Ethical search engine optimization

Writing articles for the Internet, whether as an effective method of bringing attention to your product or service, is quite different from writing articles for print publications like magazines or books.

In Internet writing, there are certain rules to follow, to ensure that the articles are well-written, and generate interest among web readers.

Internet Article Writing Purposes

Internet articles, whether for informative or marketing purposes, is distributed freely via the Worldwide Web. The main purpose is to generate targeted traffic to your website and construct, as well as maintain as list of potential customers.

The articles written are made to provide information to the reader and encourage them to learn further about your business or services. Internet marketing articles could be utilized to promote any type of product, service or specific information. They can be used to promote your website, affiliate marketing program or blog.

The process of writing Internet articles is relatively a simple one, and would generally cost you nothing. This involves writing the article and submitting these to article directories, article announcement lists, and e-magazines.

Internet Article Writing Methods And Techniques

Internet articles are written basically to entice the reader to learn more about the products or services you offer. The article itself is not where you sell the product, instead the article should provide web readers with adequate information, which would make them want o take action and click on your website to learn more. In addition, the articles should be really compelling, or persuasive, so that others would also want to post it on their blogs, websites or newsletters.

Standard Article Lengths

Internet articles generally should be between 400 to 1,200 words in length. It is important to keep the articles fairly within this length, because if it gets too long, the ones reading it may get really bored or begin to click away.

However, if the articles are too short on the other hand, it probably would not provide enough pertinent information. The main objective is to strike a balance between the two aspects. The title of an Internet article is also one of the most important aspects you should keep in mind.

An effective strategy would be to insert the keyword of your article into the title. In order to not compromise the quality of the title, web analysts suggest keeping an article’s title between 4 to 7 or 8 words.

How To Prevent Keyword Abuse

In writing your article, you may want to include the primary keyword or phrase, like around 1 to 3 times in each paragraph. Placing keywords needs to make sense, and you would not want overuse the keyword or phrase in a paragraph or sentence, just have it there. For example, you are writing an article on pet food. You may write the paragraph like this one:

“I regularly buy pet food for my cats. I really like the wide array of pet food choices they sell at Petco. They offer different pet food types for cats, dogs, hamsters, rabbits, parrots, and even iguanas”.

In viewing the example above, the keyword “pet food” was placed three times, and also blended well into the paragraph. The good thing is that the keyword wasn’t overused. In the succeeding example, you will notice that the main keyword is used excessively, and does not properly flow well, making the paragraph difficult to read:

“I regularly buy pet food for my cats. As much as I do, you’d also love the wide array of pet food they sell at Petco. They offer pet food for every type of animal. They have pet food for cats. They have pet food for dogs and rabbits. They also even have pet food for hamsters, parrots and even iguanas.”

Spending budget in SEM is worth so long as it attracts more unique visitors through search engines. Internet advertising in India is fast moving from flashy boxes and sponsored links to the new buzzword: search-engine marketing. In 2005, total online ad expenditures in India exceeded Rs4 billion ($88 million), of which Rs2.36 billion was SEM, out of which Rs720 million was spent by companies in India, and the rest from enterprises abroad.

According to an industry study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Industry wide, the biggest SEM spenders are retail companies, followed by technology, travel and the automotive and banking industries, with non-governmental organizations and property markets also advertising.

Why Can’t We Ignore Spending on SEM?

Those who are into online business wanting to increase the web traffic through search engines should keep their eyes opened to study the trends. Otherwise, they’ll be lagging behind.

Furthermore, the old rules of web1.0 SEO hold less importance in the new web 2.0 world. In a fast changing behavior of search engines, the role of SEM consultant/SEO firm should be to keep a good track of the current trends and accordingly suggest the changes required to be implemented to drive more traffic.

Let’s have a look at the following table – I have drawn according to my level of understanding.

Web 1.0 SEO vs Web 2.0 SEO

Page views vs Accessibility

Reciprocal Links vs Bookmarking/del.cio.ous/dig/BLs

Keyword rich contents vs User generated contents/Interactivity

Meta tags vs description and Title/Optional

SE submission vs Optional

Directory submission vs Automatic crawling by spider

HTML optimization vs AJAX optimization

Reliability on Search engine PR vs P2P network

Personal sites vs Wikis/blogs

Double Click vs PPC

Digg is news search engines while delicious is a social book marking site and del.ciou.ous are news sites while techcrati is a search blog search engine

Technocrati

Blog search engines – rivals (Google, Yahoo! Msn!)

