Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Let me start off by saying that I do not condone using this type of technique by any means. This is an article around learning the darker side of search engine marketing, since we do not see many articles related to it. Many people ask about black hat marketing methods and techniques, this can be considered a very black hat method.

As we all know, backlinks are essential in a marketing campaign for any website. The more relevant backlinks you have to your site, the better it is for your SERP’s. So let’s say you have just finished up your new website and are looking to start promoting it to the general public. You could start with simple forum signature links, paid directory submissions to high profile directories such as Best Of The Web, use Yahoo Answer’s by replaying to questions in the same category as your website, or just buy text links. There are several other ways to start building backlinks to your site, but those can be covered in another article. The problem can arise for you if you gain too many backlinks in a short amount of time for your website. Since the website is still new, you do not have many backlinks, if any at all.

To the search engines, you are like a small seed waiting to grow. As you get more backlinks, you are in essence watering your seed (no not that way). If you get to many backlinks to fast, that is like taking a huge bucket of water and pouring it on your little seed. As we all know that too much water is a bad thing, and over watering can kill the growth process. So imagine what would happen if you went out and got hundreds and hundreds of backlinks each day to your new site. Yes you guessed it, you can hurt your new website. The search engines will actually penalize your website if you all of a sudden starting showing all these backlinks very quickly.

Now take the over watering technique and apply that to a competitors new website. The same thing will happen to there site, to many backlinks in a short amount of time and they will get penalized in no time. I do not think that this would work on a well established website since the site has been around for years and has built the authority and backlink numbers already. What good is a few hundred links a day going to do to a site that already has hundreds of thousands?

There are two pieces of software that I can think of that would be able to accomplish this task for you with very little work. Xrumer and Prosubmitter are tools used to auto submit your website URLS to forums, blogs, message boards etc. automatically. These are not your typical run of the mill programs and can seriously harm your site if abused.

Xrumer works with several popular forums, it can auto create the account (breaks almost all security measures, captcha, word text, javascript and even email verification) and post messages for you. Even after you post a message with the URL, it can then go back to the same forum, create another account and post a following up bogus message to your original thread. Yes this software is pretty damn evil, it is multi threaded and can run on proxy servers. There are more in depth features of the program, but this should give you a general idea as to what it does and how it operates. So take either of these two, run them for a week straight on your competitors new website and I bet within a few weeks you will see the penalized results.

I had always thought that the SERP’s could not be manipulated on Google, Yahoo or MSN, but this sure sounds like a way to do it to a new website. So how can you protect your new website from someone who could sabotage it from the start? I am still working on answers to that question so I can share them with all of you. If you have idea’s on how to protect your new website from this sort of attack please post a comment and let everyone know.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.

Don’t you hate it when you find a list of websites that are suppose to offer free submission, then you find out you have to either pay a small fee or take the time and put a reciprocal link somewhere on your website. I was in search of actual free submission sites that I could just put in my blog site information or even my RSS feed and just hit submit. Well I am starting a list of tested and true to be free blog submission sites. The list is currently only 45 sites, however I will be adding more to this list on a weekly basis as I find and test the sites that are truly free. You can bookmark the list for your convenience and check for updates. If you have free sites that you can submit your blog or RSS link to please let me know as I will gladly add it to the list.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
http://www.globeofblogs.com/register.php
http://blogstreet.com/bsibin/add.cgi
http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp
http://portal.eatonweb.com/register/ (quick sign up first)
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.hirank.com/semantic-indexing-project/census/index.html
http://www.britblog.com/register/index.php
http://www.bloogz.com/man_en/add_your_url.php
http://boingboing.net/suggest.html
http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html (quick sign up first)
http://www.blogflux.com/add.php (quick sign up first)
http://blogintro.com/submit/
http://findingblog.com/add_blog.php?cat=
http://www.iblogbusiness.com/add.html (business only)
http://www.blogburst.com/blogger/join.html
http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php
http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm
http://www.postami.com/rss.finder/submit_feed.php
http://www.2rss.com/index.php
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
http://www.feedsfarm.com/a.html
http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php
http://www.search4rss.com/?add=default
http://www.feeds4all.com/NewFeed.aspx
http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp
http://www.feed24.com/?c=add
http://feeds2read.net/Suggest-A-Feed
http://www.jordomedia.com/RSS/l_op=Addrss.html (3 steps)
http://www.nfeeds.com/submit.php
http://free-rss.page2go2.com/rss-add.html
http://www.feedooyoo.com/ref.htm
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.rssmicro.com/?m=fs#theForm
http://www.feeddirectory.us/directory/submitrss.php
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php
http://www.rssmotron.com/feed_submission.php
http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php
http://www.morenews.be/voegbrontoe.php
http://www.daytimenews.com/submit-rss-feed.aspx
http://www.rssbuffet.com/submit.php

