The Bad: Common “Black Hat” Practices

Despite the many anti-spam ordinances that have been made by search engine figureheads such as Google’s Matt Cutts, there are still several unethical, black hat techniques used by search marketers to bolster the performance of their clients’ websites. Unfortunately, search engines are not quite to the point where all of these methods are automatically caught and penalized and they rely heavily on human reporting, but this doesn’t mean that they have not drastically improved over the years. Below are some of the most common black hat practices still in use:

• Keyword Stuffing – A common attribute to many spam sites is that they “stuffed” with the same keywords over and over. In one of our recent consultations with Jonathan Jonas of Sober.com, we found that his competition had words such as “addiction” as many as 150 times on a single page that only contained around 800 words. The goal here is to make search engines think that the page is extremely relevant to the word “addiction”, when in actuality the information is more or less useless.
• Invisible/Hidden Text – If you’ve ever looked at the footer or source code of a website, you may have seen text that was the same color as the background, or hidden from view with CSS. This text is simply meant to hide what would otherwise hinder the user experience, but to trick the search engines into thinking there is more relevant content on the page than there really is. For the most part, search engines are fairly adept at detecting this and penalize heavily for it, often banning the sites from indexation.
• Link Building Bots/Programs – We’ve mentioned before that inbound links should take quality as a priority over quantity, but having a plethora of inbound links from thousands of different domains can be effective in some scenarios. Link building programs or bots often post generic, anchor text optimized comments and links on blogs or automate the submission of a website to thousands of low-quality directories in an effort to garner rankings for a targeted keyword. While this used to be a way to obtain first page Google rankings in a matter of days, there are now penalties in place for websites that see huge bursts in inbound links from non-credible sources. You can use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see how many incoming links there are to your site and see if your SEO company is using a program to build links, rather than doing so manually.
• Doorway Pages and Websites – Pages on a website that are stuffed with certain keywords but not visible to users are known as “doorway pages”. The objective is to have search engines pick up on these “highly relevant” pages and drive traffic to them, even if they provide no real context to the site they are on. Using the example of “addictions” we mentioned above, the site in question had a doorway page for each type of addiction simply for the purposes of tricking the search engines. This concept applies to entire websites or website networks as well, where the site provides no real content of value and simply links back to a parent site. It is important to check your website Analytics so that you can see where you traffic is coming from. If you notice there are a several obscure, spam-oriented sites sending you traffic, you might want to address your SEO company.

The Good: Common “White Hat” Practices

Now that you know what to look out for when it comes to shady SEO practices, you should know the methods by which an ethical SEO company will improve your website’s performance. Note the difference in how ethical SEO methods prioritizes organization, research and quality over spam and quantity.

• On-Page Optimization – We recently wrote an article that describes how you can properly research and organize information on your site to be the most search engine friendly, but the overall goal of on-page optimization is to appropriately target specific keywords because they apply to your brand and your target audience, NOT just to garner traffic. A targeted audience that arrives at a well designed, cleanly organized website is much more likely to convert (purchase, signup, etc.) from you than bulk traffic who arrived from some obscure corner of the internet.
• Unique Content Creation – One of the most central ways to getting targeted traffic is creating content that will appeal to your target audience. Blogging, videos, podcasts, and tweets are all extremely important when it comes to attracting people interested in your product or service and helping search engines to determine a clear theme for your website. Neglecting other factors, if your site has 200 pages in total all discussing different types of running shoes, new running shoe product lines, video promotions and other relevant content, it is going to rank higher for the related topics than a site that has 40 completely different topics. Furthermore, creating content on your topic allows you to demonstrate that you are an expert within your niche and therefore are likely to be referred to by your visitors.
• Natural Link Building – While creating unique content may result in a multitude of natural inbound links, ethical SEO campaigns often require you to work to obtain the links manually. Natural links are varied from several different sources and are not all optimized with certain keywords that you are targeting. Natural link building is the result of good networking with other webmasters, bloggers, and journalists in your industry that want to link to you because you’re an authority. Moreover, the goal of these links is to be placed on sites that have the most authority and credibility with search engines already so that you are associated with them, rather than a network of spam blogs. You can find a good resource on beginner’s link building here on our blog.