As of August 2006, Technorati indexes over 55 million weblogs
Technorati uses and contributes to open source software.

In gist, there are a few steps, such as, social networking, dig & delciou.ous, tagging, links from user generated contents, etc need to be taken. Moreover, we need to adopt search engine marketing mix to drive traffic not only through global search engines (google, msn, yahoo), but also through specialty search engines like it.com.

Social bookmarking sites have become one of the most ideal spots to find additional traffic for your own site, especially if you provide a lot of interesting and noteworthy content. Submitting to such sites can do a lot to gain more exposure from quite a number of online users who constantly are on the lookout for fresh and interesting content. Here are some tips that may help you more effectively make use of social bookmarking sites as a means to get additional visitors to your own site.

When submitting to a social bookmarking site. Bear in mind that timing may also be critical. Getting into the front page of social bookmarking sites may not be the same as getting into the front page on most search engines. Most of such sites may only give you a span of 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. In this case, you need to know when you should be submitting in order to get the most benefit of traffic.

The best time to submit your site is after waking hours, when people are already up and about and going online. Since 24 hours may be a slim time span, getting your site in time when most people are already online would allow you to get more traffic than when posting it on dead hours when most people are asleep. The same thing may be applicable when posting on the weekends. Weekdays may be more preferable but you also have to consider the increased number competition for the top page that you may have to contend with when posting on weekdays.

Another good way to get traffic on social bookmarking sites is by submitting to the right category. The more specific the category you submit to, the better. It is better to check out if your site can be submitted to a specific category on several social bookmarking sites instead of being content on submitting them on the General or Miscellaneous categories. Such categories can easily be filled up by other submissions and may decrease your chances of getting noticed.

When posting on social bookmarking sites, it is also important to build up a top profile. Building one would be like building a reputation for your website. If you already have a fairly old site that other users have previously visited and found a number of interesting articles and content, you have better chances of getting noticed easily the second time around than with a new site. Posting links going to other sites that also offer similarly interesting articles would also help a lot as you try to build up a top profile.

Another important means of getting noticed is by cooperating with other social bookmarkers. The network that you create on such sites can easily help you get noticed easily the moment you post new content. Also bear in mind that user votes can also help in getting your submission to the top page. The more votes on your submission, the more likely that other visitors might also be checking you out and therefore increase your chances in getting to the top page of a social bookmarking site.

Off Page Optimization

These are techniques for SEO that are done off the pages of a website. Without off page optimization, the on page optimization would not be enough to maximize a website’s performance in the search engines and improve search engine ranking. Off Page Optimization often refers to Link Building. Link Building the practice to obtain links that came from the outside or external factors to your own website.

