Black Hat SEO attempts to employ techniques that are not recommended as part of a good SEO design. This is because it focuses on improving page rankings using deceptive tactics which are disapproved by search engines. One basic truth that one needs to know about Black Hat SEO is that it may produce a high web page ranking, however, these results may only last temporarily since sites using such techniques will eventually be banned or penalized when they are discovered utilizing these tactics. This penalty on using Black Hat SEO techniques can either be in the form of reducing the website’s ranking or totally removing the site’s listing from the database through search engine algorithms or by manually reviewing the website.

There are several approaches that webmasters can adopt in Black Hat SEO. These can range from keyword stuffing, page stuffing, invisible text, farm links to many more similar techniques to deceive search engines and obtain maximum visibility and ranking. These methods do not adhere to search engine rules and regulations and create a poor user experience.

Some Common Black Hat SEO Techniques:

Keyword Stuffing – By keyword stuffing we mean distorting search engine results by overloading the web page content with long lists of keywords you wish to rank for. It involves repeated use of a word or phrase to improve a page’s relevancy.

Hidden Text – This involves inserting text that is mostly repetitive use of keywords usually placed at the bottom of the page. This hidden text is text colored to blend with the background of the page and is invisible to the user visiting the page. The concept behind this Black Hat SEO strategy is that the search engine spiders can detect the hidden text even if people cannot see it as these spiders read the page’s content through the HTML code. Few search engine spiders can make out and also disregard any text that is used to blend with the page’s background color.

Page Stuffing – This is another widely used technique to attract traffic from search engines. Here the variations of the web page that is replicated or slightly changed are submitted to the search engine. The possibility of all these variations resulting in top rankings on the search engine is high if the page does well for a particular word or phrase.

Cloaking – Page Cloaking means using one webpage for the search engine that crawls the site and then altering the webpage to show another page to users. This alteration of web pages is used as a practice to trick the search engines. This can deceive users about the content they will see when clicking on the search results.

Meta Tag Stuffing – Meta Tag Stuffing is another technique of adding keywords in a webpage without overloading the page with keywords. However, when using this tactic, high traffic keywords are placed in the page which is totally irrelevant to the web page content. This is done only to boost additional traffic to the site regardless of the fact that these keywords do not match the website content.

Link Farming – Link Farming involves exchanging shared links with other websites to enhance SEO. The main purpose behind this tactic is to increase the amount of websites that will link to your site. This is because search engines like Google rank websites based on the quality and quantity of other websites linking to your site. You can gain a top ranking in search engine results if more sites are linked to yours as this signifies that your site has high popularity among internet users. However, link farming is considered to be a spamming technique and can lead to your site getting banned.

Cheating the system through all these Black Hat SEO techniques temporarily boosts visitor traffic; however, since users usually don’t like to be deceived, the profitability of these methods is questionable. People would not like to visit a site that does not offer what it claims to be. Besides, majority of the search engines also impose penalty on web sites employing Black Hat SEO tactics, which signifies that webmasters gain a short term victory and a long term failure.

Black Hat SEO may be quite tempting to use as it does produce the desired results, though temporarily. But its really not worth the risk for the spamming techniques it uses and can potentially lead to your site getting banned. Therefore, it is advisable to use efficient and ethical search engine optimization (White Hat SEO) to get a higher ranking for your site.

The entire world of Search Engine Optimization can be divided into a number of sub categories such as black hat SEO, good, bad, white and many more. And among all these, the two very tangible sub divisions are On –Page SEO and Off SEO. Both the sections are entirely dealt with content of a website. Let us now configure which between these two are more important for a website.

On-Page SEO

While holding a discussion on the content of websites, the first and the most important fact to mention is that search engines do not index websites but index web pages. Hence, every page should be seen and focused as a separate entity with the search engines. The most common elements of your on-page SEO are text content, videos, Meta tags, photos, images, navigation, design, infrastructure issues, headlines, sub- headings, podcasts and code to content to content ratio.