Ethical SEO and Future-Proofing Your Campaign

While search engine algorithms can and do change on a regular basis, those that have employed ethical SEO methods generally have very little to fear when it comes to their rankings and overall campaign performance. We and other SEOs have seen a multitude of documented cases where websites go from front page rankings to page 5 rankings (or even de-indexation) overnight, all as a result of their shady methods being discovered. Unfortunately, in many cases the company that is suffering the loss did not realize that their SEO firm had employed such methods, which is why it is important to read the aforementioned list of black hat SEO techniques.

Just as you wouldn’t build a physical storefront with shoddy materials that are forbidden by the building code, you don’t develop an SEO campaign with shoddy practices. The last thing a company needs to do is invest a large sum of money in development, only to have to pay another contractor to rebuild everything once the “building inspector” (Google) comes by and closes the “store” (your website) down.

The central reason that ethical or “white hat” SEO practices are endorsed and advocated by search engines is that it allows the content on the web to be organized and identified in the best possible manner, which supports their main objective. There will always be those that attempt to “cheat the system” by tricking the search engines, but over the course of time these methods have and will continue to be identified, brushing away the spam from search results and uncovering the truly helpful, quality content.

Kelly sets the stage for disaster in the opening of his keynote speech:

“If we still hadn’t get [sic] the message, there were separate seminars, two a day, laid on free of charge by Google, complete with glossy brochures, on how to do well in Google News. The seminars were full. We all wanted to know the secret. The brochure made it seem so easy…Of course, as we’re all aware now, it was too easy. In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation.“

Mistake #1: Don’t Plan Ahead For The Obvious

As Mr. Kelly and a whole plethora of other newspaper executives sat in on the SEO seminars, eager to learn about how to propel their content around the web, they failed to think about the effects it would have on the future of their industry. If every major news organization begins aggressively optimizing their content to be found by the search engines and all of that content becomes readily accessible, is it not obvious that the value of your work is going to decrease drastically?

“As any first-year economics student will tell you, massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value. Great swathes of newspaper website inventory – sometimes as much as 90 percent of page views – went unsold.”

Yet, Mr. Kelly, it seems everyone in your industry failed to recognize this before it was too late.

Mistake #2: Destroy Your Brand Values and Standards

As executives learned of the magic of SEO and went back to their organizations saying, “We need to focus primarily on SEO, that’s where all the traffic is!”, they were consciously admitting that the quality of their content and their brand was no longer of importance. Optimizing every article, every link, every word and picture in hopes of being ranked highly was now the priority – not creating unique, engaging content. With the decline in content quality also comes the decline in not only brand values, but brand perception. By pumping out more, lower quality content the newspapers were doing nothing but destroying the loyalty and rapport they had established with their readers. As all of the organizations nose dived into the pool of mediocrity and rampantly copied content, they lost all hope of maintaining a loyal, engaged audience.

“But it gets worse. Much worse, in fact, for our long-term future. In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users…”

And you’re surprised…why? Do you think Apple has such a relentlessly loyal fan base because they consistently create terrible products? Do you think National Geographic has been around for over 100 years because it produces mediocre content? Of course not.

Mistake #3: Focus On Extracting Revenue From New “Users”

Any business text book will tell you that the easiest and most efficient way for a company to make more money is to find more ways to benefit from its already loyal, paying customer base. Unfortunately, the newspaper organizations took the exact opposite approach.

“We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, “users” is about right. They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.”

After having collectively spent millions of dollars to drive traffic to their websites, suddenly Mr. Kelly and his industry colleagues realized that no one was buying from them and most “users” could really care less about where they got their content – it was all mediocre, anyway. You don’t make money by selling to “users”, you make money by selling to “customers”.