• Forum Posting Maybe you are thinking why joining forums will increase your website traffic and rankings. There are 3 things why you participate in forums:
  • Link building purposes - some forums offer signature wherein you can put links
  • Traffic - if people find your post interesting they will most likely visit your website in your signature
  • Information - you can learn a lot in forums from how to optimize your website with your target niche to your personal questions about your target niche.
• Web Directory SubmissionWeb directory is like your regular phone directory but the difference is it is in the internet. It specializes in linking to other websites and categorizing links that comes from site owners. They are being reviewed by human editors to eliminate the redundancy caused by automatic software submissions. This is a good way to promote your website especially if you submit your inclusion to those directories with high PR or page rank. Page Rank, given by Google, which is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents. See Wikipedia for more details of page rank.Kinds of Directory:
  • General Directories If you plan to target a world wide market then you should submit your inclusion to these kinds of directories. These directories are so general in nature, which means that they include many different categories and subcategories such as shopping, school, art, business and etc.
  • Topic Specific or Niche Directories If you plan to target a specific market then you should submit your inclusion to these kinds of directories. These are targeted to specific areas of interest such as sports, business, medical issues, per geo location area, and etc.
• Classified Ads SubmissionClassified ads or online advertising gives you the opportunity to increase visibility of your business services to the world. It gives exposure and it will attract more visitors to your website that leads to a high traffic and business sales. There are many free classifieds websites that offers free ad posting but in a limited time. Always remember to put yourself into an audience position and think of things that will attract their attention. It would be better if you will use captivating and promising phrases for your Ad caption and also remember to avoid spamming or posting multiple ads in the same site, area. This will trigger into a permanent ban and it will be bad for your website.
• Article SubmissionAn article is an ideal way of documenting a real life “problem” and then providing a solution to the problem in the form of case study. In this way people who will be reading your article will be able to see what relevancy a service or product might be to them. Always remember that people like to buy from someone who knows what they are doing. You can submit your own written articles to article directories to get free traffic on your website and always remember to put your hyperlinked to your resource box so that visits can visit also your website. What I mean by hyperlink is this: “<-a-href=”yourwebsite”>Your Keyword here<-/a->”. (delete the “-”)
• Press Release SubmissionPress Releases are official statements that were issued by companies and organizations to print, television and radio media. These press releases maybe purely factual and address a specific issue or concern, or they maybe more promotional in nature. Press releases are often made in-house by authorized employees otherwise it can be produced by outside firms that contracted by the company or organization. Press releases are news items that are designed to inform people but not to sell something. These are stories to highlighting all the unique features and benefits of your business or product. It only informs customers exactly how your products or service will benefit your target market’s lives in a news story format.
• BlogsBlogs or weblogs are journal or newsletter that are frequently updated and intended for public consumption. Articles that are related to the target keywords can be put inside the blogs. This is like you mini site wherein you can post anything about your website like news, new updates, etc. For SEO specialist like me, I consider blogs as my training ground because as you see it is free and if you fail to rank it no one will get angry. If you are new to SEO, you should try to have one and optimize it.
• Group AdvertisingOnline groups like Yahoo, MSN, Google Groups is another way of advertising. It helps in building a community and spreading words about your product and services.
• Link ExchangeIt is a process of exchanging links with a quality site that is related to the products or services that you are selling. Good link neighborhood will most likely increase the number of targeted visitors while Poor Link neighborhood such as link farms can actually harm your website rankings. By the way, link farm are sites that link to another website for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity. These bad neighborhood consist unrelated sites like porn site, gambling sites, and sites that practice link stuffing.
• Affiliate MarketingAffiliate marketing is a system of advertising in which there are two websites (merchants and publisher) which agrees to have a percentage to any sales generated. It is another way to have a more targeted market.
• Social MediaSocial Media is also one of the famous off page optimization nowadays. It refers to the activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and construction of words, pictures, video and audio. One good example of it is YouTube. It will increase stickiness of your visitors to your website.
• Social Bookmarking Social Bookmarking is where people can save and categorize their own personal collection of bookmarks and share it with their friends. The more friends or people in your network the higher chances to increase traffic in your website. One good example of this is Digg.com.
• Social NetworkingSocial Networking is where people develop networks of friends and associates. Social Networks like friendster, MySpace, Facebook are good examples of it. Yes, you might be wondering how can these social networking sites helps you attract people. You can post advertisements in the bulletin or ask your friends to view your site. Be sure that your advertisement is worth reading so that they will be interested in visiting your website.
• Community PostingOne good example of community is Yahoo Answer. You might be wondering how this can be a good source of traffic. Marketing people often indulge themselves into community posting to promote their products. For example, there are questions that are related to your product or service that you are offering that you think you know the answer. You might as well answer it and inform that person that you have a great product or service that might be useful.

Now that you know the basic Off Page Optimization, for starters you can start building your own blog and try to practice your newly acquired SEO knowledge and this will serve as a refresher for those who already knew these techniques.

There are so many free tools and software programs for SEO enthusiasts that it almost becomes overwhelming and difficult to grasp the “right” tools to use in your SEO efforts. Everyone has their own personal preferences which makes this predicament even more perplexing.

Well enough about me and my love of words; let’s get down to business: What are some of the best free SEO tools on the web?

Cool Tools

Google Keyword Research Tool: When this free tool came out the other week we all had a little dance party in the office we were so excited! Well to be honest… there wasn’t any dancing involved but it sure did give us a reason to celebrate.

