One of the worst kept secrets in Web Marketing is how effective a well planend Search Engine Optimisation campaign can be in promoting businesses on the web. More and more business are incorporating SEO into their marketing plan and looking for someone they can trust to optimise their Web sites in order to achieve top rankings. The SEO industry is very well established in the US, is well under way in the UK and Europe, but is still in its relative infancy in Australia (although we are quickly catching up)

With well over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever for businesses to improve their online visibility. While most reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques. Some of these techniques can actually be reasonably effective in the short term – however ultimately, most of them fail, and more often then not, result in the site being worse off sometimes much worse off) than they started.

To avoid falling into this trap, site owners should be aware of unethical SEO techniques and be sceptical of consultants who suggest using them.

SEO Techniques to Avoid

Search engine optimisers (SEOs) are often divided into two camps: the so-called Black Hats, who use questionable techniques to trick the search engines into ranking them highly, and White Hats, who prefer to work with the search engines guidelines in order to achieve lasting success.

Below is an outline of some simple black hat techniques that you should probably avoid. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it will give you a taste of the types of things that the search engines find to be unacceptable.

Keyword Stuffing:

This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages. That certainly doesn’t mean that you should avoid using your keywords altogether – by all means repeat and use combinations of your primary keywords on your pages – but use them to appeal to you users – not just the search engines.

Hidden Text or Links:

This technique involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site’s human visitors. This can be accomplished several way, such as using a white link or white text containing relevant keywords on a Web page with a white background. Your site visitors won’t be able to see this text and will not know it is there, but the search engines will. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and may penalise the page, if not the entire site, for it.

Cloaking:

This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. The user does not see the group of spam pages and is simultaneously re-directed to the real site. Cloaking can have valid uses–some sites use it to redirect based on location. However, cloaking that is used to deceive the search engines is considered a spam technique and may result in site penalties.

Doorway Pages:

Also known as Gateway pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing any particular value of their own.

Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content:

This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users.

Link Farms:

Google’s quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors. Reciprocal links from these pages hold no value for you at all and could potentially associate you with “poor neighborhoods”. Avoid these inbound links because they will result in serious penalties and banning.

In selecting an SEO consultant, ask them about their best practices and be sure you know what they’re doing to your pages. Realise that no company can guarantee results and if a company claims a special relationship with Google or any other search engine, run the other way.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame has posted an article entitled : How to Handle a Google Penalty – And, an Example from the Field of Real Estate which includes a simple step by step process explaining how to check if your site is suffering from a Google penalty – and very importantly – how to deal with it.

The flow chart Rand has come up with steps you through several simple questions (with yes and no answers) to help you determine a strategy for dealing with a Google penalty. Here’s a summary of Rands post – including a textual representation of his diagram.

Step One – Is your site indexed in Google?

Try googling site:yourdomainname.com If your site is displayed, go to step 2 . If none of your pages come up – or if only your home page appears, then you may have some sort of penalty.

Login to Google Webmaster Central, validate your site and see if Google responds that your site is penalised. If so, clean up your site (by removing anything spammy – see Google Webmaster Guidelines and in particular the quality guidelines) and submit a reinclusion request within the Webmaster Central console.

Step Two – Do you rank for your domain name ?

Try Googling www.yourdomainname.com - If your site shows up, skip to step3 . If no, then you may have some sort of penalty.

Penalty? login to Google Webmaster Central, validate your site and see if Google responds that your site is penalised.

No penalty? Then it may be a trust issue. Review all your links, see if you have potentially bad outgoing links – and get rid of them. Drop paid link campaigns that you feel may be hurting your rankings. Drop link exchanges that you feel may be hurting your trust. Clean up other areas of the site that may seem a bit “gray”. Submit a reinclusion request via Webmaster Central.

Step Three – Do you rank in top 20 for some of your unique terms?

Try Googling some unique (or relatively unique) phrases from you site. If your pages are listed then you don’t have a Google penalty. If they don’t, then you may have some sort of penalty.

