Black Hat vs White Hat SEO

White hat SEO techniques follow the general guidelines of search engines; they are considered ethical techniques and are therefore viewed positively by the major search engines. The White Hat search engine optimisation (SEO) and Black Hat SEO debate is gathering momentum as SEO becomes increasingly important in the success achieved by websites. As
On the other hand black hat techniques are those short term tactics that web architects adopt to ‘fool’ search engine crawlers into believing things that may not actually exist on their websites e.g. backdoor ‘cloaking’ and artificially boosting backlinks from link farms (dummy webpages with bogus links). As these are generally un-ethical they are not accepted by search engines and they can result in your website being banned or penalised sites for the use of black hat techniques.

White hat and black hat SEO are two different and generally opposing views on how to carry out effective search engine optimisation. White hats are those website architects that ‘play nice’ and are prepared to wait for long term results to build their site popularity. Black hats are those website designers that want to quickly boost their search engine rankings by cutting corners and are ready to compromise even the readability and content coherence of their sites in the race for better SEO results.

It is not surprising that all search engines today are actively monitoring for black hat SEO techniques as these practices ultimately harm their search result reputation as these websites are not delivering a positive user experience.

Source: Black Hat and White Hat SEO

10 Reasons Why You are not Rich

Many people assume they aren’t rich because they don’t earn enough money. If I only earned a little more, I could save and invest better, they say.

The problem with that theory is they were probably making exactly the same argument before their last several raises. Becoming a millionaire has less to do with how much you make, it’s how you treat money in your daily life.

The list of reasons you may not be rich doesn’t end at 10. Caring what your neighbors think, not being patient, having bad habits, not having goals, not being prepared, trying to make a quick buck, relying on others to handle your money, investing in things you don’t understand, being financially afraid and ignoring your finances.

Here are 10 more possible reasons you aren’t rich:

You care what your car looks like: A car is a means of transportation to get from one place to another, but many people don’t view it that way. Instead, they consider it a reflection of themselves and spend money every two years or so to impress others instead of driving the car for its entire useful life and investing the money saved.

You feel entitlement: If you believe you deserve to live a certain lifestyle, have certain things and spend a certain amount before you have earned to live that way, you will have to borrow money. That large chunk of debt will keep you from building wealth.

You lack diversification: There is a reason one of the oldest pieces of financial advice is to not keep all your eggs in a single basket. Having a diversified investment portfolio makes it much less likely that wealth will suddenly disappear.

You started too late: The magic of compound interest works best over long periods of time. If you find you’re always saying there will be time to save and invest in a couple more years, you’ll wake up one day to find retirement is just around the corner and there is still nothing in your retirement account.

You don’t do what you enjoy: While your job doesn’t necessarily need to be your dream job, you need to enjoy it. If you choose a job you don’t like just for the money, you’ll likely spend all that extra cash trying to relieve the stress of doing work you hate.

You don’t like to learn: You may have assumed that once you graduated from college, there was no need to study or learn. That attitude might be enough to get you your first job or keep you employed, but it will never make you rich. A willingness to learn to improve your career and finances are essential if you want to eventually become wealthy.

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Five Things You Can do to Take Charge of Your Career

With recent shortages in employment and with unemployment agencies in most States reportedly running out of funds, American workers are taking charge of their own careers and what they are doing to survive today’s economy may surprise you.

Aurora, IL (PRWEB) October 11, 2008 — With recent shortages in employment and with unemployment agencies in most States reportedly running out of funds, American workers are taking charge of their own careers and what they are doing to survive today’s economy may surprise you. Below are five things you can do to backup your current employment, and if you are currently unemployed you may still benefit from the information here.

1) Be prepared to engage in a major job search:
Career experts have always advised that if you feel threatened by job-loss you should up-date your resume, make sure that you have all your current skills and experience listed and then start your search. Recruiters are better able to place candidates that are still employed, since employment is one of the elements that make an individual what recruiters call a “Most Placeable Candidate” or an MPC.