With all on-page content elements, the major concern always remains the need of their working together. This is not only essential for SEO reasons but also facilitate design purposes as well. It is important for the designer to produce unique pages, with unique selection of templates, content and etc. Also, the well connectivity of all the pages of the website is equally crucial. Let your website has easy and smooth navigation for your visitors so that they can effortlessly reach to the page they are looking for on getting to your website. All such activities ensure to reap great SEO benefits from all your on-page website elements. As far as the Content of your On-page SEO is concerned, focus on two most vital things- keywords and links. Proper management of these two elements is extremely significant for any webpage. However, it is important to bring to your notice that all on-page SEO elements will give flourishing results only if manages properly with your off-page SEO elements.

Off-Page SEO

According to some SEO experts, Off page SEO is much simpler than on page SEO, where in On page SEO, you are required to deal with a number of elements, Off page is more focused on links. In addition to this, keywords are required to be focused but that too, to a certain degree, where they are used to link back to your website. Concisely, it is all about inbound links that performs the most.

Moreover, building links also have different processes, but the most useful is the strategy, where first of all, a list of important keywords is created. Post this, choose 10 of your most genuine keywords or keyword phrases and make them your anchor text phrases or keyword text links. Then start with the link building campaign, which includes Offsite business blog, website membership, article marketing, directory submission, blog commenting, forum posting, social networking and other such activities.

It is evident that quality backlinks are a key factor to the success of SEO. A more important question that now arises is what best you can do to get backlinks while avoiding getting into problems with search engines.

The purpose of having backlinks as an element of page rank algorithm is that people will want to link to pages that have quality content. The more the number of backlinks a site has, the better it is. However, practically speaking, you cannot be relying on the fact that your website content is of high quality and therefore people will link to it.

No doubt if your site has the most relevant and high quality content, you can get many quality backlinks including from websites that contain themes similar to yours. Nonetheless, getting such inbound links may not always be easy and require a lot of efforts, therefore, you may want to look out for other ways to get quality backlinks.

Ways to Build Your Backlinks

Even if you manage to get lots of backlinks in a natural way, it is never a bad idea to welcome additional quality inbound links. There are several ways for acquiring backlinks which may be ethical while other ways may be illegitimate and unacceptable and can lead to your site being penalized in the long run. The legitimate ways of getting backlinks include directory submissions, forum posting, linking to other blogs, press releases, etc. Among the unacceptable ways are linking to link farms, buying links in large quantities, getting linked to websites hosting illegal content, linking to other websites that belong to the same person, etc.

To start building backlinks, the first step would be to identify sites from where you can acquire quality backlinks. This can be done with the help of Backlink Builder tool which generates a list of websites on entering keywords. Once you get the list of potential sites where you can post messages, articles, or backlinks to your website, the choice is up to you to visit these sites and start posting your content along with an inbound link to your website in it.

You may have a question about how websites generated by the backink building tool can provide backlinks free of cost. The answer to your question simply lies in the fact that such sites need content for their site. With you posting and feeding them with content without getting paid for it, helps you to get free quality backlinks in return from them. It is like free trading where you offer something required by others for free and get what you want for free. However, this free trading lasts as long as you post your content to sites that are respected and also as long as you do not end up posting fake content.

Below are some of the most successful methods that can be used to build backlinks.

Directory Submission

Getting your site listed in various directories is one of the basic steps that you should start with in your efforts to build backlinks. It may be unlikely to get any significant traffic through directories; however, the idea here is to get backlinks to improve your page ranking.

There are several directories to which your site can be submitted. These can range from general directories, blog directories, SEO friendly directories to non-reciprocal directories (directories that allow you to list your website in their directory even if you do not link back to them). Additionally, it is important that you submit your site to only those directories that have a high page rank.

It is also important to know that listing a site in directories is a time consuming process as it requires you to first find out quality directories to which you want to submit your site. Once this is done, you have to search through the categories and sub categories in these directories to find out the specific category to which your website belongs. Therefore, keeping the time constraint in mind, it is a good idea to hire a professional SEO company that provides directory submission services so that you can save time and concentrate your efforts and resources on your other core business functions.

Forum or Blog Posting and Article Directories

Forum posting and Blog posting is another way of getting quality backlinks to your site because search engines usually index forums as well. Getting backlinks from blogs or forums that are reputed can be very helpful. However, at times there could be a possibility of your post being edited or deleted by the forum administrator if they find that your posting does not adhere to the forum policy. Moreover, there may be times when the administrators may not allow any links in posts until they are totally relevant.

