SEO 101

We all want our websites to rank high in search engine results. Many use white hat SEO and some do use black hat SEO as well.

Let’s revisit the meaning of white hat SEO and black hat SEO from Wikipedia:

“White hat SEO is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.”

However, in February of 2006, German car manufacturer company BMW was given the ‘death penalty’ by Google for using a black hat SEO technique called doorway pages. Doorway pages are pages not meant to be found by searchers, are highly optimized pages submitted to the search engines to achieve better rankings for certain keywords. When users click on the search results, they are redirected to the homepage. Apparently, the people at BMW optimized their pages inside of javascript and when users searched for the keyterm “used car”, they were redirected to the main homepage of BMW Germany page. Is anyone out there surprised that BMW would make such bad judgments, especially with their reputation? Remember that with SEO, time is your bestfriend.

Google has reincluded BMW into their index after BMW apologized and removed JavaScript-redirecting pages from their properties.

Lesson learned: No matter how big or important your website is, Google will ban your site if you create deceptive or misleading content.

- Jen Seo (yes that’s really my name!)

We all want our websites to rank high in search engine results. Many use white hat SEO and some do use black hat SEO as well.

Let’s revisit the meaning of white hat SEO and black hat SEO from Wikipedia:

“White hat SEO is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.”

However, in February of 2006, German car manufacturer company BMW was given the ‘death penalty’ by Google for using a black hat SEO technique called doorway pages. Doorway pages are pages not meant to be found by searchers, are highly optimized pages submitted to the search engines to achieve better rankings for certain keywords. When users click on the search results, they are redirected to the homepage. Apparently, the people at BMW optimized their pages inside of javascript and when users searched for the keyterm “used car”, they were redirected to the main homepage of BMW Germany page. Is anyone out there surprised that BMW would make such bad judgments, especially with their reputation? Remember that with SEO, time is your bestfriend.

Google has reincluded BMW into their index after BMW apologized and removed JavaScript-redirecting pages from their properties.

Lesson learned: No matter how big or important your website is, Google will ban your site if you create deceptive or misleading content.

- Jen Seo (yes that’s really my name!)

Google has been coming down hard on a large amount of websites recently and one of their latest happens to be PayPerPost. PayPerPost is basically a network of bloggers who are paid to blog about something. For example, if you owned a website about cosmetic surgery, you could sign up for their service, think of an idea to write about and pay the owner of a blog to write a quick entry about your site. Easy as that. You get a quick link to your site and the blogger gets some pocket change.

The problem is that Google doesn’t like people trying to “game” their algorithm and unnatural link building, in their opinion, is wrong. Which is ridiculous because buying links isn’t always about “gaming” the system, but just another form of advertising. Either way, Google doesn’t like it and that’s what really matters, right? For punishment, Google has completely removed page rank from bloggers who are associated with PayPerPost.

Not that page rank is very important, tool bar page rank that is, but I’m betting that these sites have been penalized in more than just their page rank. So if PayPerPost was one of your little secrets to success, you better start looking elsewhere. At least for the time being, as I’m sure PayPerPost will be fighting this one.

If you are considering Search Engine Optimization for your own website and have tried to do a little research, you’ve likely come across the idea of adding meta tags to your website. If you search the web for how you should go about doing this, you’ve probably come across a ton of different meta tags configurations to use, most of them being extremely out of date. These days, you really only need three.

<title>Your Title Goes Here</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your Descriptions Goes Here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your Keywords Go Here” />

“Title” actually isn’t a meta tag, but everyone always includes it, so I will too. That tag is extremely important. Put the title of the web page in there and try to get some important keywords in it as well. The meta description is also very important. Not for ranking purposes, but for bringing people into your site. The “description” is what people will read when they find your website in the search engines. You want this short description to entice visitors into visiting your website. The “keywords” meta tag is actually becoming extinct. Since it was abused so much in the past, search engines don’t pay much attention to it, but until it’s confirmed that it won’t help at all, I’d recommend still using it. Just use a few keywords in there, don’t spam it.

Pretty much any other metatag that you might want to use won’t help you out. Like these for example:

<meta name=”subject” content=”Subject of Web Page” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />

The “Subject” meta tag isn’t even supported by any browsers or search engines, so don’t worry about that one. Now let me explain the other one, in case you have heard otherwise. The “robots” meta tags tells the search engines either to index the page and follow the links of the page, or to not. Sounds good right, since you obviously want the search engines to index your pages and follow your links, but the thing is, they do this without the tag. If you don’t want to the search engines to follow the links or index the page, then you can use it, by why would you want that?

So there you have it. The basics of meta tags.