Here are some tips:

• Update your resume.
• Contact recruiters or start contacting employers.
• If you plan to work with recruiters, try not to post your resume on every search engine. This will make you an active job-searcher and may reduce your chances of being placed by a recruiter.
• Submit your resume to the right sources. Make sure you are getting your resume in front of the hiring manager and not just sending it to a resume bank. The best way to do this is to call ahead of time and ask who is in charge of hiring for the particular position you are interested in.
• Follow-up. Make sure you call the contact person for the positions you applied to and find out the status of your applications. This is the one step that makes the difference between a high chance of success or failure in any job search.
• Finally, do not wait till you lose your job to start searching; start today.

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Video SEO Tip

YouTube has now begun placing click-to-buy links beneath its videos, as part of a larger plan to offer an e-commerce platform to all its partners. However, YouTube partners are typically large and well-established companies, leaving out the 99.9% of businesses and individuals of this opportunity. Fortunately, we have a tip on how anyone can create their own “hot URL” to any web page they want, which shows up in a better position than these links, and without having to shell out any cash. Read on…Right now, the larger partner companies – Amazon, iTunes, EMI music and Electronic arts – are getting to test out the “click-to-buy” feature, which appears below partner Videos – either as graphic buttons (as shown in the example above), or as text links.

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Search Engine Optimization Training

Irving, TX (PRWEB) October 3, 2008 — Mark Stone, an Irving, Texas based Search Engine Optimization expert has developed a starter SEO class for entrepreneurs, small business owners and sales and marketing professionals who are interested in increasing the visibility of their website within the natural results of search engines.

Search engine optimization or SEO is the integral core of an online business’ marketing plan. Yet the pricing structure of many top level SEO services far exceeds the budget entrepreneurs and small business have in place for marketing. With the introduction of the SEO Starter Class from SmartOnSEO.com marketing professionals and businessmen from all walks can learn the basic fundamentals of search engine optimization and fast track their own SEO project.

Course instructor Mark Stone said, “What we’ve done is taken the basics of our proven SEO processes and techniques and developed a live one-day SEO training class which puts the user in position to impact their rankings positively without costing them a large chunk of their marketing budget.” Mark went on to say, “we developed the course after analyzing many of our prospects who couldn’t afford the services for our initial SEO projects but who stated they had the time and desire to learn to optimize their own website to achieve top rankings.” Thus the comprehensive one-day course was born.

What makes the SEO Starter Course unique is the presentation. The entire class is presented in easy to understand “how-to” topics with a minimum of technical talk, delivered by an experienced instructor who will show attendees what works and what doesn’t. Finally, class participants walk away at the end of the day with the tools and resources to fast track their own project. The day long event costs $495, a fraction of what you could spend with a proven SEO company.

The SEO Starter Class is held monthly and class size is limited so register at SmartOnSEO.com

Since 1998, Mark Stone has achieved first page results for over 80,000 pages in long ago titans such as AltaVista and NorthernLight to today’s behemoth Google. He is a member of SEMPO and TopSEO’s and in 10+ years has never had a website penalized by the search engines.

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SEO Tips

10. Use a Site Map: Hard to navigate pages drive visitors away quicker than anything else. Providing a site map to help them get around your page not only makes their experience better, it lets web crawlers search over and log all your content quickly and correctly, helping your page to get ranked better.

9. Know What Search Engines Want: Search engines have guidelines for getting your page noticed and ranked higher–read them. Optimizing your site to what the major engines want is one of the easiest and best ways to get noticed.

8. Use Keyword Phrases: Keywords don’t have to be just one word, in fact, they shouldn’t be. Using keyword phrases allows you to focus your content to exactly the audience you want.

7. Use Keywords throughout Your Site: Once you have your keywords down, make sure you sprinkle them liberally throughout your site’s content. Your keywords are the way your website attracted visitors, make sure that they recognize the content those keywords led them to.

6. Link to Other Sites: Getting links to your site on other related sites is vital to improving your page ranking. Don’t spam (by posting links on blogs or link farms), but get quality, similarly focused sites to link to you, and return the favor. A series of mutually beneficial links is a key step is getting your website noticed and ranked.

5. Use the Right Keywords: Make sure that the words you think best sum up your website are the same as the one an average person would type into a search engine when looking for a product like yours. Experimenting with different search engines, to see what websites come up for the keywords you think represent you, is a great way to get a feel for what your keywords need to be.

4. Put Keywords First: When writing the content of your page, make sure that the keywords your want to lead visitors to your site appear in the first sentence, this is what is displayed in search results.

