White, Black and Gray SEO

Starting out with your SEO efforts you can see just how many options you have when it comes to techniques and strategies.  You may keep seeing white and black hat SEO being mentioned around the web.  There is also gray hat SEO which I will go over in a bit.

White Hat Efforts are as angelic as they sound.

W.H. SEO stays within the guidelines that are the internet marketing world’s ethical standards.   These best practices are views from the search engines that do all of the ranking and the professional in I.M. who know what is ethical and then what is down right tricky; which is black hat.

Black hat SEO do not fall within any of these guidelines.  I like to think of B.H. has the slimy guy in the corner that has spent 10 years learning how to make “sub conscious suggestions” to you and then manipulating your actions and feelings.  Just kinda tricky, which we are all exposed to most of our lives.

Now, black hat techniques are successful, they do work.  They will work until a search engine finds out what has been done and will de-rank your site or worse; sue you.  Manipulating redirecting links, inserting clear font keywords into your content so that extreme keyword density is achieved, and thousands other ways to climb the SERP will get you far; until you get caught!

Since our industry is so rapid at changing, what specific techniques that are considered black hat can change on a daily, if not hourly basis.  New techniques are always being tried and when there is more success with new way, old ways get tossed to the curb.

It is even possible for older black hat techniques to be so widely used, they become white and common practice means of SEO.  Gray hat techniques are  exactly what they sound like.  They don’t technically abuse the rules of search engines but then again, they don’t seem to be the most honest way to go about SEO either.

Always, choose what is best for you and your website.  Honesty will always go far; but if you have to push the limits make sure you are completely educated on the possible repercussions.

It has been disputed that search engines don’t count internal linking; however, why not take a look at anything that might help?  So, to optimize your site with inter linking your pages you will want to put each other’s links on each other’s pages.  Sounds confusing?  It can be!

While getting other sites to link back to your website is not always directly in your control, with inter linking each and every link comes from a trusted and powerful website, yours!

This will help in the long run when the spiders take a look at your site and pages.

4 tips to think of when you are inter linking your pages:

Anchor Texts:  You should make your anchor texts fairly short and to the point.  While including action statements to your visitor is always considered a smart move in the conversion way of thinking, avoid the generic, “Click Here” option.

It is a good idea to make your keywords throughout your page the anchor for your hyperlinks.

Using Links semi-sparlingly.  Since we are always stating; Use a ratio of 3-4 keywords to every 500 words in an article; this should keep you away from going hyperlink crazy within your content.

Do Not Ignore your additional pages.  If you spend all of your time focusing on your homepage, optimizing for your home page and keyword decking out your homepage, you are losing a great opportunity to boost your supporting pages up the SERPs.

After you have taken all of these tips into consideration you can go ahead and start linking your pages.  It is always best to link the supporting pages of websites back to the main page of its subject minded homepage.  The closer a page is to a homepage, the more relevant and important the search engines are going to presume this page is.

So you want to write a great meta description?  There is a post on Google Webmaster Central Blog that outlines the basic dos and don’ts of the descriptions tags.  While the idea of your meta description tag actually affecting your site’s results ranking is still up in the air.  Everyone can agree that a great description tag has the ability to have more visitors click on your website.

Google suggests

• Putting up unique meta description for each one of your pages.
• Include information about the content that could not effectively be in the title.
• Use punctuation sparingly.
• Represent the content of your page truthfully with your description.

Using 100% unique content is always going to be the way to go.  This includes description tags as well.  Do not use the same description of all of the pages on your site.  Does each one of your pages cover the exact same topic?  That doesn’t look like a comprehensive site to any search engine.

Information that you couldn’t fit in the title is a great place to start with this tag.  If you are selling a product or several, this might be a place to give key information about your product. e.g. “Make: Mercedes   Model: G 500 AMG   Year: 2008  Price: $55,000.”  Try and take a step back and realize what information you think potential visitors want to know.