While posting in forums and blogs can be done faster and require lesser efforts, submission of articles to various directories can take a very long time since articles are longer when compared to posts and also involve a though process to write them. However, it would still be worth the time and effort in the long run.

Press Releases and News Announcements

Though this is not a day to day practice to build quality backlinks, it does fetch good results if done the right way. There are several websites out there which publish press releases or news announcements free of cost or may charge a fee. A press release that is well written can boost visitor traffic to your site and also a backlink from a reputed site to your site is a value addition to your entire SEO efforts. However, a press release can be used as a medium only if there is something newsworthy. That is the reason why press releases and news announcements do not factor in as a daily way to build backlinks.

Content Exchange

Content exchange can also be very helpful in getting you quality backlinks. For example, you can provide free RSS feeds to websites that are interested in them. When your RSS feed gets published by the other site, you will get an inbound link to your website. This will also drive a lot of visitor traffic that will visit your website to get more details on the headlines and abstract they read on this other site.

Creating Quality Content

Creating professional and quality content is also very important to get more backlinks to your site. This is because content that is well written is always noticeable and there would be more number of people who would want to link to it.

Leaving Comments

To create awareness and get visibility for your site, you can also leave comments on others blogs. Leaving comments that are appealing to read will always have a good chance of drawing the attention of more people to your site.

Practices to Avoid While Building Backlinks

There are several ways in which links can be built, however, it is important to realize that certain link building ways can ruin your SEO efforts. One such practice to avoid is link exchange, wherein, when you place a link on another website, that website in return will place a backlink to your website. There are a few things to be considered with this concept of link exchanging. First is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Having more outbound links than inbound links is not good. Second, there could be a possibility of your link partner being a link farm. In this case, your site can get penalized or banned by search engines as link farms are considered as unethical SEO practice.

Additionally, you must also be careful about linking to sites that are suspicious or host illegal content. Though search engines will not penalize you for having backlinks from such websites, since you do not have control over what they link to, linking with such sites can ruin your SEO efforts.

If you’re serious about SEO, you need to know how to analyze the information you uncover.

A decade ago, businesses were wondering whether they need to be part of the Internet. By the late 1990s, plenty signed up and did the basics like placing keywords in the META data.

Unfortunately, that’s all some companies do – pick out keywords that may or may not be appropriate and pack them into the META keyword data set that search engines pretty much ignore.

Proper analysis requires sound thinking and judgment in many areas. We’ll focus on two major ones – Top 300 and page caching.

Top 300 What’s the Top 300? It doesn’t sound too valuable unless your biggest customer of the last 10 years actually traveled that deep into the depths of search engine information overload.

Actually, any number will do depending on your interest. Start with your 10 favorite search terms (or carefully targeted search terms). To track your growth, think big. If you’re ranking No. 292 one week and then a week later, you’re No. 154, you know you’re on the right track.

Too many SEO managers make the mistake of tracking the Top 30 results and miss out on the wonderful fact that they’re already No. 31. Don’t be poorly informed.

Page Caching Google is the best for this because of how fast it continues to reindex pages. Create your own Google Cache Calendar – a Word or Excel document will do. List your strategic pages – say about 10 for starters. Apply the Top 300 rule, check your rankings and record the cache dates. Over time, those dates form patterns that can help you determine when Google will return next – enabling you to time your next set of SEO updates.

If you’re not in the Top 300, you can still get some perspective from the page cache analysis if you’re still planning to optimize a given page. It’s easy to find the page – if it’s in Google’s index. Just enter the URL as your search phrase or find some unique text from the page and search for that string of words with quotes on each end. Either will result in a top SEO ranking and you can grab the cache date.

The bottom line is that you need to track you’re progress before making changes to the strategic SEO pages

Most people familiar with organic search engine optimization know about PR Web and optimizing press releases with keywords. However a growing number of companies are finding that the PR Web podcast service is an easy, cost-effective way to enter the social media marketing arena and extend the reach of their press releases.