This tool is amazing! Simply type in your keyword and you can see a long list of related keywords with approximate search volumes for those keywords as well! You can even customize the results with this tool: everything from the location (country) of your keyword results to finding out which month had the highest search volumes. For more information on how to use this keyword research tool check out this great article.

This free keyword research tool immediately replaced my other keyword research tools by Wordze and SEO Book after just one test use: that’s how powerful it is. In short, the tool rocks and it instantly makes keyword research way easier and much more efficient!

HTML Playground: This tool is great for those that have limited HTML knowledge or just aren’t sure how to apply the right formatting in an easy and efficient manner. Well this free tool takes all the “hard work” out of HTML coding for you. It has a list of all the most popular tags; simply click on the tag, customize the parameters and colours you desire and the HTML code is ready to go! It even shows you a preview of what your text or image will look like once uploaded! This tool is simply vital for any HTML rookie or beginner.

Firefox Extensions

There are hundreds of free Firefox extensions readily available at Firefox Add-ons. They have tools and add-ons for just about everything! My favourite Firefox add-ons for SEO are:

SEOpen: This add-on lets you place a toolbar in Firefox to quickly analyze everything from the number of Yahoo! Backlinks to verifying whether the PR of a site is legitimate or not; and that’s just the beginning. I think of it as in all-in-one SEO resource that is absolutely mandatory!

SearchStatus: This nifty little add-on simply lets you display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere on your browser. It also allows you to highlight nofollow links and comes equipped with a fast keyword density analyzer. Pretty sweeeeeet!

SeoQuake: This tool is one of the most advanced Firefox add-ons for SEO. Yet it’s perfect for both beginners and advanced users. Basically, SeoQuake displays the parameters for search results and even includes the findings into the search engine result pages - Search engine ranking - for the most popular search engines. You can then set these parameters to display by ascending or descending order; so you can search for any keyword in Google or Yahoo! and then set the order to show the highest PR’s, or the most Yahoo! backlinks, or by whatever parameter(s) you are most interested in.

And now, my favourite Firefox add-on is…(insert drum roll)… Speed Dial!

This add-on lets you visually display your most used websites so you can access them instantly! Forget about using bookmarks ever again! Simply open up the add-on and enter the number of columns and rows to determine the amount of sites displayed in your speed dial. To enter in the sites simply click on the boxes and type in the URL’s.

When you want to access your favourite sites simply hold CTRL and press the number of the site (number set in speed dial options) to open it up in a new tab or window. Or you can press the speed dial button which displays all your sites in one window and then you can just click on the site you want to open. Once you get the hang of this add-on you can instantly access your favourite site(s) with just a couple of clicks: saving you both time and effort! It’s a win-win situation like no other!

These cool tools and Firefox extensions are really useful and can dramatically improve your SEO efforts while simultaneously saving you time and improving your efficiency. Be sure to check them out and feel free to share your own favourite Firefox extensions!

This article is for SEOs, Internet marketers, webmaster and site designers and all those who are interested in Search Engine Optimization.

For a long time now designer and developers used to stay away from flash because they were considered SEO unfriendly. SEOs had a bad time optimizing the flash files. The common trick used for this was the Google swf object a javascript package that used to manipulate a named div that already carried formatted text describing the flash content on a webpage. This was not only clumsy but it allowed keyword spamming too.

Now Google and Adobe got together and brought about a revolution in search engine crawling algorithms. Google search process can now read the text on your flash files. The flash files are now indexed like web pages. But make sure the text you are putting on the flash is flash text only. If you put an image that reads “apple” then no way the SE robot can read the text. So all information that you want to get cached must be in text. Images and movies in .flv format are still not indexed or understood by the SE bots.

As far as links are considered in the flash files or in other words the navigation from flash files they are done in the same way as done from the html pages. So even flash menus will not be a problem any more. I know its difficult to accept but its true folks. The things will now be easier. Hats off to Google.

All those who are using the swf object have nothing to worry. You may still continue to use the same code as Google says it will continue to support the code too that was used to fetch the flash file to manipulate the named Div as mentioned before.

