You may or may not have heard of Black Hat SEO, but it is important to understand a bit about this so you can be sure to steer clear of Black Hat SEO Tricks and avoid your website being penalized!

Black hat SEO is an unethical way for a webmaster to get their website to appear higher in the  search engine results (SERPS) than it really should. This may sound like a good thing to you, but in almost all cases, this higher rank in the search engines will be a temporary thing, and the website will very often end up in a much worse position in the long term (or perhaps be completely removed from the SERPS)

These black hat SEO tricks will usually have some of the following characteristics.

• It will break search engine rules and regulations.
• It will unethically present content in both visual and non visual to the search engine web crawlers.
• It will create a bad user experience.

Penalties for using black hat SEO tricks can be extremely harsh and include but not limited to banning from all search engines. There are ways to avoid creating a black hat website and if you follow them correctly will save you a lot of problems in the future.

1. Do not stuff your keywords

Using a lot of keywords in your site and nothing else will get you in hot water with the search engines. You need to learn how to place your keywords properly to avoid this. If you fluff your articles with a lot of keywords yes, it will increase your chances of ranking higher on the search engine but only temporarily.

2. Avoid using invisible text

Invisible text consists of putting keywords into your site where the text is the same color as the background e.g. white text with a white background. This text is hidden from the customer but can be detected by the search engine crawlers.

3. Avoid Cloaking

Cloaking means that you show one page to the search engines and a completely different one to your visitors. One example of doing this is by using the “iframe” code within your page.

4. Do not use doorway pages

A doorway page is literally just a fake page that is used to attract the web crawlers. The customers themselves will never see this page. This doorway will trick the web crawler to rank your business higher but again, this will only be temporary.

If you wish to run a legitimate business you need to avoid black hat SEO techniques  because they will taint your company in the long run. Run your business right and do not fall into the unethical practice of running a black hat SEO website.

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In this post I’m going to talk a bit about social bookmarking and SEO. A lot of people ask me whether or not social bookmarking can help your search engine rankings and the answer to this question is “yes”, but only if you do it correctly.

Social bookmarking is defined by Wikipedia as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. If you have ever posted your link to one of your blog articles with Digg you have social bookmarked it.

So what is the relationship between social bookmarking and SEO? Social Bookmarking has a number of SEO advantages:

• You may get a backlink when you bookmark a page on your site (I say “may” because some bookmarking sites use “nofollow” in their backlinks).
• Bookmarking a new page or a new blog post on your site can help get that page indexed in the search engines quickly.
• Most social bookmarking sites allow you to use tags. You can list your target keywords in these tags and this can help your ranking for these keywords

It is very easy to bookmark your blog articles or web pages to multiple social directories with one click. For example OnlyWire allows you to join over 30 social bookmarking services and then bookmark your blog article or web page by logging into your account and posting your title, description and tag keywords.

OnlyWire is free for your first 300 submission and really makes submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites a breeze. If you are serious about social bookmarking for the purpose of building backlinks you may want to use software like Social Bookmarking Demon instead. This software allows you to bookmark at up to 100 social bookmarking sites and has lots of randomization and scheduling features built in.

When you write a new blog article or web page and bookmark it you can also help yourself out by utilizing some basic SEO techniques.

To keep it simple what you want to do is choose a specific keyword phrase for the article you write about. If you target longtail keyword phrases, which are phrases of three or more words, you increase the odds of ranking higher on the search engines as these longer keyword phrases tend to be less competitive.

The easy way to set this up is to include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. You should then also include it in the first and last paragraphs of the article before you publish it.

When you go to bookmark the article you want to tag it around that keyword phrase. You should include those again in the title and in the description for additional emphasis.

If you are doing a lot of bookmarking you should be very careful not to just bookmark your own websites. If you do this there is a chance that you will be detected as a “self promoter” and one or more of your accounts could be closed. The best way to avoid this is to regularly bookmark other websites as you surf throughout the day. Or use a software such as Social Bookmarking Demon with built in randomization.

Search engines spider large social sites such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Simpy and others multiple times per day. By bookmarking your article in these directories you are creating valuable back links to the new pages on your site and you have a chance of receiving visitors from these social sites (expecially if your post is interesting or controversial and other people bookmark it).

If you follow these tips for social bookmarking and SEO you will see a greater return for your efforts in terms of search engine rankings and traffic.

For more ways to improve your search engine ranking download my SEO EBook.