A few good recent examples of this is TechCrunch creating the, “CrunchPad” (now called the JooJoo) and Smashing Magazine writing, “The Smashing Book”. Both of these sites have hugely loyal audiences and they will devour a product that these sites put out. However, neither of these sites would exist if they said, “Hey let’s make a bunch of crappy content and drive a ton of new users to it!” – Surely we aren’t the only ones who realizes how asinine this sounds.

Mistake #4: Make SEO An Objective, Not A Tool.

Hopefully by now you’ve clearly realized that SEO should never have been the primary objective of the news organizations. High quality content is always of the utmost importance. Yes, it is also extremely pertinent to make sure that your wonderful content is found by a great deal of people, but the goal is to turn “users” into “customers” by creating a level of quality content that they cannot find elsewhere. Unfortunately, if that content is not marketed appropriately and effectively, your great content cannot be found by those willing to pay for it.

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz recently wrote an article on this notion and has a great point:

“Like many parts of life – it’s not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field.”

Great content and SEO go hand in hand, but content is always the primary focus so that your SEO efforts can be fruitful.

Mistake #5: Blame SEO For Your Mistakes

As much SEO bashing as Matt Kelly does in his article, he comes to an interesting conclusion:

“It means not letting SEO wag the dog, but instead focusing on creating the most engaging, entertaining, informative content possible. It means building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines. It means we have to stop thinking about users, but start thinking of readers, listeners, viewers. One day, even customers.”

After all the slander and finger pointing, it is good that Mr. Kelly finally admits that they were doing it right in the first place and just ended up making a very expensive, 15 year long blunder.

• Company Name: Task Smashers
• Domain: www.tasksmashers.com
• Product: Online Project Management Application

Keep in mind that some of the below implementations do require the research that was mentioned in our first article, but others simply require a little know how and some elbow grease.

Relevant Titles

When creating content on your website, it is logical from both a usability and search engine standpoint to make your titles as explicit as possible. The more relevant your title tags are, the quicker that users can find what they want on your website and the easier it is for search engines to categorize the content. Using relevant titles applies to both your site’s pages and blog posts, so avoid creating flowery titles such as “Ways to get in touch” in comparison to “Contact Us” or “Web-based project management tool ” when you can say, “Online project management”.

As you are determining your titles, the research you have done on targeted search terms can really make all the difference in your website’s visibility. Let’s say that Task Smashers wants to name their home page, “Task Smashers – Online Project Management”. This title is a great start since they are being descriptive, but “online project management” doesn’t get searched for very much on its own (only 40,500 searches monthly in Google). Naturally, Task Smashers wants their website to be found by as many people that search for project management as possible, so let’s expand upon the title and bring it to be much larger targeted audience. Adding in some more terms that describe their product’s functionality, we can create a title such as “Task Smashers – Project Management, Task Management and Collaboration” that has 3 major search phrases instead of 1 and an estimated 2,440,500 searches per month – what a huge difference in potential visibility!

Organized Content

Header tags (H1, h3, H3, etc) are designed to allow website owners to define the importance of text on their page and organize it accordingly. With the exception of the title, the H1 tag is the most prominent text on a page to both users and search engines and is used to help establish the theme of the page; in addition, the other heading tags are used to label subheadings under the H1 tag in order of importance. For example, if Task Smashers has a “Tour” page highlighting the various features of their product and they name the page, “Take a Tour of Task Smashers Project Management”, the H1 tag should be something like, “Project Management Features Tour”. The H1 tag can be used multiple times if you have a few important headings, but using a sole H1 tag and then categorizing the rest of your content using h3, H3, H4, etc tag yields a more organized, keyword targeted page. However, you should not encase large sections of text in the header tags to attempt to spam the search engines – your goal is simply to organize your content and define the overlaying themes on a specific page.

