The 12 Commandments Of Search Engine Marketing
1. DON'T DUPLICATE: The search engines understandably do not wish to serve
duplicate or near-duplicate pages to their visitors. Some unethical Webmasters
will flood a search engine with thousands of near-duplicate pages in an attempt
to dominate every keyword search relating (or not relating) to their site.
So, many engines actively look for content that is very similar and will drop
pages or domains they find crossing the line. These "dupe-checkers"
unfortunately can catch folks who are not even trying to create duplicate
content. Even the famous Amazon.com was accidentally banned by AltaVista at one
time. They had so many affiliates with similar pages regarding books that
AltaVista's dup-checker dropped them until someone complained.
Many catalog sites will offer similar products with similar descriptions. You
may not be trying to spam, but a search engine spider may conclude otherwise.
Therefore, be sure to vary your content as much as possible. If you still have
concerns that a spider might jump to false conclusions, add a random amount of
blank space and other "benign" tags to the page to vary the file size by 100
bytes or more. You can also vary your meta tags, ALT tags, title, etc. Don't
misunderstand me though: This is no substitute for failing to create unique
content!
If you create custom versions of basically the same page for each search
engine, you may attract the unwanted attention of a dup- hecker. One option is
the use of the robots.txt protocol to prevent indexing of pages intended by
Engine A intended for Engine B. For more information see: How and Why to build a robots.txt file.
2. DON'T MISREPRESENT: Perhaps the greatest of all the commandments, don't
misrepresent your site! If you optimize for keywords that have little or nothing
to do with what the visitor will see on the page, you're asking for trouble. For
help finding the appropriate keywords to target, I highly recommend the WordTracker service:
3. DON'T HIDE: Search engines don't trust hidden keywords. Even though some
engines like Google will say flatly "don't hide keywords," this, as with many
statements, must be tempered with reality. Keywords in meta tags for example
will not get you banned or labeled as a spammer even though they are hidden. The
same goes with other hidden areas like ALT tags, NOFRAMES, hyperlink URLs, and
comments. These are some of the "acceptable" hidden areas so long as you include
only relevant keywords and you don't over-do it. Hiding keywords by using the
same color text as the background is almost always considered to be spam. Some
Webmasters will vary the color codes just a little to avoid detection, but you
certainly take a risk using this strategy.
4. DON'T CLOAK: Cloaking takes the "don't hide" concept to the extreme. In
simplest terms, cloaking software serves up one page to the search engine, and
another page to the visitor. This effectively hides the real page being indexed
by the engine from the visitor. If you've ever run across a page that somehow
ranked high for no apparent reason, it may have been cloaked. The ethics and the
dangers of the practice have been hotly debated in search engine marketing
circles for years. Most engines today repeatedly speak out against cloaking.
Still, the practice continues to thrive since the engines have traditionally
done a poor job of finding and penalizing sites employing the technique. Recent
News: Google has issued statements in January that that they have improved their
detection of cloaking, so beware.
5. DON'T STUFF: If you stuff too many keywords into your page, you could get
in trouble for spamming. Repeating the same word multiple times in a row is the
worst offense. However, over-use of your keyword can cause your ranking to drop.
What's the magic number? That varies by the area of the page and the search
engine. The WebPosition Page Critic will help you stay within the engines
preferred ranges.
6. DON'T REDIRECT: Some Webmasters will try to hide "ugly" content designed
for a search engine. As soon as a human-visitor arrives, they are redirected to
the real page via a meta refresh tag, java script, or other trick. Basically
this is the "poor man's" version of cloaking. If an engine determines your
intent was to trick the engine, you may find your page banned. However, since
there are also many legitimate reasons to redirect a page, such as when a page
is moved, engines tend to avoid harsher punishments. Instead, they will usually
try to index only the page to which the user is being redirected.
7. DON'T PAGE JACK: Most companies will try to mimic the basic elements that
make up a top ranking page to boost their own rank. This is a perfectly
acceptable strategy. However, unethical Web marketers will copy the entire text
and HTML of a top ranking page from one of their competitors. They'll then place
it on their own site and submit it. To avoid being caught, they will then cloak
it so their own company information appears. Before you start thinking "what a
brilliant idea," bear in mind that it breaks the copyright laws of most
countries!
The best way to detect page-theft from your own site is to setup your web
site's
to check for a unique phrase or other string found on your pages that would not
be found elsewhere on the Web. A quick check of your web site's detail report will
show any pages found matching the query, and thereby bring out a page-jacking
suspect.
8. DON'T BUILD BAD DOORWAYS: Ask any search engine what they think of doorway
pages, and their first reaction will often be negative. If they think you're
optimizing your page, the immediate fear is whether you're going to go too far,
or do something to hurt the search experience for their visitors. Therefore,
it's a good idea to avoid the use of the term doorway page, gateway page, or any
of half a dozen other terms when communicating to a search engine.
We have always referred to a doorway page as any page designed to rank well
on a search engine, thus acting as a doorway or entrance to your site. When it
comes right down to it, every single page an engine displays in its search
results is acting like a doorway to that site, whether on purpose or by
accident! Obviously all these pages are not spam are they? What it really boils
down to is not what you call the page, but what type of content the page
contains and how you choose to promote it. Because of the negative stereotype
put on the doorway page term, you'll find that I prefer to encourage the
building of "search engine friendly" pages rather than doorways. That way you
minimize the chances for misunderstandings.
9. DON'T FAIL TO CROSS-LINK: You should create links that travel from your
home page to all other pages you wish to be indexed. If your optimized page has
only outbound links and no inbound links, you run the risk of a search engine
penalizing it for smelling like a one-directional doorway or entrance page.
Although this is not likely to get your site banned, it may prevent the page
from being indexed, or ranked highly.
10. DON'T LINK FARM: Reciprocal links are great for improving your rankings.
However, be careful of joining "link farm" services designed to artificially
inflate your link popularity. Google and to a lesser extent other engines are
now said to be blacklisting link farm sites. If you're caught linking TO one of
these sites, you're found guilty through association.
11. DON'T OVER-SUBMIT: It won't do you any good to submit your URL multiple
times a day. While most search engines are thought to be reluctant to ban a site
for over-submission, they will gladly ignore submissions from sites that exceed
their limits. Unfortunately, they don't often tell you what the limits are or
warn you when you exceed them. For this reason, we
maintains a database of safe submission limits to prevent you from attempting to
exceed those limits.
12. DON'T BUILD JUNK: Search engines hate pages with "little or no
useful content" since they diminish the search experience for their patrons. Too
often Web marketers focus so much on optimizing their rankings that they forget
about things like aesthetics, rich-content, and user-friendliness. While the search
engines don't have a magic bullet to filter "junk" pages, this is one
commandment we should all desire to follow. What good does it do to bring a
visitor to your site only to have them click away in disinterest? For tips on
improving your Web site quality, see: "How To Create High Quality Content While Improving Your Rankings".
Note: The information presented here adapted, under license agreement, from FirstPlace Software. |