3. Hire a Professional: Not everyone’s a writer, and it shows. Hiring a professional to craft your page gives you the advantage of clear, concise, focused site content that will bring visitors to your website and keep them coming back.

2. Use a Catchy URL: There is no replacement for an attention grabbing, easy to remember URL. Keep yours short, catchy, and to the point, there’s a reason “googling” has become a part of everyday language.

1. Update Content: Once you’ve done everything right and gotten your high page ranking you have to keep up on your site’s content. Competitors will always be trying to find a way to tweak their sights to attract your customers; and even if they don’t find it, old or out of date content will still drive customers away no matter how high you appear in their search results.

SEO Strategy

What is in SEO marketing that makes it so interesting and people are doing anything to keep it up and come up with newest strategies?

In the organic type of SEO marketing, there are greater click-troughs. A lot of people market this because of the organically grown search results that do more than what they were supposed to do with the sponsored results.

While the other search engines business is supported by some of the paid ads, there are many consumers who would choose the organic search results. The listings they provide are more related and can offer great depth of choices that are truly manageable.

While the paid ads can play a very vital role in SEO marketing strategy, the organic search will be able to add to the greater click-through rates when all the things get equal. This makes the websites meet their targeted traffic in the search engine rankings.

SEO marketing is very important because it is where ideas are being created by the people doing the websites. They must come up with great marketing ideas in order to compete with the thousands of websites in the different search engines.

Some do not even think of SEO marketing as a marketing strategy but a competition with the other web sites. Even though it is a foul play, they would still continue as long as their links and their ranks are increasing.

This is something overlooked by most marketers. Getting links and ranks can be done equally and black hat SEO may never work at all because there are rules in putting up a website that is user-friendly. They must not look at SEO as a competition because the quality of their services is wasted and sometimes wrongfully understood.

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Increase Traffic Using Article Submission

Article writing provides you with an excellent method of increasing the PR (page rank) of your website. The only expense to you is a little time to write short, informative articles that have value to others.

The articles you have written can then be submitted to some of the best article directories such as Articledashboard.com, ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, isnare.com, and articlealley.com

Article marketing is a great way to increase the flow of traffic and visitors to your website. If you are a business person and have a website, you may have heard the term SEO or search engine optimization. Article marketing is a very effective way to promote your business or website.

In simple terms SEO uses tactics such as keyword optimization to achieve a better placing in the search engines, resulting in more visitors and hopefully more sales for your business. Google operates a site ranking system commonly known as page rank. upholstery cleaning st louis rank is partially based on the quality of your website content but also looks at how many other sites are “back linking” to your website. A website with more back links should hold a better search engine placement and in turn receive more visitors.

Once you have written your articles, make a list of article directories where you wish to submit your articles. Most directories will ask you to create a free account before professional carpet cleaners can be submitted. Once you have your accounts in place, you can begin your article submission. Article directories must approve your submitted articles before adding them to the article directory.

Try to make your article interesting, factual and useful to others. Do not just write a 300 word advert for your company or service as it will most likely be declined. Make sure the title of your article accurately describes the content of the article and contains keywords associated with your carpet and upholstery cleaners Layout the article in short paragraphs, do not bunch all the text together as it looks terrible and web users will rarely read large sections of text.

It is a known fact that web users have a very short attention span and tend to skim over large sections of text, so make it easy on the eye and easy to read. Most article directories provide a resource box into which you can place your name, a little information about you or your business and – this is the important bit – a hyperlink to your own website. This link creates the back link to your site and will help to improve both carpet cleaning numbers and search engine placement. The more back links you have, the more traffic you will receive. Do not link directly to affiliate sites as they will usually be declined, instead link to your own site and include your affiliate links there.

Source: News

SEO 10 Steps to Triple-Digit Lifts

SUMMARY: Are you a marketer for a U.S.-based company that has worldwide dealers yet barely a Web presence? Then this Case Study on lead generation is for you.

Basement Systems has maintained triple-digit growth in leads generated from its SEO and PPC campaigns over the past two years. The 10 steps they take.

Challenge

Basement Systems’ website generated very few leads a few years ago. The basement waterproofing company’s marketing, in fact, relied primarily on Yellow Pages advertising.

