow webmasters to control access to non-web page documents, such as Adobe PDF files, video and audio files.

The X-Robots-Tag is included in the HTTP header of a document. The HTTP header is the initial reply of a server to a query. It contains information about the document that follows, including content type, creation date, character set, encodings, etc.

The new X-Robots-Tag allows webmasters to add information about search engine indexing to the HTTP header.

Which commands are supported by the X-Robots-Tag?

At this time, the X-Robots-Tag supports the following commands:

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX (Use this tag if you don’t want to show the URL in Google’s search results)
• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE (Use this tag if you don’t want to see a Cache link in the search result pages for the document)
• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET (Use this tag if you don’t want to display a summary in the search result pages.)
• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW (Use this tag if you don’t want Googe and Yahoo to index the links in the page.)

The X-Robots-Tag is currently supported by Google and Yahoo. Other search engines don’t support the tag yet.

How to add the X-Robots-Tag to your documents

It depends on your server and on the method you use to create your web pages how you can add additional tags to the HTTP header. If your web server uses Apache, you can use the htaccess file to modify your HTTP headers.

In general, you shouldn’t mess with the HTTP header if you’re not 100% sure what you’re doing. A broken HTTP header can keep search engines away so that no search engine will index your website.

Instead of using the X-Robots-Tag, you can also add meta tags with the same functionality to your web pages:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”nosnippet”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

You can edit these tags directly in the head part of your web pages. They have the same effect as the corresponding X-Robots-Tags explained above.

Do you need the X-Robots-Tag or the corresponding meta tags?

If you don’t want to limit access to your documents of if you only have normal web pages on your website then you don’t need the X-Robots-Tag or the meta tags.

The X-Robots-Tag has been designed to restrict access to your documents. That means that it does not help to increase search engine rankings.

The new X-Robots-Tag and the meta robots tag allow you to restrict access to your documents. If you want to make sure that search engines index all of your web pages then you have to optimize your web pages.

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With so many people obsessing over PageRank (PR,) it’s often a bit funny to see many of the same people letting the PR of their own pages leak like it’s nothing.

What is Pagerank (PR?)

Before I provide some tips on improving the internal linking of your own site/blog in order to not only increase the “indexibility” (I know, that’s not a word, I like it though) of your own site/blog, but also to increase the PR of your “money pages,” I’ll explain the basics of PR for those who don’t already know.

Every page that is found on the World Wide Web (WWW) is given a set authority. Google calls this authority “PageRank,” while other Search Engines (SE’s) give it their own title.

This authority, or “link juice” is normally calculated by the authority of the page(s) in which it is linked and by the number links on that page in particular. For instance, page.html is assigned a Google PR of 6. This page contains 20 links. Each of the 20 pages that have been linked to will receive a small portion of that PR6. In other words, the higher the PR of the page linking to your page and the fewer the links, the more authority your page will receive.

It’s also important to understand the difference between Google Toolbar PageRank and the actual PageRank that is assigned to each page since Google is the biggest player in the SE game. Toolbar PR is the reading (usually false) that is shown to us via the Google Toolbar or any other tool that draws this data from the Google API, while the actual Google PR is not shown to anyone, outside a select few at Google, and does directly contribute to your pages Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) positions.

So, although many will say PageRank doesn’t matter, it actually does matter! Next time someone tells you “PageRank doesn’t mean anything,” do me a favor and tell them that they need to understand what PageRank is before they make a statement like that. Google toolbar PR doesn’t mean anything these days, but the actual PR that we can’t see does in fact mean quite a bit!

How to Improve your Internal Linking Structure

As I stated before, authority is passed through to each link on each page of the WWW that has been indexed by any given SE. With that being said, consider all the different types of links you harbor on your own site/blog. Most likely you have one or more of the following:

1. Affiliate links
2. Contact us links
3. About us links
4. Social media links
5. Links to sites that don’t need your help ie. Google, Wikipedia etc.
6. Links to other internal pages that contain the same content as your “money pages” ie. archives and navigation etc.

None of these links deserve any authority, yet they get it on many sites across the net. There are 3 ways to prevent this.

1. robots.txt
2. META nofollow
3. rel=”nofollow” attribute

The robots.txt option is the best for restricting internal pages, as outlined in #2,3 and 6 above. The nofollow META tag is useless, as you can do the same thing with robots.txt, which is honored by more major SE’s and the rel=”nofollow”, which unfortunately is only honored by Google and a few other SE’s, is what you should be using to restrict affiliate links, social network links etc. from being assigned authority or “PR.”

To restrict links from being indexed and assigned authority via the robots.txt method, just insert the following in your robots.txt file (replacing “page.php” and “directory/” with your own pages and/or directories:)

user-agent: Googlebot
disallow: /page.php
disallow: /directory/

You can also use a wildcard to restrict everything after a certain parameter ie.

/directory/*

To restrict SE’s from indexing and/or assigning authority to links via the rel=”nofollow” (some SE’s treat it differently) just insert the following into the link(s) you want to restrict:

rel=”nofollow”

To restrict SE’s from indexing and/or assigning authority to pages via the META nofollow option, just insert the following META tag into the page you want to restrict:

By using one or all of the above options you will be increasing the PR of your site/blog by taking the authority that was once assigned to these pages that should have been ignored in the first place and letting it flow to the pages that you want to rise in the SE’s.

Once you’ve loaded up your robots.txt file and restricted all the static pages on your site/blog it is relatively easy to continue this positive trend. Also keep it in mind and remember to insert a rel=”nofollow” into every link you publish that doesn’t need to receive any authority.

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