lack Hat SEO, a Necessary Evil - Are you the next Darth Vader? In the Star Wars Series, Anakin Skywalker (a promising Jedi knight) goes from good guy to the boss of bad guys, all while trying to save his wife from a prophesied death. He decided to do it by any means necessary. To a Black hat SEO, the ends justifies the means. S/he does not care if the web site's content is poor or the visitor is inconvenienced; all of these are secondary considerations. The user is brought in by dishonest links. All the Black hat cares about is results (translate into hits). All SEO experts want a high ranking and lots of hits. In this respect, all SEOs manipulate SERPs (and all search engines assertions are proved right). I submit that is the duty of SEO experts to deliver traffic if they get paid. All SEO experts worth their shingles would practice Black hat techniques if they would not get penalized. The Black hats are here. So what? Myth Two: Multiple Domain Names Pointing to the Same Site Increase Rankings If you have multiple domain names pointing to the same site, the search engines call them "mirrors" and will penalize you (the mirrors won't get listed). So if you have multiple domain names and you want to remain in the SERPs, build sites to correspond to each separate domain name. The real problem people have with Black hats is political correctness. It is not politically correct to cold call and badger people into buying things, it is not politically correct to be a "bible thumping" evangelical. And it is definitely not politically correct to be a "Black hat" SEO. It is however politically correct to call Bush an idiot (you get the drift). The websites that get penalized most on search engines are not Black hats (real Black hats do not know what spamming means, they only understand viral strategies). They are small websites that can't afford a professional and use optimization rules that the search engines consider forbidden. Link farms won't come up and tell you "hey, I am a link farm and just have thousands of links to totally unrelated sites." Instead, you'll get an offer from a third party site or via email. You have a responsibility to check that you are not linking to some link farm; you can't control who links to you. If you are linking to a banned site, your site may be penalized. Some people even network and set up link farms; a network of full-time housewives once linked to each other and unintentionally created a perfect link farm. Please note: SEO firms check all sites linking to you on a monthly basis; that's one reason why they collect a maintenance fee. Some high-ranking websites use pop ups that you cannot close and other unethical practices (such as unsolicited emails, which the pop up forced you to subscribe to before it goes away), and nobody bans them. They also buy text links on millions of sites and nobody accuses them of unethical linking practices. Black hats keep search engines awake at night Off Page Myths Myth One: Linking is Everything Despite everything said about link farms, people actually engage in them without being truly aware of it. The fact is, linking IS important. Linking and content alone will probably do more work than rigorous scientific techniques and automated methods. But it can be dangerous to get overly attached to linking and not know that indiscriminately linking (reciprocally) to a link farm can get you grey listed and banished from Google's SERPs until you come humbly clean (give them a few months before you get relisted). Two things keep search engines awake at night: Google and SEO practices (Google only stays awake because of SEO). SEO practices enable search engines to remember their primary clientele: the man with the mouse. And the SEO expert is the man with the better mousetrap. Apart from SEO, redesign is necessary to improve your users' experience on your site. Forms, layout, interactivity, aesthetics and more all need to be updated as web standards and usability change and improve. You can't afford to assume it's all about SEO when your users get to your site and flee at the quickest opportunity. Now that we have finished with the On Page Myths, let's look at some Off Page Myths in SEO. Search engines worry that SEO practices will let low quality content drift to the top of their pages, and therefore strive to develop ways to insulate their SERPs from the practices of the SEO adept. However, the search engines are playing catch up. All search engine optimization practices are rigged around how the search engines work, and undergo review every time the search engines change their crawling and indexing algorithm. If your site is not search engine friendly, you can still optimize, but it makes the whole process just that much more difficult. Your navigation structure must be navigation friendly to spiders. Your copy MUST be changed if it is not relevant to your target audience. If you insist on unfriendly design then you should include a Pay Per Click program; you will need it. Black Hat SEO, a Necessary Evil - You say tomato... The question of people saying White hat, Black hat, is largely one of ethics. And ethics like any other branch of philosophy is subject to schools of thought. However, due to the "political correctness" of certain views, right now, reality is being overshadowed by doublespeak. The reality is that customers want results. You will do anything as long as you won't get banned or taken to court for it. I could summarize the above statement in one word: cheap! If you can't afford to redesign, say so. Don't say it's not necessary. Sometimes a site is just not search engine friendly; for example, you build an AJAX-powered site, and then call an SEO expert who tells you to move the text away from the AJAX windows. If you tell him that "that's not necessary" you just made his job a lot harder. This said, content must be relevant; if you are optimizing for the right key words your key words appear more important when emboldened and in headers than when all over the place. Avoid key word stuffing and spamming, you will get penalized. Myth Three: You Never Need to Redesign Your Site Spamming works; if the numbers don't add up, then spammers would stop spamming and try something else. If your