Linkspam is an illegal method of obtaining page rank, where a website owner will buy paid links from some other websites which has good page rank, acquiring links by providing spam comments, excessive reciprocal link exchanging and many more.

Actually both buying and selling links doesn’t adhere to Google policies, hence these types of links are intended to manipulate the page rank and increase the website visits. But the saddest part is that most of the SEO (Seach Engine Optimization) Companies, do paid linking as business.

I strongly suggest SEO”s to adhere to the Google search engine optimization policies and work hard towards it to achieve your website goals. Do not follow illegal methods of obtaining page ranks and later feel for it, once your site gets blocked or pushed to the last results.

So instead think Positive – while you are thinking to post a link somewhere in a website, just check for relevance, hence Google always checks for Quality, Quantity and Relevancy when manipulating page ranks.

If you come across a website which buys or sells link, just post a complaint to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1

Acquiring natural links may be sometimes difficult for beginners but wonder, Slow and Steady wins the Race. Build your website natural links slowly, and get good page ranks in the long run

So what are the common black hat seo techniques that are followed and what happens to a website if black hat seo are used?

Here the answer for your question.

Generally, black hat seo is kind of spam and unethical, for which search engine companies penalize for misuse by banning the website from their search engines.

Using Invisible Text: This is a common method, in which website developers use to get the list of top searched keywords and put them in the page, in the website background color. When a person searches in a search engine a using a specific keyword might reach this page, whereas the page which he lands has nothing to do with that keyword, nor it would be visible to the website visitor.

Below is a recent site that I got in my Google alert for a keyword I subscribed. When I went to the website, there is irrelevant content to a furniture shop . Here is the invisible text “keywords” they used to rank it.

Stuffing Keywords: Lot of keywords are stuffed in a specific page, with lot of repetitions, which is against the search engine policies. Also the Meta tags also have lot of keywords.

Website Cloaking: A webpage is created for the sole purpose of increasing the website traffic by identifying the search engine’s spider user agent or ip address. When a user visits the page, he would be taken to some other page which wouldn’t be related to what was shown in search results.

Doorway Page: A page is optimized for specific keywords and once starts getting in traffic, the website would be redirected to the real website. This is also similar to website cloaking.

Link Farms: This is a kind of spamming the search engines indexing algorithm. This is also known as spamdexing. It linking to site whereever possible, but which are not relevant to the content or keywords. This is made with the only intention to increase the backlinks, reciprocal link, which search engine see as spamming, as it is against the search engine indexing policies.

 Penalty:

 Is there a good penalty other than blocking or re-ranking the site? Yes, good penalizes by blocking the site or by dropping site from its current position to some the bottom of the results.

Here is the site, that was blocked by Google  for using Black Hat Technique. ( I have provided the image of the invisible text given in the html code)

“In the last week, more than 280 search terms have been attacked by more than 6,600 black hat search engine optimization (SEO) operations, according to a study by SonicWall.”

Read the full article here: http://www.lastclicknews.com/black-hat-seo-operations-become-rampant-101052.html

1. Title Tags – Give higher importance to title tags hence 9.8/10 importance is given to Page Title by Search Engines.

2. URL Structure – Build a short keyword optimistic page link with relevance

3. Content – Content is like a king in Search Engine Optimization. A good content with right keywords and relevancy would bring good results. Include your targeted keyword in H1, H2 and H3 Tags

4. Internal Linking & Navigation – Provide proper and right anchor texts. Anchor Texts also is an important attribute in on-page optimization, which helps the visitor to navigate throughout the website.

5. Dead Links – Have a periodic check on the broken links and redirect them to the relevant urls. More the number of broken links can also affect the search results and ranks.

web directories

1. Optimizing the Image Size ie. Creating a image which is less in size.
 
The graphic/image present in the website should be less in size and more efficient , hence when a website gets downloaded, along with the image also gets downloaded. So if the image size is big, then it would take time for the website to display and also consumes high bandwidth.