So designers you have free hand form now onwards. Go ahead and so your creativity to the world. Flashy sites are now in.

Article marketing is popular for a reason: When done right, it drives traffic to a targeted Web site. It also allows a marketer to build back links to his or her Web site which, in turn, helps boost a Web site’s page rank. In an increasingly competitive online marketplace, you cannot afford not to write articles as a means of promoting your affiliate products and/or services.

If you’re an affiliate, there is simply no better way to promote products than article writing. Should you not have strong writing skills, or even if you don’t have the time, you can and should hire a professional writer to write SEO articles for you. Some of the best SEO tips for affiliates are also the most simple.

Whether you’re going to be posting your articles on your own Web site, on a blog, or you’re going to submit them to article directories, you must ensure they contain commonly searched for keywords and keyword phrases. You can research keywords on such keyword tools as Word Tracker and Overture.

One of the best SEO tips for affiliates is to choose your keywords wisely. Knowing which keywords to use in your content is key to ensuring the search engines index your articles, Web site, and blog quickly and to ensuring that your Web site ranks high in the search engines.

Anyone who’s surfed the internet has more than likely come across articles that are filled with the same words and phrases, but the content just makes no sense. Another of the key SEO tips for affiliates is do not saturate your articles with so many keywords and keyword phrases that the content makes no sense. If your articles are filled with nonsense, no one is going to read them. And, if people don’t read your articles, you’re not going to drive traffic to your Web site.

Another of the most popular SEO tips for affiliates is certainly to write your articles in an engaging, conversational tone. You want people to read your articles, to feel as though their time was well-invested in reading your articles, and to visit your Web site and purchase one of the products you are marketing as an affiliate. You can only achieve this goal by writing quality articles.

These are just several of the most popular SEO tips for affiliates. Tips, however, must be put into action to work. Article writing is an absolute necessity to your success as an affiliate marketer. Set a goal to write a set number of articles each week - two, for example - and write and publish those articles on a regular basis if you want to drive traffic to your Web site and to build a customer base.

There is a lot of litter on the street, and the weird thing is that those things that do not belong there (litter, etc) is what catches your eye first. The search-engines seem to have adopted this rule.

The virtual world is like the real world. When I take my bike to the mountains in only half an hour ride, I’m surrounded by nature. A closer look reveals that nature and nurture can’t be separated, perhaps on a few Virgin Islands in the ocean, where nature is unaffected… A few yards away the first litter triggers my eye; a red agricultural machine, a sort of a lawn mower in the bush, a few miles further a somehow whitish fridge once pulled down the edge of the mountain, cans of coca-cola, plastic bottles, you name it and you will find it. Rubbish and litter.

The internet is like that, the real and virtual world are populated by the same people. Rubbish is everywhere, but how do search engines deal with this? Do they show pure nature or do they focus on the litter and rubbish down the road?

Testing is the ultimate activity before launching a product. A test shows some quality characteristics of a product. Fool-proof is a simple and interesting test where you enter BS data and check the response of the system. It is often a first indication of the overall quality…

A test needs data and having written a few hundred articles gives you enough data to perform some simple investigations. Anyone with a few hundred articles may check this.

The fool-proof test I performed was by using my name (by using quotes and without initials. This may not work with all names as mine is quite unique) and submitting these to the main search engines. This is the result:

1. Google’s first page:

The fourth entry shows litter. Someone from Pakistan has misused my name (I’m quite sure that it doesn’t fit the pakistan context) and put in in their url. Google finds it probably as being weird and therefor significant. The URL in question refers to a youtube video.
On the ninth place there is another occurrence of misuse with my name and showed again in a wrong context. Perhaps the same person , also from Pakistan.

2. Live Search is free from rubbish on the first page, the second and other I didn’t check.

3. Yahoo doesn’t show the Youtube results (because they have their own video site), but also there on the first page they show a link out of context. Again my name is used. This is shown on the 6th place.
On the fifth place there is another wrong reference from a site called “swik.net” that misused my and very likely other peoples names.

What does this mean? It means that littering is not only accepted as in the real world, it attracts the attention. In this case, the attention of the mayor search engines.