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Do you want to learn how to get more website hits? If so it is worth remembering when working on your SEO that it pays to spend a good amount of time concentrating on your home page and researching the keywords for it. However, you shouldn’t stop there…

Here is my strategy for multiplying my traffic and getting more website hits. I get so much more traffic from my sub pages and blog posts than I do from my home page. This is how I do it.

At least once per week I do the following:

(1) Choose a topic. It should be something related to the niche of your website.

(2) Research keywords for that topic. I am using the Google keyword tool to check the search volume and then Stealth Keyworld Competition Analyser to find great keywords.

(3) Find a good keyword phrase. As I am using the keyword in a page or blog post, I don’t mind if it only gets 50 or 100 searches per month, as long as it doesn’t have too much competition. The keyword definitely needs to be less competitive than the one for my home page as I am not going to get as many backlinks to this new page or post as I have for my home page.

(4) Create a page or a blog post about that topic and include the keywords in the permalink, the blog post or page title, the <TITLE> tag, the <H1> tag, 2-3 times throughout the body of the post and in the alt attributes of any images (if applicable). If you are using WordPress add the keyword as a tag as well. Monetize the page with a link or information about your product or service, or at least one affiliate program, or adsense, or a newsletter optin.

(5) Link to that page from at least one other place on your site e.g. home page, blog or menu. If you are using a blog, a link should automatically appear under “recent posts”.

(6) Social bookmark the page. Here are some tips on social bookmarking for SEO.

(7) Write an article about that same topic, but make it different from the page that you added. I post my article using Submit Your Article with article leverage. In half the resource boxes I use only a deep link to this new page and in the other half I include both a link to my home page and a deep link. I put my keywords in the anchor text too.

(8) Repeat for a new page or post…

This technique works better than trying to squeeze lots and lots of keywords into your home page. Even if you just pick a keyword with 50 searches per month, this doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up if you repeat this exercise at least once per week

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Many people want to know “how do I submit my site to a search engine?” and some people even go on to purchase services which will submit their website to a search engine on a monthly basis (for a monthly fee of course). If you are one of these people I have three words for you…. “Don’t do it!”.

Read on and learn a little bit more about the search engines and how they work before going off and paying for some search engine submission service that will probably do absolutely nothing for you apart from cost you money.

First of all, the main search engines are:

• Google (approx 69% of the searches)
• Yahoo (approx 19% of the searches)
• MSN (approx 8% of the searches)

None of these search engines require you to submit your website to them.

Why not…? The reason is that these search engines find websites by themselves without the need for anyone to submit them. All of these search engines have software programs known as “spiders” which basically go and visit  (crawl) different websites on the internet, following links on each of these website, which lead to other websites, which lead to more websites and so on.

All you need to do to get your website indexed by a search engine is to get some backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a live link from one website to your website. There are many easy ways to do this including distributing articles with your resource box in them containing a link to your site, submitting your site to online directories, exchanging links with other websites, distributing an online press release and more.

Once you have been indexed by a search engine there is absolutely no need to submit your website to them once, never mind every single month. Submitting your site to search engines won’t do you any harm (apart from wasting your time or money), but it is not going to do you any good either.

So if you have already started a search engine submission campaign I recommend that you stop immediately and spend your time or money on building good quality backlinks to your website instead.

I hope that answers the common question of “how do I submit my site to a search engine”. The short answer is, “you don’t”.

However, submitting your site to manually edited link directories such as Yahoo Dir and Dmoz is a completely different thing. This will benefit your site and it is a worthwhile exercise.

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Is your website converting?

Setting up your website is one of the initial steps of an Internet marketing campaign, but the success or failure of your website is dependent on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t have any idea what you would like your  website to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.

If you expect visitors to your website to perform some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them,  signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product, there are some steps you can take to make sure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any out of the ordinary offline promotional activities.

If you find that thousands of visitors have come to your website this does not necessarily mean that your website is successful. Usually,
you want those visitors to actually do something on your site. The number of visitors to your site who made a purchase is usually called the site conversion rate, and it is one of the most important figures in determining the success of your website..

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 4,000 hits to your site, but only 50 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this percentage, just take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.

If your website is designed to get your visitors to fill out a form or sign up for a newsletter, make sure to also figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually purcahse something. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

If your conversion rate is poor you may want to consider how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible? Does the visitor have to jump through hoops to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just give up and move on to another  website. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

It also makes sense to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

It is important to check your conversion rate before embarking on an SEO campaign to get a higher search engine rank. You can use pay per click advertising to check the conversion rate of specific keyword phrases. This can save you time upfront as you do not want to end up optimizing and promoting your website using a keyword phrase that does not convert well for your product or service.