By default, header tags are not the most attractive pieces of text on a web page so you can use CSS to style them. For example, we use the below css code here on Forge Search Marketing for our H1 tags:

.post h1, .post h1 a {
font-family:Georgia;
font-size:28px;
margin:30px 0 10px 0;
font-weight:normal;
line-height:32px;
}

Readable URLs

By default, many websites are structured using dynamic URLs and while these do not greatly hinder your search engine rankings, utilizing readable URLs has a variety of benefits:

• Easier to remember and associate with a specific website
• Higher keyword visibility from search engines
• Users can identify what content the link provides, creating trust
• Higher click-through rates on search engines, emails, IM’s, etc.
• More easily read by all major search engines
• Website analytics becomes much easier to read and decipher

A caveat to implementing readable URLs is that if you already have a dynamic structure in place and your website is live, it is best to NOT convert it over to a readable/static URL structure unless you are working with an SEO professional. Changing your URLs without taking certain preventative measures could be catastrophic to your search engine rankings – as we said before, dynamic URLs are not bad, they are simply not as preferable.

Implementing readable URLs depends on what platform you developed your website, so here are a few resources to help get you started:

• WordPress – Pretty Permalinks
• Drupal – Readable URLs
• Moveable Type – URL Structure
• Joomla – URL Routing
• Expression Engine – Cruft Free URLs
• SilverStripe – URL Rewrite

Meta Tags

One of the most commonly overlooked tasks when doing basic search engine optimization is implementing the appropriate meta tags into your website. Let’s take a look at the example below:

<head>
<title>Task Smashers - Project Management, Task Management and Collaboration</title>
<meta name="description" content="Task Smashers online project management is easy to use, easy to track, and won't break the bank." />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
</head>

Some of you may be asking, “Where is the keywords meta tag?” Due to the keywords meta tag being abused by spammers some years ago, all major search engines with the exception of Yahoo do not currently use it as a ranking factor. If you do choose to use it, only fill it with a few central keywords to your product or service so that you are not seen as attempting to spam.

The description tag content shows up on the SERPs right under the title of your website and should be limited to around 160 characters. If you do not have a description meta tag in place, the search engines will automatically generate this text for you based on the content of your website; however, you should always fill this in so that you can accurately describe your site and convince searchers that your site is of value to them.

Description meta tag shown on the Forge listing on Google

Define Your Brand

One of the largest mistakes startups make is that they want to jump straight into marketing their product or service without clearly defining their brand. Your brand is your personality and culture, how you want to be perceived and more importantly how people actually perceive you. Branding is incredibly important for search engine optimization because you need to convey a uniform message and people need to be able to find you based on your brand, not just your products or service.

Research the Market and Competition

When starting a company, chances are that you have competitors in your market. There are several free to use tools such as Google’s Insights for Search and Keyword Tool that you can utilize to accomplish basic research regarding search trends, competition, and relevant terms to your business. When doing research, you want to not only establish what the most popular terms in your industry are, but get ideas on how people search for your product or service. Matt Cutts has a great example of the semantics behind the flash (or thumb, or usb) drive that elaborates on the differences of how people search (jump to 12:40 in the video).

Google's Insights for Search shows basic search-based market information

Early Implementation

A common misconception is that search engine optimization is a service implemented after your website is live. Any search professional will tell you it takes time to remove bad or inaccurate information from Google/Yahoo/Bing’s index, but that doesn’t mean that positive changes by SEO professionals cannot be made to strengthen your presence and increase your website’s traffic. By planning your SEO strategy in advance and developing your website with it in mind, you lay the foundation for strong organic rankings in the search engines and save yourself a lot of headache compared to restructuring your entire site a few months down the road.

Make Your Website User Friendly

The flashiest website (pun intended) is great when you want to make a grand entrance into the market, but that doesn’t mean it is the most user (or search engine) friendly. A key part of your overall SEO strategy is to make your website simple to navigate and easy for the user to obtain the information that they want. Driving traffic to your website with a search engine marketing campaign is great, but if people get confused and quickly leave your site you are not only wasting their time but your budget. If you can, take advantage of a user experience professional when planning your site – they are wonderful resources that will help you get the maximum number of conversions for your web traffic.

Further Reading

In our next installment on SEO for startups, we dive into the fundamentals of on-page, white hat SEO practices that create a solid foundation for more advanced search engine marketing campaigns.