Little effort went into the website because basement waterproofing is a reactionary purchase – people usually don’t need it until they experience a wet basement. So, buying ads in the Yellow Pages seemed sufficient to generate business.

Richard Fencil, Web Marketing Director, wanted to shift the firm’s lead generation focus to the website – a relatively new marketing medium at that time for the company with dealers worldwide. Here are the 10 steps Fencil and his team took.

Campaign

Fencil and his team focused on SEO and PPC campaigns to make the website the primary online lead generator. “We just need to be out there in the appropriate spots,” he says. “And the Web is great for this because when someone looks for waterproofing, we can affect how we come up there to an extent.”

Here are 10 steps the team took:

->Step #1. Redesign website with SEO in mind

To generate leads from SEO, Fencil’s team redesigned the website in the following ways:

1) Changed the structure and navigation to make it easier for the search engines to understand what Basement Systems offers. They did this first by creating an easier flow for readers.

2) Did a lot of keyword research up front. After they knew which keywords effectively drew people to the site, they built keyword-related content into it to convert traffic into leads.

“We have multiple keywords that drive small amounts of traffic,” he says. “So, we have to build our site to accommodate lots of different searches.”

3) Implemented a thorough assessment of all titles and metatags. They found many pages with duplicate or incorrect tags and titles.

Tip: To consistently improve the SEO of the website, Fencil and his team used consultants and attended conferences and seminars. They used this information to complete three major overhauls of the site to get where it is now.

Note: Natural search drove most of the traffic to the site, But it didn’t convert quite as much traffic as PPC ads because SEO is not as targeted.

->Step #2. Create a PPC campaign

A. Buying and messaging

When buying PPC ads, the Basement Systems team got far better results in local markets than nationally. So, they bought the largest metro buys they could. They also bought in smaller markets where they had dealers.

Some of the geotargeted PPC ads took a prospect right to a local dealer’s site instead of Basement Systems’ website. “People want to work with a local company, not necessarily a national company,” Fencil says.

The messaging in PPC ads changed based on keyword searches. Some sample keyword searches: “basement finishing,” “basement waterproofing,” “crawl space waterproofing,” and “sump pump insulation.”

B. Testing

Fencil’s team used analytics offered by major search engines like Google and Yahoo! to test the effectiveness of PPC ads. “We test every text line, dynamic content switching on Yahoo! and, of course, placement positions based on bids,” he says.

Positioning of ads, whether first or seventh, was extremely variable. Many factors influenced placements, including how well a keyword phrase converted traffic. So, Fencil’s team continued testing, tweaking, and tracking to get better results. They discovered that putting the 1-800 number in the ad, for example, had no effect. It was better to put text in there.

Note: Dynamic content switching generated a higher clickthrough rate but a lower conversion rate. They bid on ads accordingly.

->Step #3. List in relevant directories

Fencil and his team posted Basement Systems’ 1-800 number and website URL in every directory their intended audience might search. Directories included Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, DMOZ.org, YellowPages.com, and many other niche or regional directories.

->Step #4. Build credibility in the community

Basement Systems built credibility by:
- Posting over 400 customer testimonials on the website
- Highlighting its patented sump pump systems on the home page
- Highlighting 19 innovation prizes on “waterproofing products” on the home page
- Showing products on the homepage that have been featured in popular TV shows, such as the one hosted by Bob Vila, Ron Hazelton’s HouseCalls, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

->Step #5. Create partnership with dealers

Basement Systems’ dealers are independent. They can sell other products and services besides those offered through Basement Systems. But that didn’t prevent Fencil’s team from directing leads from the corporate site to dealers based on their location.

In addition, Fencil’s team helped dealers improve their own websites by implementing the same SEO strategies they used nationally.

The team also built boxes on dealers’ websites that said: “As Seen on TV: See Us on Bob Vila and Ron Hazelton’s HouseCalls.”

“The more they sell, the more products they buy from us and we benefit,” he says.

->Step #6. Respond immediately to inquiries

If a lead came through the 800 number on their website, Basement Systems had people on their staff reply immediately to set up free appointments. “As soon as it comes in, we get right back to them because people change their minds,” Fencil says. “Things aren’t as important a day later.”

A lead from a contact form was forwarded to the appropriate dealer for their call-back.