The search engines represent the eye of the visitor that drives his bike through nature. And litter is among the first that is displayed. This seems logical and fits the principle of searching: that of attention. Attention is never drawn to what you need, but to what gets you distracted.
Another view on this matter could be that Search Engines are not aware of the results they show, whereas a human check instantly signals wrong entries…

The Search engine rules are real, more real than real life itself.

Organic search engine optimization results are displayed “naturally”. Organic SEO is used to draw traffic by means of complex methods and techniques. The technique or optimization is the process of attaining higher search engine rankings to make it more search engine friendly.

This article will look at organic optimization techniques as an ethical optimization without a paid placement program. This is my favourite way of optimizing the websites.

Once you’ve come up with the keywords for your website, its time to develop the content in which they will be used. Your page should have informative content related to the phrase you optimize it for. Content development may range from adjusting the page titles and meta tags to creating additional sections with new content and reorganizing the whole structure of the site. The way you do it will depend on the requirements of your site and business

Benefits of Optimized Contents

Everlasting Results

Organic SEO keeps your website appearing on the search result pages for a long time because your website gives the search engines exactly what they want — relevancy. Relevancy is something you cannot achieve by “tricks” or by paying for it. You can only be relevant by being relevant, and that means, constantly generating content that people want to find and consume. As long as you ensure relevant content, other websites link to you, and the search engines love your website for that.

Trustworthy

If you are constantly adding organic content to your website, it shows you really care for what you present on your website that shows you take interest in your business and that further shows you are really there to do business and have not just created a website on a whim. Organic content also manifests your deep-rooted knowledge of what you are involved in.

You must create high quality original optimized content for this search engine strategy to really develop and flourish. The greater and more valuable the content, the quicker your rankings and traffic will flourish. By producing real value content in articles, sites and blogs, you are creating real traffic and real links that the search engines knock themselves over for. And they will reward your site with higher rankings and even more traffic.

Sometimes their website doesn’t even rank for their own web site’s name. How did this happen? Read below to find out some of the reasons why a site may have been banned from Google and what to do to get back in the rankings.

Usually there is no warning for being banned or penalized by Google except for the steady drop of sales and visitors to your site. Many site owners and search engine optimization firms are left with little to no idea why they were removed and can be left scratching their heads as to how to get back in. While there are many reasons why a site has been banned, here are a few of the more common reasons. If your site has been banned contact your SEO company or give Big Oak a call to help you get back on the right track to high Google rankings.

1. Robots and Meta Tags

The first and simplest solution many be that your robot.txt file has been changed to prevent search engines from entering your site. Or your meta tags could be directing the search engine robots to exclude your site. While this would be highly unlikely, it is best to rule this out. So check your robot.txt file (if you have one) and your meta tags. Unless you want your site hidden, you should never read this in your meta tags: . If you see this, you are blocking your site from Google.

You can also ban your own site by having a robots.txt with the wrong code. Two examples of robots.txt code are below.

This example allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard “*” specifies all robots.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This example keeps all robots out:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

2. Cloaking (A Big Google No-No)

Straight from Google’s website: “The term “cloaking” is used to describe a website that returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the web server is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they’ll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.”

If your website or web pages are set up to display different information for a search engine spider versus a real person, then you are cloaking. Cloaking delivers one version of a page to an Internet user and a different version to a search engine. The cloaked page is packed with keyword and terms that the site wants to be highly rank for so, in essence, they are cheating. There are good reasons for cloaking as well, such as targeted advertising, but if you are trying to manipulate your rankings you should put an end to this immediately.

3. Duplicate Content or Websites

If Google finds multiple web pages have the same content they may penalize each website for this. Of course, someone may have copied your content and Google banned you even though it was your original content that was taken. Make sure no other site is using your content. You can do this by performing a Google search using some of your text with quotation marks (”) around it. If you do find someone is using your original copy visit here to learn more about copyright infringement: content spammingl.

You can check here to see if your site has been duplicated unbeknowst to you: http://www.copyscape.com

4. Hidden Text and or Links

How can text been hidden? Well, there are a variety of ways - some are more sneaky than others. But is boils down to this: it is considered hidden if the text or link is invisible to the website visitor but can be seen by search engine spiders. This used to be done quite often, such as making your text white on a white background or using cascading style sheets (CSS) to hide your text, but search engines can easily spot this today so it is best to avoid it altogether.