With the google updated coming soon, everyone seems to be scrambling to see what they can do to better there website for the SERP’s. Then some realize that they are the supplemental results and are stressing on how to get out of them. Well first if you do not know, google’s supplemental results are actually a second database that google keeps on record. The first database being the normal listings, or non supplemental results (no genius needed there). The supplemental results are for pages that google feels is not as important as other pages. You will notice that with the supplemental results, the google cache is older since they really do not feel the need to come back to your site unless you give them a good reason. Now you will see in come situations supplemental results showing up higher in the SERP’s, this is due to the search term not being very popular. Let’s look a little further and see the common ways of getting your website or some of its pages in the supplemental index is by the following:

Low Trust Factor
You can have thousand’s of links pointing to your website, however if they mainly come from FFA, blog spam networks, reciprocal link farms or using automated software to put your link on forums and blog comments. Even though your site has links all over the place, those links do not carry much weight with google. With these factors, they do not trust your site as well as other sites in your niche.

Page Rank
Yes I know this might start an argument, however PR is important for any SEO campaign. If your website is in a highly competitive niche, then you better get your site out there as far as linking and site notoriety is concerned. Google will actually take your PR into account when deciding to put you in there supplemental index or not. If your site is among thousands, even millions, then why would they list a PR 1 or PR2 site with the PR6 or PR7 sites? Your PR is determined by google and the amount of quality websites that are linking back to your website. The more you have, the higher the trust you have shown google thus pushing your website higher in the SERP’s and out of there supplemental results.

Duplicate Content
If your website has content that is the same on multiple pages, or close enough to being the same through many pages you can get hit with a duplicate content penalty. Duplicate content does not just stop with the actual body text on your site, this also applies to your page titles and your meta descriptions. People do not realize that when you add 50 pages to your website that share the same title or page description, you are actually hurting your SEO campaign.

So What Is The Cure To Google Supplemental Results?

Best answer I can give you is straight from Matt Cutts blog itself.

In general, the best way I know of to move sites from more supplemental to normal is to get high-quality links (don’t bother to get low-quality links just for links’ sake).

Getting high quality backlinks and also deep links will help pull your site out of the supplemental results. If you do not know what deep links are, then let me show you some examples.

Normal Link:
Http://www.yoursite.com

Deep Page Link:
Http://www.yoursite.com/category1
Http://www.yoursite.com/category1/pagename.html

This will show google pages deeper in your site and they will begin to crawl your site from there. This has also been a great way to help get your website out of google’s supplemental results.

Now if you have a lot of pages that share the same page title or the same meta description I advise you to change them all to be unique to one another. Once you have made those changes, then begin on your quality backlinks and deep links. If you keep those titles and descriptions all the same then you are making it that much harder for yourself to get out and can take even longer IF it even works for you. So when creating your pages, make sure each page has there own unique page title and meta description tags please.