Always write using simple and descriptive words.  Try and stay away from too much punctuation.  If you are giving information about a book, colons, comas, parenthesis, italicized font, apostrophes; all of these can make the eyes “work” much harder to see the actual words and summary of what your page is offering

Writing your keywords over and over again is a very old trick.  This was done trying to persuade search engines pull these pages to the top of results.  This is an old trick and really no longer works.  I would even say this would hurt your ranking.  Spending more time and writing a descriptive tag will get you more click throughs and happier visitors.

These tips come straight from Google, so I find it best to follow what they preach.  There is always going to be a sneaky way or new trick that webmasters are going to try; however, I like to stay honest.  I think this will always keep me in good search engine standings with happier visitors.

I can’t tell you exactly when some of my sites basically died from Panda, and I can’t tell you for sure that is why my traffic sizzled up and burnt into a crisp life-less chip on the ground of Google’s “Crappy Sites Cell.”  I am really ticked off that a small, beautifully designed formerly well preforming site is now dead!  I could use four letter adjectives all day long; however, I don’t think that will get me back in the rankings.  So I am going to roll up my sleeves and take a look at what might have been the reason for my demise.

Panda explained

To put it simply, Panda is an algorithm that studies the ratings that humans give to website.  Panda watches and learns their dislikes and then employs its own formula to knock out sites that have the same characteristics that the humans ranked low.  Because Panda enforces a site wide penalty, if a percentage of your pages fall below “acceptable” your entire site will suffer.  So what are some obvious characteristics that are human-disliked?

Huge Template Footprint

We all know the sites; I see a lot of them by clicking on articles from Yahoo, the sites that have 10-15% original content above the fold.  Dodge that Adsense ad, manage to figure out which “X” to choose to close that pop-up ad that made it through, get all the way over to the scroll bar without touching anything- and bam! You get to see some words written by someone!  NTB is setup so that this does not happen with your site, unless you spend extra time repositioning the templates, so I am good on this.

Empty Page

Have you ever chosen a website, with a very impressive “authority site” name only to discover that all of the thousands of pages are basically empty except for a few links?  Frustrating, but this isn’t my issue either.

Overlapping and Repetitive Pages

Okay, this one might have me.  I am not the most pro-active about my content.  I focus mainly on just getting some up and making sure it is related.  Some writers believe that this is the issue.  Panda makes this mistake; having several articles or pages covering the same topic means: Content Farm.  I am going to readjust my pages to include some more not so highly related pages.  I will always believe that they more quality content I have, the better so this will be a win-win.

High Ad Ratio

I am going to included Adsense and Affiliate ads in this category.  No one really likes ads, I suppose they are just as annoying on the internet as they are on the TV or radio.  This is where we get to the conundrum; we want conversions, we want traffic.  Panda hates ads, Adsense wants ads everywhere.  How are we going to find a happy medium?

I am going to take a look and see which of my ad boxes are lowest preforming.  These will then be easy to take out and hopefully my users experience will grow (along with my ranking.)

These reasons and possibly a high bounce rate will affect a lot of websites, if not now, then soon.  I will be working tirelessly to get my bounce rate down on ALL of my pages and to fix some of the above issues that I think burnt my little site like the sun hitting an ant on Mercury in July.

Search Engine Optimization is one of my favorite parts of website building.  I think my enjoyment might stem from the fact that I like to do tasks that I know will further my sites along.  I know every time I post on a blog, especially a popular SEO blog, my backlink will be found fairly quickly and my sites will either gain foundation for being first position, or it will be on my way up the results latter.

So what are my favorite internet marketing blogs?

First off, my favorite- Shoemoney.  Shoe blogs about all different aspects of the affiliate world and he is proud to post that he writes over 90% of the posts himself.    When I first found his site, I was pretty excited that he was from Nebraska.  I grew up in rural Oklahoma, so I automatically felt a kinship.  (Of course we would get a long, 7 ½ hours away practically the same neighborhood!)

The rotating pictures of half-dressed girls threw me for a while; but that is easy to become blind to after a while.  Overall, Shoemoney is funny and is loaded with great information.  It is definitely a good read, exceptional backlinking potential, and he throws Giveaways and Prizes on a regular basis.  What is there not to love?