5. Keyword Spam and Keyword Stuffing

Ever seen a web page with a very awkwardly written first paragraph where a certain word is repeated ad nauseam? Here’s an example:

“We sell the best father’s day gifts for father’s day. If you like to celebrate father’s day we can help with the best father’s day gifts for father’s day.”

Care to guess which keywords are being targeted? This is keyword spamming or stuffing but it is just the tip of the SEO iceberg. This is just the content on the page, there is probably keyword stuffing happening in the code: in the meta tags, invisible text, alt tags, title tags and comment tags. etc. If the word or phrase is repeated too often Google can place a filter to reduce the site’s rankings or simply ban the site. Keyword density can be tricky but, as a general rule, Big Oak shoots for 1% to 5% of all text on a page to be our targeted keywords. Ultimately you must write for the reader not the search engine. Be sure the keywords flow naturally.

6. Doorway Pages

Defining a doorway page can be difficult so here is our definition that could potentially ban your site in Google: pages that are created in order to attract search engine spiders and be ranked highly for their targeted keywords. Real visitors find this page and then continue to the “real” website from there. Hence the name “doorway page”. These pages aren’t in the navigation most of the time. If you come across a page where much of the information is duplicated from other pages on the site but it is different in terms of keywords only, this is most likely a doorway page.

As you can see this can be a gray area. Some pages on a website may focus on a particular subject and be innocent of trying to lure search engine spiders only for high rankings. Err on the side of caution and make sure the page is useful and part of the your site’s navigation.

7. Redirect Pages

Sneaky redirection pages are set up in groups from 5 to hundreds. They all target similar and related keywords or phrases. Usually, the only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking.

These pages don’t necessarily contain content that any human would be interested in. These pages may show up high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), but when you click on one of these pages from the SERPS, you will be redirected to another page. In other words, the page you click to see is not the page you actually get to read.

The redirect can be automatic, done with a meta refresh command or through other means such as a the mouse moving while on the redirect page.

8. Buying Links

While buying links may not get you banned, they can certainly hurt your page rank. Google has slowly been catching on to this fad and has measures in place to put your site in limbo for 6-8 months (known as the “sandbox effect”) so you can’t instantly benefit from buying links to your website. Many sites that sell links are being devalued by Google, making an investment in this strategy a waste of money and time. Ultimately, stay away from buying links to increase your ranking.

9. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

Link campaigns are good thing when done correctly; we would say they are a necessity in today’s SEO world. But linking to bad neighborhoods are a sure way to lose your rank in Google. If you aren’t careful about who you are linking to you can easily disappear overnight. Basically, while you may be ethical and do everything right linking to someone who isn’t can be considered guilt by association. Always verify your links to other sites. Make sure they have page rank in Google and are indexed by Google. Try searching for their URL to see if they are indexed. Avoid linking to any sites that use spamming techniques to increase their search engine rankings. Regularly checking outbound links from your site and removing any offenders is a good idea.

A few site types to avoid:

* Free-for-all link farms
* Adult sites
* Gambling sites

10. Code swapping

Optimizing a page for top ranking, then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
What does Google say?

“Don’t deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users,” Google says, and they list some bullet points on avoiding being banned.

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Google also states:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?’”

While creating a page without a thought to search engines is probably going a little too far, optimizing your site for an organic search, as long as it conforms to their standards, is perfectly acceptable.
How to get back into Google

Visiting this old link I used to reccommend http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py shows no option for “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” any longer which allowed you to request reinstation.

However, logging in to Google Sitemaps now shows a direct link at the bottom of your main account page to “Submit a reinclusuion request” which takes you here - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/reinclusion?hl=en

This means you will have to register your site to do.

From there you get to check boxes that let you admit guilt, acknowledge modification, agree not to do it again, and even a box to explain yourself.

You don’t have to contact Google but it can’t hurt. They will eventually spider your site again and see that you have cleaned up your website. You may have to wait a few months for Google to re-index your site so be patient and don’t tinker with your website too much unless dictated by your site’s products or content needs.