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Are shades of grey SEO really Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is a strategy which gets a web page or entire site banned from a search engine.

A shade of grey is when you use a black hat strategy but your site has not been banned yet. Remember the acronym for YET: You’re Entitled Too!

There are many different opinions on the subject of Search Engine Optimization. Many folks will deliver advice which will work to get you top 10 rankings but what is really the difference between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO?

There has been many good attempts to define Black Hat SEO. All are relevant and an example can be found at http://www.blackhatseo.com. The site contains a page of example Black Hat SEO and a directory of not recommended products and services.

But is there more to it than just keyword stuffing, hidden text and spamming image alt tags?

If you read the the Webmaster guidelines at Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html, you’ll notice that sneaky Redirection pages are not welcome. (This does not include the 301 redirect.)

What are Sneaky Redirection Pages?

Sneaky redirection pages are set up in in groups of 10 or 20. They all target similar and related keywords or phrases. The only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking.

They do not contain content that any human would be interested in. These pages show up high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). When you click on one of these pages from a search engine result, you will be redirected to another page. (Usually a high pressure sales page.)

Is this misleading? You bet. Why? Because the page you click on from the serps is not the page you actually get to read.

Can Sneaky Redirects be considered as a Black Hat SEO tactic?

I think so. The reason being is that if your page is discovered, it does get banned. These pages are smart when it comes to getting a higher search engine position but they will vanish if another marketer reports your page.

What SEO Strategy Should You Use?

All SEO strategies have value. I think that the focus of attention should be to avoid Black Hat SEO if your intention is to keep your site from being banned.

Visit SEO forums and use the ideas that you feel comfortable with. There are many SEO forums out there. Here is one to get you started: http://www.searchguild.com

Be aware of search engine guidelines. If you read conflicting information, or if the tactic does not feel 100% OK, maybe the tactic should be placed on the back burner or even avoided forever.

The author, Ed Zivkovic is based on the Gold Coast in Australia.
Ed writes and publishes home business and webmaster articles at http://www.ezau.com and enjoys going to http://www.gold-coast-beaches.com.

Getting Traffic to Your Web Site and to Your Motel is 2 Faces of the Selfsame Mint

Getting traffic to your website or to your motel demands good foot work and draws of optimization both for your site and for your motel. The optimization for your web site will be via a established SEO Supporter and the optimization for your hotel is by and large finished by the hotel itself, a great example of a Purple Cow in hotels is the Fox Hotel in Copenhagen, which got a clean make over by creative people and was the home of the launch of the new VW Fox in Denmark.

The first affair to do is to get a strong address, for your web site this means finding a good PHP host and a nice domain name, for your motel, this entails having a outstanding address in the city where your motel is situated, preferable in the real center of the city.

Having a good address for your motel gets lots of visitors just by itself. For your internet site this is not so plain, you need prominent rankings in search engines and to find these you will need to do search engine optimization. A decently optimized website will bring you tons of visitants to your website, visitants who are future clients at your motel.

SEO in the travel diligence is really tough and you will demand the greatest SEO Company to do the preparation and implementation of all tasks involved in the process. You must also be aware that SEO demands time, so patience is a virtue.

One of the most pivotal aspects of any web marketing strategy is how do I bring home the bacon in the serps. How do I get my site to rank comfortably in Google?

One of the most fundamental aspects of doing winning in the search engines (allowing for the fundamental principles like great content are already in place) is pulling in links for your web presence. You can build this a couple of ways, some considered positively by the search engines and some not so happily.

A trusty methods, that the search engines think is adequate is link building with articles.

Basically this necessitates writing a nice article, rather around something from your target market, and then posting it to a free article directory.

You really shouldn’t underestimate the crucial nature of link building. If there is one indicator that means the most to the search engines, by and large, it is links. Fine, there are piles of other signals, such as the domain name, but you are deluding yourself if you believe you are going to be listed well, and easily heard, if you do not stimulate any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?

During these tough times, we tend to forget the little details that make up the entire picture. Today, more and more people are joining the online marketing business or basically, online business. But how do you stay on top of your game that even on the net you tend to lose all your consumers. Little detail counts. And with Search Engine Optimisation Melbourne, all details count. Keywords, tags, metatags, and excellent content and links are the details you never want to overlook if you want your online business to be in the top.
There are a lot of online marketing strategies out there but none beats search engine optimisation because people tend to use search engines like Yahoo or Google to find what they need and having the right keywords during the searching process might just pull the trick. But wait, where will search engine optimisation come in play. It already has! Having the exact choice of keyword and the quality content on you website, you have already done the job. People will be flocking over to your website since you’ve hit the jackpot.
As I’ve said, in these tough times, even the little detail counts. So learn to be more detail-oriented in these challenging times if you want your online business to survive.

Once again I seem to be writing about Google. The reason Google keeps cropping up in these articles is that:

• Google is a innovative company always coming up with new ideas to keep one step ahead of the competition.
• Search Engines are the most important way that most webses generate new traffic.

• Google is the most important of the Search Engines.

