There’s an interesting thread at SEO Refugee where the question of “Blackhat SEO” comes up. What is blackhat SEO and how can it affect your website?

Technically blackhat SEO is doing anything outside of the webmaster guidelines with the intent of manipulating the search engine rankings.

Blackhat SEO tends to bring in results faster than the normal “organic” process of whitehat SEO. It investigates exploits in the search engine algorithms to make a site perform better than average.

I think it is important to note that blackhat techniques are not illegal. Nor unethical. It’s just a short-term solution and there are appropriate uses for blackhat techniques. By short-term, I mean that a site using blackhat techniques will eventually get caught and when that happens the domain will be banned by the search engines.

A problem comes up when defining blackhat because a lot of blackhat techniques have legitimate uses. The problem is the search engines have difficulty detecting blackhat intent on a casual basis. And intent is the real indicator of whether a website is up to no good - and subject to ban - or not.

Common blackhat techniques include:

Hidden text and/or links - Or almost hidden. Use of CSS and matching colors shows the websites a site stuffed with links and content typical viewer won’t see.

Sneaky redirects - Use of javascript, meta refresh and other redirects where the viewer is supposed to arrive on one page but is instead redirected to another sales/ad ridden page.

Scraping - Generating original content based on targeted keywords takes real time and work. Blackhats usually want to keep this to a minimum so automated scripts pull content from existing websites. Advanced scripts scramble the content to make it appear unique.

Link spamming - Using automated scripts to plug links on blogs, forums and guestbooks. This isn’t as effective as it used to be because of the “nofollow” attribute and is the main reason behind Google’s nofollow solution.

Cloaking - Similar to hidden text but implemented in a completely different manner. Cloaking involves watching for the IP addresses of the search engines and displaying different content to them than to a normal viewer.

Keyword stuffing - An old school technique where the keyword density of a page is inflated. Doesn’t really work anymore especially in the meta keywords tag which is all but ignored by modern search engines.

Link farms - Building several sites that link together to artificially increase link popularity of a website.

Hijacking - Copying existing websites to rank for their content.

Referer log spamming - Pinging the website logfile in hopes the webmaster will track that URL back to the spam site.

Buying expired domains - To capitalize off their previous success.

Most blackhat websites don’t provide any real value to the visitor and that is why the search engines seek them out and purge them from their index. But as mentioned earlier there are appropriate uses for blackhat techniques.

Consider a real estate listing in a hot market. Taking the time to get that listing ranking at a level that is of value to the real estate agent just isn’t cost-effective. Using blackhat techniques that may get the site popular within weeks instead of months makes sense. But of course the site will eventually get caught and banned.

Blackhat is fine for short-term projects but should not be employed for a website geared for lasting value or long-term search engine success.

Posted in SEOs, Website Designers, Promotion, Industry News, SEO

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Conversions are any change in a viewers behavior based on your message. Usually online this means clicking something but not always. Consider the following common conversions:

• Increased awareness of a business brand, product, service or person.
• Conversations or references for a business, person, product, service or article.
• Enhanced understanding of an issue that leads to more or less use of…
• Make a purchase
• Click a link

Increased Awareness

This is usually branding or making someone or something more recognizable to a viewer. This comes in handy for people looking to raise their stature in their industry or community. A great example of this are the politician’s websites that are gearing up for the November elections. Common examples are just about every business website out there - they all affect the brand of that business (for better or worse).

Conversations or References

If two people I’ve never met have a conversation about something I wrote that article is successful. If I can get people to link to something I wrote even better. Conversations and references are word of mouth or viral marketing. It’s a tough thing to make happen but always worth the effort.

Enhanced Understanding

Enhanced understanding naturally leads to people doing more or less of something. For most businesses they want the viewer to do more: buy more of our stuff!
But a non-profit may want people to do less: stop smoking, consume less energy, etc. The viewer has to make a choice to either ignore the message or accept it.

Make a Purchase

Making a purchase may come from enhanced understanding but it’s really about the value proposition and how your goods stand up against the competition. Competition that’s just a few clicks away online. Is your pitch good enough to get the viewer to stop what they are doing and navigate through your checkout process?

Click a Link

Learn more, order now, and subscribe are the most common calls to action I see. Then there are the ads including affiliate programs and contextual (Adsense). Sometimes getting the viewer to click the right link is the trick. Usability is the key to get viewers to click the links you want.

When I think of conversions for websites these are the categories I place them in. Once I know what types of conversions I’m looking for I start to define my market: not just people interested in “product x” but also people that will request more information or tell a friend about it or… whatever I want them to do. It’s a special type of person that will convert at all and a rare person that will do it the way I want.

I think that is overlooked on most websites. Traffic for the sake of traffic does not help your brand and can hurt it a great deal. Building traffic to increase conversions is as old as the internet. If you have 1,000 visits per day and 2% convert then if you get 2,000 visits per day your sales numbers double. Simple enough but what about the other 98% of viewers that didn’t get what they wanted? You also doubled the number of frustrated viewers which hurt the brand.