This may be as a result of Google discounting (or ignoring) the “link value” transferred to you by a bunch of your link partners. Now that those links don’t pass any value to you anymore, you probably won’t be ranking as well as you once were. If this is the case remove links back to your “suspect” link partners, and submit a reinclusion request.

Also review your site content and do some link building for great high quality, natural links.

Finally…

The above process is not a panacea, and will probably not solve all your problems, but it’s definitely a good starting point to diagnose and help address suspected Google penalties.

Rands article has also includes some great real world examples… so make sure that you drop by and take a look.

There is a common misconception that the terms “Search Engine Friendly” and Search Engine Optimised” are somewhat interchangeable. This myth usually seems to be bandied about by Web Design Agencies who are “dabbling” into web marketing and Search Engine Optimisation. But the sites that most good developers create are search engine friendly sites, not necessarily optimised sites.

Many (but definitely not all) design firms appear to believe that as long as a site can be navigated and crawled by spiders, and page titles accurately describe the contents of each page, that it has been Optimised for Search.

Most SEOs believe that it’s a good thing that knowledge about search engine friendly webdesign is becoming more and more widespread, and it’s great that webdesign companies are finally understanding that there’s some things they’ve been doing wrong for ages. As a rule SEOs tend to spend way too much time making sites search engine friendly – that’s the work a proper webdesigner could and should have probably done as a part of the site design/development process.

Once a site is “Search Engine Friendly” an SEO can start optimising for the search engines… Optimisation involves looking at the target market, the primary keywords, and the competition, it includes link building and site promotion and means tweaking, adapting, and monitoring the results of changes. Very often Optimisation includes seemingly minor or trivial changes…

Search Engine Friendliness is certainly critical for a site to rank well on search engines, and a Search Engine Friendly site is a prerequisite for Search Engine Optimisation. However, most professional SEOs would probably acknowledge that Search Engine Friendliness  is simply the starting point.

Sound like an impossible challenge ? … Well perhaps it is… but what can be done to promote and market a website on a shoestring budget ?

Patrick Sexton (SEOish) interviewed some major players in the search space (Aaron Wall, Andy Hagan, Andy Beal, Todd Malicoat, Neil Patel, Lee Odden and CK Chung) and asked them all if they only had $100 how would they market their website.

Here are some highlights :

$100: Maybe a listing in joeant.com and/or botw.org

With $100… I think I would buy some cheap hosting, put up a WordPress CMS, find some good affiliate programs, and start writing and optimizing.

Attending a few conferences per year for education but particularly for networking can prove to be a very worthwhile investment.

leverage social media. You could potentially do it for free, but if I had $100 I would try and create 1 great piece of content and push it out on all of the social sites.

You will have to learn, and learn, and then learn some more.

The Article – Got 100 dollars? 7 Experts share budget website marketing tips -provides some great insights, and is definitely worth a read. But the overall theme is perseverance and dedication, which come to think of it tends to apply to SEO in general, with or with or without the budget…

Google has just updated their Google Webmaster Guidelines page with clearer and more detailed information. According to Google, following these guidelines will help them find, index, and rank your site.

In particular, the Quality Guidelines section outlines some of the dodgy practices that may lead to a site being penalised or removed entirely from the Google index. The “Quality Guidelines section now also has hyperlinks to more pages with more details.

Heres an overview :

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site does participates in affiliate programs, make sure that your site also adds value in itself. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

You may be aware that Google has very recently rolled out a new search result platform named Universal Search. With this new program, Google has begun integrating information from some of its vertical search platforms (such as video, maps, news etc..) into its regular web search results.

Universal Search presents an opportunity for small business owners to be more involved in search with less technical expertise required. The opportunity arises because of the relativley new and less competitive nature of Google’s vertical platforms.

This article provides an overview of some of the different search elements which may now be displayed in amongst the “standard” search results.

Google Video : is a relatively new field – simply adding a video to your Web site with a good descriptor in the file name can help you take advantage of video search.  Do a search on “video search optimisation” for advice on how to optimise for video.