->Step #7. Encourage dealers to set up extended hours

Basement Systems encouraged all their dealers to have extended hours to respond to leads themselves.

->Step #8. Join social media communities

Fencil has created a new staff position that focuses on social media. He wants to be prepared for any future shifts in the way people find information on the Internet.

But the initial goal of the social media campaign was to join communities where people discussed anything related to waterproofing. They answered questions in forums in those communities. They simple wanted to talk to people, not create viral videos or anything like that, Fencil says.

->Step #9. Constantly try new things

Though most leads came from SEO and PPC campaigns, the team did a smattering of other things to drive and convert traffic. “We do banners, display ads … we have a spread on Bob Vila,” Fencil says. “We’ll spend money anywhere to try things.”

They test to see what works and optimize based on test results.

->Step #10. Test and track

The team used Google Analytics to track where Web leads come from. Then they compared the source of leads to how well the leads converted to determine what sources drove the most traffic or sent leads that converted better.

Tip: Basement Systems used its own proprietary software with programs like Google Analytics to get this information.

For tracking, the team attached different codes to different ads, switched phone numbers for certain campaigns, and created specific landing pages for specific campaigns. “There are lots of ways to do it so you can absolutely track every single click that comes from every source,” Fencil says.

The team also did multivariate and AB split tests to see what kind of content and content placement converted better on the website.

Results

After Fencil and his team shifted their attention to the website, the number of leads skyrocketed 3,477% from the year before. “It just shows how we weren’t doing anything in 2004, so it’s kind of a ridiculous number,” he says.

Having triple-digit increases in Web leads for two consecutive years is nothing to brush off, though.
- 295% more leads generated from the Web in 2006 over 2005
-151% more leads generated from 2006 to 2007
-71% more leads generated from 2007 to 2008 so far

“In 2006, I thought, wow, we probably can’t grow much more than this,” says Fencil. “And then we more than doubled the next year … I haven’t even seen the size of our market yet. I can’t guess it.”

NOTE: Leads were described as people who filled out an online form or called the website’s 1-800 number.

Unique visitors to the site also increased by 106% from 2005 to 2006.

Traffic increased 22% from 2006 to 2007. “It kind of shows we got better at our conversion, not just generating traffic,” Fencil says.

Source: News

Learn How to Create Quality SEO Content

Over 98% of the world’s consumers use a search engine when they step out into cyber space looking for information, and the majority of this 98% choose to use Google. What does this mean for a marketer? It means that most of their potential consumer market is going to be coming at them via the Google search engine, and with a bit of crafty planning they can turn the game around so that Google is essentially doing their advertising for them. How? By ensuring that their site ranks in the top three to five pages of a search engine search.

How does a site land in these top three to five pages? Since search engines want to stay in business they want to make sure that their results are as relevant as possible. Therefore, the sites that are located in these top listings are going to be those whose content best matches the query entered by the consumer. This is a concept known as content relevance, upholstery cleaning spray site builders that understand this can utilize the basic techniques of search engine optimization to make their content as relevant as possible-techniques that are taught throughout the pages of Google Snatch.

Latif, the author of Google Snatch, has spent years learning how to write quality web content that will help his sites move to the top of the search engine rankings and stay there, and he uses his experience to teach marketers how to do the same. Throughout the pages of furniture cleaning service book he demystifies the process behind selecting keywords to build a site and writing SEO articles that will serve to turn that site into an informational superhighway, thereby making it more attractive to consumers, raising its search engine ranking and exponentially increasing the number of positive leads that it will generate.

The number one principle emphasized throughout Google Snatch is that small business owners do not have to spend an arm and a leg to bring in a so-called “marketing expert” to help their business grow; if they have the proper allen stone memorial run they can accomplish this all on their own. By learning and incorporating the principles taught by Google Snatch these small businesses can give themselves a jump start out into international air space without having to completely blow their marketing budget.

Anyone attempting to incorporate Google Snatch into their marketing campaign should ensure that before doing so they have obtained at least a primary understanding of site building and virtual marketing, as the leather upholstery cleaning teaches a number of basic and advanced techniques without spending a great deal of time explaining the fundamentals behind them. Therefore, anyone unfamiliar with the concepts of link building, meta and H tags and article directories should take the time to do a bit of homework before making an investment.

Source: News