Now for the most relevant and insightful information;  Search Engine Land is the place you will want to go.  They have great posts on a daily basis that offers so much information about SEO and the internet community as a whole.  Most of the authors are “guest authors” and I say guest because they write for SEL; but they usually have their own blog.  Every post I have seen here has been pretty intellectual and well written, including this one by Greg Sterling.  This blog certainly gets its reader involved in every aspect of the internet game!

David Naylor is a great read from across the sea.  His site is up-to-date with everything Google and Search Engine.  His blog is certainly focused around SEO and getting organic search ranking.  About more than half of his posts are done by his employees who seem to have acquired his intellect and humor into their writing.  This is a visually and mentally stimulating publication that provides great knowledge about SEO.

Those are my favorites, other good ones to check out are SEOmoz, Copyblogger and  Entrepreneurs Journey.  Do you have a favorite Internet Marketing blog?  How about any type of blog that is a must daily read?

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO can be confusing for site builders that have just started.  Below are some of the basic options Niche Traffic Builder allows you to control inside of our system.

Domain

Having the exact keyword in your domain is an immediate good check mark from any search engines.  If you think about it; If I have a site like, www.google-traffic.net search engines can basically guarantee that my site will definitely talk about “Google traffic,” it wouldn’t make much sense for me to make a site about hair growth treatments.

META Page Title

Inside of NTB this is same as the Title Tag.  The title should include the page title and relevant words to the content of the page.  Search Engines look at this because it is another way for their “spiders” to quickly understand what the page content in relevant too.

H1 Title

This is another way to explain to search engines what your page is about.  The H1 should describe the 1^st and most important topic of the page.  NTB does this automatically with the Title of you Page, you can change this if you would like; however, from and SEO perspective it should have the title of your page and maybe some other descriptive words.

META Page Description

This is the paragraph that is found underneath the Page Title in search results.  This influences searchers to choose or not choose your page.  The description was originally meant to be a short and sweet summary of the page’s content.

You can either choose to enter nothing; this might work best for a blog that is constantly updated with current or trending information.  By entering nothing into the META page description search engines will grab the first paragraph that has the keywords in it.

If you are planning on having a set page, you might consider making this a small “sales pitch.”  Using this opportunity to explain to the searcher (as quickly/short as possible):

• Their problem
• The grief this problem might be causing them
• Your solution.

META Page Keywords

These keywords are the most important topics on your page.  This list should be short, especially when dealing with niche traffic.  If I had a page about shoes and the content included  “winter boots” and “summer sandals” the likelihood for getting ranked for either of those terms is pretty low.  I would need to make 1 page for winter boots, 1 page for summer sandals, 1 page for hiking boots and so on.  Doing this would allow me to enter specific and extremely relevant keywords for the META Page Keywords and be most “understood” by search engine spiders.

I don’t believe anyone would agree that manual link building is fun and exciting.  It can be quite monotonous and boring at times.  There is hope, by building manual backlinks you get to pick which sites your link will stay on.  And with time, you will understand which back links are the strongest and best to use.  It will not be long before you notice that your traffic is picking up.  You may also start to see your Google Page Rank grow as well.

If you are planning on getting 50% or more of your traffic from search engines, then you need to understand the game.  Search engines like sites with quality backlinks.  Of course, you want to please the very origin of most of your traffic.  Below are some steps that will help you with your backlinking and building trust with search engines.

Understand Pertinent Links

Keep focused on sites that are in the same genre or purpose as your own site.  Within the internet community we have an interesting situation- Our competitors need our help, just like we need theirs.  I don’t suggest taking the Google’s 1^st result site out to dinner, but you can find sites that are generally related and comment, visit and email them to start relations while bringing up your SE cred.

Use Anchor Text When Possible

If you are commenting on a blog, and they allow you to put your html as a link from you name, you can put; your name, your companies name, what your product fixes (e.g. Fingernail Biter) and so on.  When I comment on blog I regularly go to I use just my name.  I am building backlinks; yet, I still want to be respectful to the owner of the blog that is allowing this.