By knowing what you want your viewers to do and building the site around that your viewers will be much happier and your conversions will increase by percentages. How different would your bottom line be with a 5% increase in conversions?

Posted in Sales and Marketing, Business Owners, Customer Service, Marketing, Web Design

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After testing YPN for the last two months it looks pretty conclusive: YPN has a long way to go to catch up to Adsense. In all fairness I believe YPN is still in beta, still there are some things they need to work on. My not-too-scientific approach was to use a site that was already pulling a small but steady amount of traffic and Adsense clicks and then swap the Adsense for YPN.

Problem #1 - YPN doesn’t offer link ads. On advice from Mystery Mentor, my plan was to use the ads he recommended for Adsense including the text link ads across the footer. YPN offers the standard text ads but not link ads. And because you can’t use Adsense and YPN ads on the same page because of the TOS I had to choose to either keep earning the money I was getting or continue the experiment. I opted to continue forward.

Problem #2 - YPN’s relevancy falls short. The ads that appear for Adsense sometimes make me scratch my head but the YPN ads were almost always off-base. I figured that it might take time for them to align to the content but after two weeks I had 0 clicks and was considering swapping back. I found a setting in the control panel that let’s you tighten the focus of the ads. I made the appropriate change and saw a very minor improvement.

Problem #3 - Low CTR. The ads were still targeted too broadly and the CTR didn’t improve.

Problem #4 - Limited pool of advertisers to pull from. I don’t have proof but I suspect the industry this site covered just didn’t have a very broad advertising base. I saw a lot of ads for “mortgage” which probably pay well but I’ll never know because my viewers aren’t interested in that and didn’t click the ads.

Problem #5 - Low gain for clicks. I thought that maybe the problem of fewer clicks would be compensated for by high payouts for the few clicks I did get. No such luck.

YPN has a solid platform and implementing ads is just as easy as Adsense. I beleive that as they progress and recruit more advertisers the relevancy will improve. And I did only test one site. Other sites or industries may have better luck. But for now the steady money is in Adsense, at least for me.

Posted in Business Owners, PPC, Reviews, Industry News

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After several conversations where people asked if I had a facebook account and I was forced to admit “no, I don’t” I have finally given into to the peer pressure and joined the facebook cult.

Check out my profile, befriend me or drop me some tips to make my facebook experience as cool as I’ve heard!

So far the signup process was very easy. But the search process is a bit cumbersome. It seems facebook really wants you to plug in your email manager and I’m not comfortable with that. Searching for individuals doesn’t seem possible as they want you to look for groups but the groups don’t include “industry” just company, education or location. Kinda short-sided IMO.

I’m still in the dark as far as the facebook culture goes but I hope to learn fast - especially if you help… maybe drop some tips in the comments bellow…

Posted in Sales and Marketing, SEOs, Website Designers, Business Owners, Reviews

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Dear Web Hosting Company,

There is a major issue in your industry that you may not be aware of and I’d like to take a few moments to tell you about so that you can do a better job serving my peers.

I know you do a great job (at least 99.9% which is no small feat!) but lately even big, established web hosts have been failing us in one particular area: Digg traffic.

Digg traffic or the “Digg phenominon” is where a site that normally attracts a couple hundred to a few thousand visits in a day spikes to thousands of visits per minute. Of course this effect isn’t limited to Digg. There are other sources of large traffic jumps (like other social bookmarking sites and the news media) but the Digg phenomenon is probably the best known and most often referred to on message boards and blogs.

To the untrained (and automated) eye this may appear to be a DOS attack, but it isn’t. It’s real traffic from real people coming to our sites to see something cool, interesting or useful.

We work hard to make this happen and it really sucks when our host lets us down.

Of course we are aware that you have policies that we agreed to when we set up the account where you are justified to drop the site when big traffic spikes occur and in extreme cases suspending or terminating our long-standing business relationship. When these things happen we can’t help but wonder if you are missing the point: as website owners we count on you to stand up for us.

After all, we need you and the services you provide. As more stories of dropped sites when that magic moment hits spread across the internet, expect future customers to ask about how you handle these situations.

And you better believe that as website owners, promoters, SEOs, SEMs, designers and marketers we do talk about which web hosting companies can handle a couple days of boom traffic and which ones can’t. We are taking names and sharing them on forums, blogs and through email. These conversations are happening daily. And we are the people on the front lines. We are the decision makers and influencers. We need to know we can count on you not only when the worst happens, but the best.

Conversly, being able to take a Digg-pounding may result in some positive publicity for you.

What we are asking for is:

• A clear policy on boom traffic
• You to know the difference between the Digg phenomenon and a DOS attack
• You to help us out when such an opportunity comes along

If you do these things and we can take advantage of these boom traffic situations it means our websites will be more successful and that we will need to upgrade our accounts (which means more money for you). If you won’t handle it we have to find hosts that can. You’ve been great to us so far, please see what you can do.

Sincerely,

Your web hosting clients

Posted in Website Designers, Business Owners, Promotion, Industry News, Marketing

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