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Do you own a website or blog? Are you disappointed with the number of free visitors that you receive every day from the search engines? If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, then read on to find out how you can quickly and easily get a higher search engine rank.

Each of these 7 methods can make a vast difference to where your website or blog ranks in Google or any of the other major search engines.

(1) Double Check Your Keywords

If you are getting very little or no search engine traffic, this will be for one of two reasons. Either because you have chosen a keyword phrase for your website that doesn’t get searched on very often, or you may have a good keyword phrase but your site is not on the first page of search engine results for that phrase.  Alternatively you may not have even thought about keywords.

Whatever the answer, if you are receiving no search engine traffic it is worth taking a second look at your keywords. Use a keyword tool such as Wordtracker to generate a big list of keywords related to your website and take a look at two very important statistics for each keyword:

• The total number of searches in a 24hr period
• The number of competing pages

You need to be sure to pick a phrase that has a good number of daily searches, but you also need to be sure that the competition is not so tough that you will never be able to reach the first page of the search engines. It is a bit of a balancing act, but once you have found the right keyword phrase, read on for more tips about how to get a higher ranking for your keywords.

(2) Make Sure your Keywords are in the Right Places

Many people believe that you just need to list your keywords in the meta keyword tag of your web page to get a good ranking, but this is a myth. Most major search engines including Google do not even take these tags into account when ranking a web page. The main reason for this is that they have been spammed so much in the past that they are no longer worth considering.

Two of the most important places to put your keyword phrase are in the <TITLE> tag of your web page and in the heading tags <H1>. Try to mention only your keyword phrase(s) and nothing else in these tags to ensure that you don’t dilute your efforts.

You should also aim to mention your keyword phrase throughout the body of your web page. Mention it a few times at the beginning, middle and end of your web page, but don’t go over board  – a spammy page with your keywords mentioned too many times can have the opposite effect on your ranking than you would like.

(3) Check your Web Page is Perfectly Optimized

As well as putting your keywords in the Title and heading tags of your web page you should also mention them in the anchor text of some of the links on that web page or on other web pages on your site and in the alt and title attributes of links and images. Again, don’t go overboard with this.

When you have finished optimizing your page you may want to check your keyword density. There is no exact formula for the keyword density and it should normally be around the 2-5% mark. Use a free keyword density tool to check the density and compare it to your main competitors. Try to aim for a similar density.

(4) Create a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap can be beneficial to both the visitors to your website and to the search engines. It will help to ensure that the search engines can find and index every page on your website. You can create a site map by hand, but it is much quicker and easier to use a tool to automatically generate one.

Here is a free sitemap generator.

(5) A Little Bit of LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It sound very complicated, but it is a relatively straightforward concept.

LSI is about the meaning of the words on your web pages and how they relate to each other. If you have optimized your web page for a particular keyword phrase the search engines will analyze your web page to see if there are other words that are related to these keywords or have a similar meaning.

As well as putting your keywords in the right places and checking your keyword density you should think about including other keywords on your page with a similar or related meaning. This will strengthen your page overall and improve your chances of ranking well.

(6) Understand Who your Competitors are

Even if your keyword phrase returns a million pages when you type it into Google, the only pages of real importance are the first few websites on the first page of results. Most people don’t go past the first page or two when searching for something, so you have to aim for a page one ranking. To do this you need to take a close look at who your competitors are. Enter your main keyword phrase into Google and take a good hard look at the websites in the first few positions. How well optimized are they? What is their Google Page Rank (PR)? How many backlinks do they have? Who is linking to them?

Doing this analysis will give you a very clear picture of what you need to do to beat this competitor. In some cases you may find that the top competitors are huge multi million companies with many staff working on the website and in this case you may decide that this keyword phrase is too competitive and you may want to rethink your keywords.

(7) Boost those Backlinks

Finally and most importantly you must continually build high quality backlinks to your website. This is one of the most important factors in getting a top ranking. You can do this by writing articles, submitting your site to directories, distributing press releases, posting in forums and making comments on blogs and websites. You can get a good idea of how many backlinks you need by comparing your website to your competitors’ websites. Use a backlink tool to compare the number of backlinks on your site to your competitors.

Read about more Ways to Improve Your Google Page Rank here.

If you would like to learn about these methods in more detail or find out even more ways to get a higher search engine ranking download my report 10 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking.

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