Normally a search engine optimization expert will either write from scratch or optimize an existing press release for a customer using relevant, targeted key phrases that are searched. A new twist that you can add to the mix is to conduct a telephone interview with a PR Web representative and have the resulting audio file produced into a high quality podcast. This service costs $100.00 for a 4-5 minute podcast, or $200.00 for a 10-20 minute podcast (these fees are over and above the press release contribution fees that PR Web charges). PR Web handles all the technical details. All you have to do is participate in a telephone interview and then PR Web takes the podcast file and publishes it on its site, and submits it to podcast directories and iTunes.

If you have ever wanted to promote your business using search engine optimized press releases, now is the time. By augmenting your press release with a polished, professional sounding podcast, the marketing possibilities are endless. You can link to the podcast from your home page in a weekly “featured podcast” segment you create. You can create podcasts when you introduce new products. Work with a search engine optimization consultant to maximize your key phrase research and build an entire archive of press releases and podcasts on your site for the search engines to crawl. Content is definitely king, and by committing to a regular schedule of optimized content creation, your company will improve its organic search engine rankings.

You may have a website, but a website is only as effective as its optimization. Search engine optimization encompasses many different activities, all of which boil down to making the search engines find you and your content, bringing traffic to and conversions on your site. Two of the most effective ways to do this are by publishing press releases and submitting your website to directories, online references that categorize and link to other websites – hopefully yours.

By submitting your website to fee-free directories like Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project, you can gain exposure, increase your page rank, become more visible on search results pages and, ultimately, get your customers’ attention before your competitors do. (The SEO Advantage.) Directories are often administrated by the equivalent of librarians, who accept manual directory submissions and are often experts in a particular field. That said some directories have been criticized for delayed approvals, rigid organizational structures and editorial disputes. (Wikipedia) The result was the inception of “wikis,” collections of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses them to contribute or modify content. Wikis generate meaningful topic association and offer the same advantages as directory submissions, but without the tedious submission and approval process.

While you’re submitting your website to directories and wikis, press releases should be a regular addition to your online content. If properly optimized, press releases have been proven to increase traffic to websites, improve search engine rankings and secure greater coverage in the media. (Shift Communications) Five questions can help you develop SEO-friendly press releases:

Is this press release consistent with my other SEO strategies or initiatives?

What are my website’s top keywords/phrases, and are they relevant to the press release?

Are there additional keywords that would be appropriate for the press release and enable it to generate more traffic?

Are there specific components of my website I want to emphasize or promote with this press release?

 Is it appropriate to add multimedia (video, podcast, images, etc.) to the press release?

Start with a strong title and, if appropriate, subheading with keywords; search engines give more weight to bolded headings. When writing your press release, determine the best keywords to include, then supplement them with colloquialisms that would be more commonly used in conversation. Try to mention your three most important keywords at least three times throughout the press release, but don’t fall into the trap of overusing hyperlinks. Focus on the important key phrases to avoid irrelevant search results or, worse yet, getting labeled as spam. The keyword density of your press release should always lie within 2 to 8 percent, depending on its length. By visiting www.keyworddensity.com, you can enter your URL and a particular keyword to get an accurate keyword density analysis.

Remember that press releases are informational announcements, and therefore should be kept between 300 and 500 words. The length of your press release should determine how frequently you use your keywords and how you use hyperlinks. Furthermore, be sure that hyperlinks aren’t the only way to redirect readers to your website; list your complete URL somewhere in the copy.

Finally, put it out there! Your press release should not only be permanently linked in a specified section of your website that readers can always find, it should also be in as many relevant online locations as possible. Once readers catch on to your content in a third-party location, they’ll start going straight to the source – your website. Optimize it, and they will come.

You can assign a person at your store to write, manage and submit your press-releases. The same person may be responsible for your SEO strategy. Alternatively you may consider hiring a third-party agency to manage your press releases. If you are an izmocars (http://www.izmocars.com/) Rainmaker customer, press releases and directory submissions are part of our SEO strategy. Our Strategic account manager works with you to identify press worthy events and specials, and we issue the releases on your behalf. Our online marketing specialist make and maintain submissions in directories that are relevant to your website, geography and products, including consumer-focused wikis, free and paid directories.

Please contact us to learn more about our Rainmaker program and how it can help you get more traffic to your website.