Basically, you want to name your files accurately, using keyword-rich file names. Create a keyword-rich title tag and description, look for anchor text opportunities, include RSS feeds, create a video site map, and optimize the content on the Web page from which you launch your video. Then submit to video search engines like Blinkx. By uploading your video to various video search sites like Google Video, YouTube.com or Metacafe, you can expand that video’s reach exponentially, and increase the chances of it coming up in a Google Universal Search.

Google Maps: Also known as Google Local, this is already a major part of the search results. If you don’t already have a presence, make sure you visit the Google Local Business Center and sign yourself up for a free listing. This feature-rich program will allow you to build a “landing page” that will help bring visitors to your Web site.

Google News: Press releases will be indexed and displayed as “news” so strategically releasing information about new products and services can result in having Google News pick up your information and display it as “news.”

Google Image Search: Images on your site not only sell your product, they can become a way for visitors to find your Web site via a Google Image Search. Use descriptive keyword-rich file names and alt tags – always keeping in mind it’s important to label your photos with accurate descriptions. Instead of saying “beachfrontunit.jpg” say “gold-coast-beach-front-unit.jpg.”

You can gain some traffic and some search engine presence by looking at just a few of these ideas. Help and step-by-step explanations are out there; a few simple searches can teach you a lot about the procedures necessary for adding these features to your online marketing campaigns.

The “official” Google Blog has provided a basic but clear explanation of the robots exclusion protocol. In this blog post, Google explained how the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET META tags function. In short:

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

In his article – 100,000,000 ways to invest in SEO - Stoney deGeyter outlines some steps that Small Business owners could take to carry out their own Search Engine Optimisation.

Stoney suggest taking small steps through the process, and setting aside a specific amount of time each day dedicated to the education and implementation of SEO strategies.

Start off with On Page optimisation :

As you learn, don’t take a single source as gospel. Find multiple sources that can confirm each other and also take in contrary opinions. These can only serve to confirm what you believe is the right approach. But most importantly, learn by doing, testing, and analyzing what you have done. Don’t expect big immediate payoffs, but be patient as you work through the SEO process and its implementation of your site.

Move onto Off page SEO techniques :

Depending on the size of your site and the amount of time you can dedicate to it each day, it may take several months to a year to “perfect” the on-page optimization. At that point, its time to start learning more about the off-page factors. Again, baby steps are required here lest you become overwhelmed. SEO is literally a sea and if you try to take it all in you’ll likely drown in it. Instead, just take a small area to learn and master as best you can before moving on.

Running your own effective SEO campaign is undoubtedly a significant investment in time and effort – but can definitely pay dividends in terms of traffic and online sales/enquiries.

Metasearch engine Dogpile has recently published their 2007 “search overlap” study. The first study, released in 2005, found that 84.9 percent of results on search engines were unique to one engine and not found on competitor sites. The study involved Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and also found that among 12,570 random user-defined queries just over 1 percent of first page search results were the same across the engines.

The 2007 study has found further divergence and even less overlap: only 0.6 percent first page search results were the same across the engines.

Here’s a high-level summary of the findings of the April, 2007 study (with figures rounded), conducted in conjunction with Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University:

• The percent of total results unique to one search engine was established to be nearly 90 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by any two search engines was established to be approx 9 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by three search engines was established to be 2 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by the top four search engines was established to be less than 1 percent.

The majority of first page results are unique:

• On average, 70 percent of Google first page search results were unique to Google.
• On average, 80 percent of Yahoo! and Live first page search results were unique to Yahoo!

Top search result was different across engines:

Only 4 percent of the #1 ranked non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines for a given query, down from 7 percent in the July 2005 overlap study.

Sponsored links on Google and Yahoo:

• Less than 5 percent of Yahoo! and Google sponsored links overlap for a given query.
• For 23 percent of all queries, Google did not return a sponsored link where Yahoo! returned one or more.
• For 10 percent of all queries Yahoo! did not return a sponsored link where Google returned one or more.

There are still many executives at large companies that think Search Engine Optimisation is black magic. The key to convincing them otherwise is to start small, prove the value of search marketing, and build up allies in your organisation.

In his recent article – “Convincing the Executive Team to Invest in SEO“, Aaron Shear (on SearchEngineWatch) offers some advice on how to get the executive management team to buy into the idea of search marketing.