Say for example, if a image is 40 KB, it would take some time to get downloaded, instead if it is just 4 KB, within a fraction of milli-seconds it would get downloaded, which results in quick display of the web page.

Recommendation:  It’s recommended that the homepage or any other page is less than 200 KB overall and with less than 20 Objects. This would increase the download speed of the website at the same time doesn’t consume more bandwidth.

2. Optimizing the Image Name

When Website Templates are created, it involves writing a style sheet, which may contain some images. It is good to name the images as header_img.gif , body_img_bg.gif etc in case of style sheets to easily understand,  whereas when it comes to products boxes, mangement people images, its good to have the name related that product.

Say for example, if there is an antivirus program boxshot,  you can name the image as “Buy_Antivirus.gif” with an alt text as “Virus protection software” etc. So this would also help the website listed in search engines for keywords like buy antivirus software protection etc. Because all the search engine spiders see only the text and not the image. So its necessary to the image with relevant names which adds value to SEO. In case you the an antivirus software as “as.jpg” then as is not going to be listed nor conveys a meaning.

So while creating a website HTML,HTML Images, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)Images, Image names , size , format (recommended is gif, png) ,Javascript, Graphics and multimedia objects should be given importance.

Hope this helps!

Title Tag

<title> Internet Marketing Blog </title> – This tag is the one which is more important and would be seen in search engine results as well as browsers.

Meta Tags

Keyword Tag – This would contain the words which are generally searched in search engines

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword, keywords, key words, effective search terms, search keywords “>

Description Tag -  Gives a short description about what the page is about.

<meta name=”description” content=”Optimize your website with important SEO HTML tags”>

Author -  Provide the author name or email address

<meta name=”author” content=”Yuvaraj Hermesmyth”>

Robots – a conditon with which we can allow or disallow indexing by search engines
<meta name=”robots” content=”allow”>

Header Tags

<h1> Heading 1 </h1>
<h2> Heading 2 </h2>
<h3> Heading 3 </h3>
<h4> Heading 4 </h4>
<h5> Heading 5 </h5>
<h6> Heading 6  </h6>

Tag for Automatically Refreshing a Webpage after 20 Seconds

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”20;url=http://www.hermesmyth.com/”>

Tag for Image Optimization

Optimizing a image name is also important. A good alt text will also be helpful in SEO.

<img src=”painting.gif” alt=”Mordern Paintings” />

Email Tag

When you want to post an email and when clicked it that needs to be opened in the users default email client this tag is used.

<a href=”mailto:yuvaraj@hermesmyth.com?subject=Hello%20Yuvaraj“> Send Mail</a>

Hyperlinks

Internal Links or Links placed within the webpage should have proper keywords in alt text, which helps the website rank better.

<a href=”http://artgallery.hermesmyth.com” alt=”Art Gallery, Mordern Day Paintings”>Art Gallery</a>

Few important points to be noted:

1.) Website Submission: When a website is submitted in a website it is good to have minimum 200 words, with 2-3% keyword density.

2..) Javascripts sometimes prevents the search engines to crawl the entire page, so its good have the Javascripts, call/embed the link inside the html page, like we call forward the CSS and embed in a webpage.

3.) Don’t use Frames or limit the usage of frames, hence search engine won’t recognize the frameset which cause lot of problems to the search engine spiders. Its better to use internal hyperlinks inside frames, if you wanted to have frames.

4.) Flash Pages:  Use the Meta keywords and description tag for flash pages.  Webpages which are completed designed using flash is called as splash pages. Most of these flash components are not recognized by search engines as they are not HTML hyperlinks.

5.)  Have Speed, Reliable and  Best Web Hosting Server, to prevent website down-times.