website gets high rankings because of your link network, and not because you offer relevant content, then I call you a spammer (a link spammer perhaps), but if I write an article and get a piece of software to send it to a hundred directories, you call me a spammer. If I have an opt in database, and send emails to all of them using an automated system, Microsoft and yahoo would call me a spammer if they had their way. Myth Two: Key Word Density is Everything The idea that any one thing is everything is probably the most dangerous concept. Google's PageRank algorithm has over 200 factors it considers and MSN's Ranknet considers over 600 factors. Onsite factors on their own are just a start to SEO; off page factors are also important. So who is a spammer? Or is spam just a bad word because it sounds like it? Google compliant Black hats Most real "Black hat" practitioners are Google compliant, and will never be banned by Google. They operate by putting links back to their sites in comments, and posting these comments in high-ranking blogs worldwide. Lots of people are active Black hat practitioners, making loads of money for Google and driving traffic to Adsense campaigns. This is because Black hat SEOs seem to be the only SEOs who explore every possible way to optimize for search engines, due to their " by any means necessary" motto. They actually find ways that are acceptable to the SEO averse search engines to optimize their sites and get a high page ranking. Combining these with the traditional techniques of SEO (keyword density, use of meta tags and flat website design), they bring mediocre sites with low content to top ranking positions. I personally dislike purely sales sites with no content. So can I call them spammers? About Meta tags -- please DO write relevant keyword and description Meta tags into your code. It gives spiders something to cache in the database. Without them, you will be left with no description when listed in the search engines. If your key word Meta tags are irrelevant to your content you may get penalized. The search engines do not place any sort of premium on Meta tags for ranking; I have seen and ranked sites with absolutely NO META tags. This said, please add Meta tags, they make your site look neater in the SERPs. Why would I say the Black hat SEO is a necessary evil? I don't care for keyword stuffing, nor tiny text; not only are they rather old, they are plain silly. And I agree that spamming is inconvenient, even though we have all learned to live with it. Apart from that, sites with no content raise my ire. So do politically correct people, who try to manipulate others to their way, or try to cover up their own shortcomings by giving a dog a bad name. The search engines discovered that their SERPs are fallible, and in an effort to play God, they say "unethical practices," and end up giving SEO practitioners a bad name. The search engines need the adepts of Black hat SEO techniques, since this will be the only way they can work on their ranking strategies and eventually give the users a search experience which is rewarding and fulfilling "Knowing yourself, and not knowing the enemy, one defeat for each victory, knowing yourself and the enemy, in a hundred battles no fear of defeat." On Site Optimization Myths Myth One: Just Put Up Meta Tags to Get Your Ranking I didn't want to put this one here at first because everybody else mentioned this in their articles, so I thought that it was an open secret. Then I met a businessman who optimizes his blog via writing key word meta tags and doesn't do much else as far as SEO. I told him to "try and read a bit more about SEO," then I cleaned up his tags for free and offered to help with linking (for a fee). 28.The SEO Analysis: What it is and Why You Need it One of the very first things we do when we start working with a client on a search engine optimization project is perform a head to toe site analysis. In fact, more often than not, we won’t actually even quote a price for SEO unless we’ve already done an analysis. Search Engine Optimization Can Be Done By Anybody Now the fact is you can optimize your site yourself, and it's not very hard, depending on your key words and competition, but hopefully with this article you won't be presumptuous in your efforts to get that top ranking for your site. Yes, "anybody" can do SEO; interestingly enough, stay-at-home moms seem ideally suited for the work since they have time and write great copy. Like everything else in life, however, it's not as easy as the pros make it look. The reasons for that are three-fold. First, every single website is different. Second, we have no idea what we're dealing with just by glancing at a site. Lastly, and most importantly, we spend a large amount of time performing the analysis because it's such an important part of putting together a plan for a site's SEO project. I addressed this question first because it is the foundation of all SEO myths. It comes from the idea that "SEO is easy, just submit your site to so and so directory and so and so search engine and you are on a roll." Do-it-yourself SEO gets its processes crossed. Now I use the term "professional" loosely, but let's just say a professional really has the knowledge and skill to get high rankings in specified key words. The idea that an SEO professional is not needed, and that by doing A, B and C you can reduce costs and optimize your site, is the root of SEO myths. We will come back to common myths that exist about SEO professionals (although some have been discussed in previous articles on SEO professionals). While this might appear at first to be not a particularly earth-shattering revelation, it surprises me how many so-called SEOs don't actually do an initial site analysis. Another thing that gets me shaking my head is the standard single page of statistics that many SEO firms consider to be an analysis. In this article, I'm going to share with you a couple of secrets to finding out what may really be going on with your website that we always look at during the course of an SEO analysis. But first, I want to show you a few so-called SEO analyses that quite frankly have me hopping mad.
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