Link With Pages That Already Have a High Page Rank

If you know of a site that has a high Google Page Rank and you can get a link on their site, take it!  These are very valuable and can immediately help you Google Page Rank.  This will likely get you a lot of visitors from their site (which is why we are doing this!)

If You Use Services…

If you pay for someone to do all of your backlinks, as in a monthly subscription, they might take down all of your links once you stop using pay for their services.  (With NTB we do not have to worry about that!)  Some monthly subscriptions will, so do manual backlinking as described above and if you do choose a service, check with them and understand their policies first.

We all know about SEO and how our sites are basically sunk without it.  Using Niche Traffic Builder, we have many built-in SEO tricks that make search engines love what we create.  Basic principal- search engines love us, we get more traffic and traffic can mean money.  That’s why we are all doing this right?  Since Niche Traffic Builder (NTB) starts us off with great basic SEO strategies we are already on a great path.  Here are some more ideas to keep on and off-site SEO worthwhile.

Title your pages effectively.

Related keywords and terms should be separate pages within you site.  For example, If you were to own: www.best-self-tanners.com you would want to make sure that you had pages for “Best Drugstore Self Tanners”, “Best Sunless Tanners”, “Self Tanner Reviews” and so on.  Using NTB’s keyword tool it is very easy to determine which associated keywords Google does not have a strong page for.  Your main page should have the most desirable keyword with the other pages offering related quality content.  Search engines will see that your site offers quality information to their searchers over a group of keywords and will want to send its searchers there so that they have access to all of this related information from one website.

Back-linking

Backlinks are important for proper SEO because it provides an immediate trust and intergrity factor.  If you were walking around a store and heard person after person say, “Miss Bumble’s honey is the best.”  You would likely have an affinity to this brand of honey, even before you knew it existed.  Same principle applies with search engines.  Backlinks are like someone raising their hand up and saying, “This website has something to offer.”  The more valid backlinks your site has, the more search engines will take an interest.

New Unique Content Added Frequently

Search Engines algorithms can change constantly.  It is important to have new unique content added every so often.  Not only is adding new, keyword dense content always a good thing, it lets search engines notice your site more.

There are many different effective types of SEO.  It is important to be noticed by the search engines as much as possible.  Unique content, back-links and keeping active with your sites is the best overall approach.  It is very easy  to make money online by building quality sites with good SEO moral practices.

Using video marketing a site owner can easily receive free traffic to their site or blog by following some simple practices.  Put 1 min video on YouTube, they will convert a file and provide an imbed code.  The imbed code can be put onto any of your sites within the html format.  Keep your video around or shorter than 1 minute.  This is only meant to be a teaser video and we will want to execute the Zeigarnik effect effectively.

The Zeigarnik effect is when our minds keep information in short term memory.  The information is somewhat forced to stay in short term memory because it is either incomplete or not worth storing in long term memory; which takes strong effort from the brain. Video watchers brains are not prepared nor desire to store information long term, so in essence we want to keep our information in their short term memory as long as possible.  If we do not provide an ending to the information we gave them, their brains will be forced to continue to keep running it through their short term memory because they have not spent enough time to decide if that information was worth forgetting.  Cliffhangers and short videos are known to keep the visitor interested and they are more likely to take the next step.  (You have to remind you viewer of their next step.  Tell them what to do, or they will watch the next related video.)

The best way to get a lot of views is to search for related videos on YouTube.  View the related videos and take their exact keywords, tags, and title.  Since your video is related to theirs, has the same keywords and tags yours will come up next in Related Videos.  This is great, viewers that did not get the information they wanted from a highly viewed video will watch yours!  Syndicate your video with Tube Mogul, using the same principles with keywords, tags and title.

Now you will have very interested and interactive visitors to your site.  Video marketing is not only fun but it is a great source of amazing visitors that is organic and free! (Besides the flip cam purchase if you don’t already have one.)  I am looking forward to putting a couple out on the web soon for some of my sites and I am quite excited.  I hope to be able to do about 1 a week.