• Design your website in a way that you sell your concept and then the product. This means, you need have a good design, which attracts the customers and is pleasant to the eye, meanwhile is should say what your company/product is about, with a CALL TO ACTION
• Follow up-to-date Search Engine Optimization Techniques. Keep studying quality SEO forums, blogs etc. I would recommend you to have a glance at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and http://www.seochat.com/
• Build quality links focusing on right keywords
• Email Campaign – Shoot out regular emails and newsletters to your target customers. Be sure you provide an unsubscribe option and opt-in list in your emails and website.
• Do regular Press Releases, and submit it to editors and PR websites. Get your products reviewed my product review editors
• Assist your customers via forums, blog and respond them as soon as you find a new thread or question
• Write and publish your articles online, and submit it to article publishing websites and social media websites.
• Analyse your website on a periodic basis to check for broken links, redirects, sitemaps and other related information
• Promote your products, providing special offers in your website.
• Update your website regularly
• Prepare monthly web metrics and progress of your website traffic vs. conversion rates
• Last but not the least – Have a constant eye on your competitor’s website and marketing strategies.

Do you have a blog or website and want to make money with it - sign up  now to earn some revenue.

Below are list of few latest trends in SEO at present, which needs to be followed to get good rankings for our website.

1.) Identifying and researching proper target Keywords

2.)  Professional keyword based content / copywriting

3.) Web Page Content Optimization

4.) Graphic / Image name optimization

5.) Localized / Regional / Geographical Optimization

6.) Social Media Optimization / Social Bookmarkingearch

7.) Press Releases and Articles writing / distributing

8.) Blogging, participation in discussion boards / forums

9.) Link Building – with right focus keywords

                                                                                             10.) Usability Testing – Based on Web Analytics

“There is nothing permanent except changes” – So once you go with the changes, then really you can make a difference by achieving success. The same applies in SEO too. You don’t have to give more importance to the traditional SEO. All you have to do is, use the traditional expertise, and research new and modern tactics used in SEO. Still I don’t say, you need to omit all the traditional methods, but you can follow a few really good tactics used in traditional marketing as well.

In today’s scenario, the best way to achieve better and high ranking is building quality inbound links, anchored with functional quality keywords, related to the website.

Nowadays one-ways links and directories are given high importance than the link exchanges or reciprocal linking, which are not any more used by SEO’s until its of utmost importance.

Previously, in SEO, when a reciprocal link is given, they add the “no-follow” attribute. But nowadays, search engines no longer support this. For example, in blogs, if Google identifies, a link as a Spam link, then no longer it indexes it. So here the search engines companies have done a good job changing the search algorithms accordingly.

Also when it comes to SMO (Social Media Optimization) some websites has started no follow attributes. Recently Digg added the no-follow attribute to external links, which applies for comments, user profiles and story pages. But still its only applicable for some links and not for all.

To know more about the recent happenings and updates in SEO, you can visit some leading SEO forums or discussion boards. To know about Google’s search techniques, I think you can visits Matt Cutts Blog. Here Matt Cutts discusses about SEO, fun and lot more about books. Really a interesting stuff.

So you need to know about the recent seo trends and seo tips to better perform in search engine to achieve high/top rankings.

Seach Engine Optimization – The term itself refers to the Search Engines  i.e. google, yahoo, bing, metacrawler and much more. “Optimization” refers to the technique involved in getting a specific website at top search results for certain targeted keywords. So to optimize a website the Search Engine Optimizers need to understand how a search engine works and the tactics involved in optimizing a website.

There are certain algorithms that are followed by different search engine providers, hence the website which is being designed should be search engine friendly. Many believe that only meta keywords alone brings the webstie in the top of the search results. But its a wrong opinion. There are lot of things that needs to be considered such as the webstie design, menu, the body i.e. the content, image names, keywords, title, alternate texts, links and so on.

There are two types of optimization. They are

1.) On-Page Optimization  – The involves optimizing within the websites.

2.) Off-Page Optimization – This technique is done externally, to bring some outbound links and visibility , in a way to support the on-page optimization.

Thats if for now, will discuss more about this in my next post