One of Googles latest implementations is a method of allowing web-designers and website owners to create specially formatted sitemap documents that inform and direct the Google robots. These sitemaps are a quick and easy way to keep your site constantly indexed and updated within the Google database and to ensure that all of your sites pages are crawled by the Google search engine robot. The program is called ‘Google Sitemaps’ and this is what Google themselves have to say about it:

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If any of the following are true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps:

• You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.

• You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.

What is a Google Sitemap?

The Sitemap protocol requires the sitemap to be present on your web-server in the form of an XML document. XML is simple code like HTML and it is used to syndicate your content to all interested parties. You may have seen it in use for syndicating weblog entries via RSS to a news-reader. In the case of Google Sitemaps, the XML document is syndicated to Google and their software uses it to ensure that the pages of your website are crawled and indexed.

Before the introduction of Google Sitemaps, website-owners had to rely on the Google robot to find all of a websites links in order to make sure that all the pages were indexed. The introduction of Google Sitemaps now gives website owners some control over this process. In additon, the XML format of the sitemap document also gives you control over several key variables.

If we examine a very simple chunk of code from a basic Google sitemap XML document we can see the variables we now have control over.

This part of code describes one page of a website, so a typical Google Sitemap document would contain similar chunks of code for every page contained within the website. As you can see each web page has 4 variables:

LOCATION – Simply the URL of the web page.

PRIORITY – A number from 0.0 to 1.0 allowing you to set the priority of a particular page within your website. This number is a relative setting and relates only to those pages within your site. It allows you to instruct Google to pay more attention to particular key pages within your website.

LAST MODIFIED – This tells Google when your web pages were last modified so preventing the robot from having to index pages that haven’t changed since its last visit.

CHANGE FREQUENCY – This allows you to tell Google how often the content of a page is likely to change. You can set it to never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and always.

Click here for more information on the XML Protocol used by Google Sitemaps

How do I create a Google Sitemap?

There are a number of ways to create a Google Sitemap document for your website.

The simplest but least controllable way is to use an online XML generator that will spider the pages in your website, and automatically create the XML file for you. With most you then have to upload the file to your web-server and inform Google of its presence. There are plenty of these scripts popping up and many of them are completely free. Select this link for a

The main disadvantage to using these online generators is that they need to be recreated each time you add new pages to your website. This won’t be a problem for many website owners who rarely add new pages, but for those who are constantly adding new pages another approach may be better.

If you would like a little more control over the various parameters stored within your Google Sitemap XML document then a script that you configure and then upload to your web-server may be the answer for you. These are written in various scripting languages such as PHP or Perl and give you more control over your Google Sitemap. They do require some knowledge of scripting and installation to get them working which is beyond the scope of this article. Many however can be set up to run at regular intervals and not only spider your complete site and automatically generate your XML Google Sitemaps document but also upload it to the relevant place on your web-server and ping Google to tell them that the sitemap exists.

Finally you could use Googles own Sitemap generator which is a Python script and takes a little more knowledge to install and configure on your web-server. It also requires that Python 2.2 is installed on the server. Select this link for more information on Googles Sitemap Generator

Note: These automatic Sitemap generators work by following the internal links within your website, any orphaned pages that are not linked to will not be included in your sitemap.

How do I submit my Sitemap to Google?

Whichever method you use to generate your Google Sitemaps document, you then need to submit it to Google. Most of the online generators and scripts will either do this for you or give you an option to do it once your XML document has been uploaded.

First, you should create a Google Sitemaps Account (which requires you to have a Google Account). This account enables Google to provide you with useful status and statistical information. The My Sitemaps page lets you know if there are problems with your Sitemap or with any of the URLs listed in it. Your Google Sitemaps account will also allow you to re-submit your Sitemaps document when you make changes to it.

Once your Sitemaps account is set up simply use the online forms to inform Google of the location of your new Sitemaps document and your site will soon be indexed.

Summary

Google Sitemaps give website owners the opportunity to inform Google about all the pages of their website. It should ensure that no pages are missed and also allows a certain degree of control over the relative importance of individual pages. Simply generating a Google Sitemaps document won’t necessarily give you higher rankings within the search engines as you will still be competing with other websites for those top spots. Both on page Search Engine Optimisation and off-page promotion will still be essential. However, sitemaps make sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by Google, and may therefore give you a competitive advantage over those websites that don’t have a Google Sitemap.

Alan Cole runs http://www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd. Increasingly his work involves website promotion and Search Engine Optimisation as well as training courses on all aspects of web design and promotion.

We are so used to having the world at our fingertips through e-mail, text messaging, cell phones and PDA’s that the one thing that seems to be disappearing is patience.

When do you want it? “Yesterday” is usually the response.

Well I’m here to tell you that there are still areas that don’t work that way – and SEO is one of them.

When you first develop a web site, it takes time for search engines to find it. I’m not talking minutes or hours, I’m talking weeks and potentially even months. Sure, there are things that can be done to speed that up, but its still a long process.

When you improve your site through SEO, those changes don’t reflect very quickly. One of the most difficult things to do in SEO is to truly determine the success or failure of site changes. Your ranking may not change for weeks or even months depending upon timing and activities such as the Google Update.

When you are thinking about setting off on an SEO tune up for your site – bear that in mind. Expect results – yes, but don’t expect them tomorrow.