SEO Quick Guide Part 2
Check out SEO Quick Guide - By Part 1
SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
- White Hat SEO - Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design.
- Black Hat SEO - Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.
White Hat SEO
An SEO tactic is considered as White Hat if it has the following features:
- It conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
- It does not involve in any deception.
- It ensures that the content a search engine indexes, and subsequently ranks, is the same content a user will see.
- It ensures that a web page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.
- It ensures good quality of the web pages.
- It ensures availability of useful content on the web pages.
Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and do not try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and you will definitely get something more.
Black Hat or Spamdexing
An SEO tactic, is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it has the following features:
- Attempting ranking improvements that are disapproved by the search engines and/or involve deception.
- Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly.
- Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.
- Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.
- Using hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections.
- Repeating keywords in the metatags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the website content. This is called metatag stuffing.
- Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called keyword stuffing.
- Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages.
- Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites - all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
- Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. This is called page hijacking.
Always stay away from any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above properties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.
SEO - Web Site Domain
When you start thinking of doing a business through internet, the first thing that you think about is your website domain name. Before you choose a domain name, you should consider the following:
- Who would be your target audience?
- What you intend to sell to them. Is it a tangible item or just text content?
- What will make your business idea unique or different from everything else that is already avilable in the market?
Many people think it is important to have keywords in a domain. Keywords in the domain name are usually important, but it usually can be done while keeping the domain name short, memorable, and free of hyphens.
Using keywords in your domain name gives you a strong competitive advantage over your competitors. Having your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through-rates on search engine listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to use your keywords in get keyword rich descriptive inbound links.
Avoid buying long and confusing domain names. Many people separate the words in their domain names using either dashes or hyphens. In the past, the domain name itself was a significant ranking factor but now search engines have advanced features and it is not a very significant factor anymore.
Keep two to three words in your domain name that will be easy to memorize. Some of the most notable websites do a great job of branding by creating their own word. Few examples are eBay, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Wikipedia, Google, etc.
You should be able to say it over the telephone once, and the other person should know how to spell it, and they should be able to guess what you sell.