Your main goal for SEO is to increase SERP’s, bring quality traffic that makes you money. However a lot of people who are just starting out in the world of SEO fail to look at what I think the most important factor is, keyword research. I have read debates that state what is more important to improving your ranking with the search engines and most have made great points. However, they failed to mention something that is more important then any factors they had listed. Keyword research will determine the direction your SEO campaign will go before you even create the website. What you might think is a great keyword or key phrase, the actual searches being done each month are a lot lower then you expected. Imaging this scenario is heartbreaking for a lot of people because I bet it has happened. You spend a lot of hours optimizing your website for your keywords, your site ranks well for those keywords and yet your traffic has hardly moved. All that hard work, patience and perseverance for your keywords has resulted in low traffic and not many sales. Now you sit back and think to yourself everything you did worked because your rankings show for it. You just cannot figure out where the traffic is now that you have that good ranking.

Before you start any SEO campaign, you need to not just make a keyword or keyphrase list, you need to research them. When you research what you are trying to optimize for, almost every time you will come up with new keywords to use in your SEO campaign. You will find things that are searched for quite a bit that maybe your competition isn’t using. That is the main goal when researching, what can I use that is getting a good amount of searches each month that the competition really isn’t using yet? This way you can determine what keywords to optimize your website for ahead of time. If you would have done this from the start of your SEO campaign then all the hard work you put into it would not have to be corrected. Now you have to change the content wording, title tags, meta tags, alt tags, heading tags, contact all the sites you have links on to change the anchor text. All of this could have been avoided if you had researched your keywords ahead of time. I know you want your website to make you a lot of money, we all do, that is the point of being in business. Just remember though a little research can go a long way and save you a great deal of time in the end.

Here is a small list of tools you can use to research your keywords. You will notice that I did not list the Overture Keyword Tool. I feel it is no longer accurate to use since it is no longer being updated and the results are from January 2007.

Word Tracker

SEO Book Keyword Tool

Keyword Discovery 

 

Years ago what you put in your meta tags would make or break or search engine ranking. Search engine marketers would emphasize heavily on what was said in the meta tags, because it played a big role on where the site ranked. You would find websites that had more text in there <head> tag then they did on the front page of the website. Imagine over 15 lines of meta tag’s being used on each page. Now a days though all of those meta tags are useless and a waste of space. There are a few meta tags that I still recommend everyone to use and I will go further into that in a bit. First let’s take a look at some meta tags that you will find by these “meta tag generators” that I would not bother using.

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”10″>
This tag would refresh the page after 10 seconds. Never use the refresh meta tag. There is no reason why you should be refreshing the page unless you are looking to redirect the user to another part of your website or a different domain name. Even then this is not the recommended way of accomplishing that.

<META NAME=”Expires” CONTENT=”never”>
This tells the search engine spider/robot when the page will expire or be out of date.

<META NAME=”Classification” CONTENT=” “>
This meta tag would be used to classify your webpage for a directory or if the search engine breaks down a site to categorize it.

<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=” “>
This meta tag specifies who the author is. To me this is just a waste of space and I have seen clients who have using keywords here that had no effect.

<META NAME=”Subject” CONTENT=” “>
This would be the subject of the webpage, and then again you have a title for the webpage I hope so just use that.

<META NAME=”Copyright” CONTENT=”© “>
Copyright notice would go here.

<META NAME=”rating” content=”general”>
This meta tag is used to give your website a rating for your audience. You could manipulate this tag by having an adult site or gambling site and still set it to general. Yea I can see how this will help you, use the backspace key and save yourself the time of even typing this one out.

<META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”XX Days”>
On new clients websites I still come across this tag quite a bit. Why would you want to tell the search engine spider/robot to only come back after XX amount of days? Hell why would they even want to listen to you? If you set this number to say 45 days and each day you add new content the search engine wouldn’t come back until after the 45 days are up? You have got to be kidding me! Highlight the entire meta tag and use the delete key in the upper right hand corner, thank you.

Misc. Meta Tags

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
This will make sure that your title or description from DMOZ will not be used on the SERP’s.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

This tag will make sure that your Yahoo directory title or description will not be used on the SERP’s.

<META NAME=”Robots” content=”all”>
You can use this meta tag if you are not comfortable or just do not want to create and use a robots.txt file. Here you can specify to the search engine spider/robot what pages or directories you do not want them to crawl and index.

So What Tags To Use?

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=” “>
Using the description tag is a must in my opinion. Google and other search engines sometimes use this tag when displaying your website on the SERP’s. The description tag should be different for each webpage you create, keeping the same description tag on every page is not an effective way for SEO on your website. Whatever keywords or keyword phrases you are going for on that specific page, you will want to word your description tag around them as well.

<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=” “>
There are search engines out there that ignore this meta tag (Google being one). However there are smaller search engines that still use this tag to help index your website so why not take the extra minute to use this one. I am sure others will argue and say why not take the minute and use one listed above. Also it has been shown that not using this meta tag will not hurt your SERP’s with some of the major engines. This one is up in the air to use or not, I still use them on my client’s websites. You will want to have created different keyword meta tags for each page as well but do not spam your keywords or key phrases in this tag.

Those are really the only two tags you should use at all times. I know using the Keyword tag is not needed for certain search engines however since it is used for others I say use it, but do not abuse it. The end result is you are always looking for a slight advantage over your competition to boost your website on the SERP’s. Meta tags are not as important as they used to be, so if you come across a company that is offering there SEO services and focuses heavily on altering your meta tags and how important they are just walk away. Those companies have no clue what they are talking about and just want whatever money they can get from you and that is it. They are just like the companies who will submit your website to 1,000’s of search engines for a fee. I will talk about that however in another post.

I had this brought to my attention the other day and I just can’t believe this statement to be true. When you use your favorite rank checking software to hit the search engines to see where you rank for your keywords, it can hurt your rankings. With all the request’s to the search engine to check each one of your keywords and its position is abuse on there system. The search engines in return will penalize your site for the automated checking process and not actually “clicking” on the link. I thought for a few seconds, and then said to myself what a load of crap! The only thing I can see happening is the search engine banning your IP after excessive queries in a short period of time. I am not sure if this is true and if so how long they would ban your IP for or how many queries it would take in XXXX amount of time to get a ban.

Seriously though, if using rank checking software actually did hurt your website and it’s results don’t you think for a split second the competition would be hitting the top sites on a daily basis? There are companies over sea’s who sit on dial up accounts all day long, logging on and off while clicking on sponsored listings to waste there money (click fraud). I would think then those same companies would offer a similar service using a rank checker to slam the top ranked sites and get paid for it. That is just to easy to do and that is why I believe checking your rank on the search engines for your keywords will not hurt your listing results and is just down right bogus.

Yes using flash technology on a website can look great. However if used in the wrong manner it actually does more harm then good. For instance, you have a an awesome flash header created for your website. Roll over effects, clean animation, sound effects (mute button please don’t forget!), all the bells and whistles to make it look nice. Yet you have your entire website navigation built into it as well. The buttons may look nice and have the roll over effects you were looking for. However it is a terrible idea for any SEO you plan on doing for your website. First of all what if the viewer does not have flash installed on there computer? I hate to say it, but it happens still to this day. Secondly, even though the search engines have come a long way they still cannot read the links embedded in your flash. So when they go to crawl your website, they will not spider the rest of your website. Another thing to keep in mind is people who use IE will have to click on the flash first to just activate it, then click on it again to go anywhere. If you insist on using flash though for your navigation, please make sure you include a footer that has links to the rest of your site so the search engines can crawl your site properly. Another alternative is to create a CSS menu, you can still make some nice roll over effects, incorporate images for the roll over, drop down menu’s etc. and still be search engine friendly. Making your website easy for the viewer to navigate through is very important, don’t forget that.

A recent study by Sistrix (site is in german) states that using the H2-H6 headline tags showed better results then the H1 tags in the Google SERP’s. Maybe Google has seen the heavy use of H1 tags and feels that the actual page content is more important then the headline itself. Just another curveball thrown at us, however one discovery I find very interesting since I was unaware of it. So for future SEO of your sites, keep in mind that the H2-H6 tags have greater weight then the H1 tag.