Google Quality Guidelines: Search engine spam

Hidden text Using invisible text specifically tailored to search engine spiders
Cloaking Presenting different content for the same URL to the web user and the search engine spider
Sneaky redirects Using JavaScript to redirect web users to a page they did not expect, usually one that is unrelated to their
search query
Irrelevant keywords Employing techniques such as keyword stuffing
Duplicate content Using the same content on numerous domains or subdomains
Badware Using malicious tactics including phishing (pretending to be another site) and malware software
(installable on the victim’s PC)
Doorway pages Pages designed specifically for search engines to rank for certain search terms. Typically, doorway pages
include a redirect to the target page of interest

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Search Engine Spam

Search engine users search to find relevant content. And search engines try to deliver
links to relevant content. Unethical SEO, referred to in the industry as spam, attempts
to boost page rank by abusing the idea of relevant content—that is, improving page
rank by doing something other than delivering quality, relevant pages. So, for example,
getting a page about Viagra to come up in a search for sports results would be considered
search engine spam.

If you are an established brand or company, your image is everything and you will do
everything to protect that image. If you are struggling to get to the top of the SERPs,
you might be tempted to use artificial, or black hat, SEO. Artificial SEO strives for
immediate benefits—usually to make a quick profit. Its sole focus is in tricking search
engines by finding loopholes in the search engine algorithms. It is this “tricking” component
that makes it unethical SEO. Nevertheless, black hat SEO practitioners are
always looking for ways to manipulate search engine results.

What exactly are such SEO practitioners trying to do? Simply put, they are trying to
use search engines to get much more traffic. The goal is as simple as the law of large
numbers. Suppose a site gets 50 search engine referrals per day. On average, it takes
about 200 referrals to make a sale. This means it takes four days to make only one sale.
Some people need better sales results than that, and they are easily tempted by unethical
techniques to attain the results they desire.

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SEO Keyword Tuning with PPC Testing

The PPC paradigm allows for fast, real-time feedback loops. You do not need to wait
several weeks or months to realize whether your SEO is working.
Say you have a list of pages with specific targeted keywords.

You can create an equivalent
PPC test campaign using exact keyword matching to see whether your pages
perform as expected. You can also use broad keyword matching to see whether there
are other keywords that you may have missed but are producing good conversion rates.
Finding mistakes quickly can save you a ton of money and time in the long run. Use
PPC platforms as your SEO testing ground.

Choosing Better Keywords
When it comes to choosing keywords, you should generally be interested in highvolume,
low-competition keywords. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool shows you
relative keyword search volume numbers. Although the accuracy of this data is questionable,
it should give you a relative baseline when comparing different keywords. If
you take this information together with the number of derived competitors by using
Google’s intitle:, inurl:, and inanchor: commands

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Utilizing blog comments, newsgroups, and forum postings

The idea is much the same when posting comments to blogs, newsgroups, and forums
as it is when submitting articles. Simply include your signature with your URL every
time you post. Note that some sites do not allow URLs. Others employ the nofollow
attribute to discourage you from placing links in your posts.
The basic rule of thumb is to be relevant to the topic you are posting about. Try to
include keywords relevant to your site. Otherwise, your post could look like spam and
you might get banned. Here are some search command tips you can use to find relevant

discussion sites:
"video games" forum
wine producers inurl:forum
"sports apparel" inurl:forum
"fishing gear" forum
Build a Complementary Site
This is not a call to create duplicated content. You want to create a complementary
content-rich site that targets many other keywords not specifically targeted on your
main site. You can utilize a free host or an inexpensive shared host when using this

technique. Go easy with cross-linking. Too much or too little is not good. Use a more
balanced, natural approach. Host these sites on different IPs as well as different IP range
blocks if you can.

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Adding Your Links Everywhere

You can do many things outside your site to foster healthy link building. You can write
articles, submit blog comments, and post to newsgroup and forum messages. What
you want to do is leave your URL within any content you create.
Submitting articles

Many sites let you submit your articles, including ArticlesBase, EzineArticles, Article
Geek, and many others. When you choose your article submission vendor, ensure that
your articles are always properly credited.
When your articles are (re)published, you want to make sure they contain appropriate
attribution by containing one or all of the following: your name, a link to your biography
page, and a URL of your choice. To find more article submission services, simply search
for article submission service. You may also want to find article submission services for
your niche. Simply add your pertinent keywords to the same query to find relevant
providers.

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Backlinks from .edu and .gov domains

When Matt Cutts (Google search quality engineer) was asked about the extra ranking
boost from inbound links originating from .edu and .gov TLDs, he responded as follows:
This is a common misconception—you don’t get any PageRank boost from having
an .edu link or .gov link automatically.

Although Google denies that .edu and .gov links get a PageRank boost, you can easily
construe that the domain extension does matter in some sense. When Google flat out
denies something, it is almost always because it is not true. But when Google is cagey
about something, you need to beware. Most people believe that .edu and .gov links are
more valuable than others because those sites typically have strong PageRank and
therefore more link juice. It is doubtful that Google actually gives these sites greater
weight simply because of the TLD extension. When your site has a link from an .edu
or .gov link, it says a great deal about the site’s trust and authority.
It is very hard to get an .edu or .gov domain. Only one registrar today has permission
to grant .edu domains: EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit organization that won the right to be
the sole registrar of all .edu domains in 2001. Not everyone can get an .edu domain,
and .edu domains are not transferable. Eligibility requirements are very strict (http://net
.educause.edu/edudomain/):

Eligibility for a .edu domain name is limited to U.S. postsecondary institutions that are
institutionally accredited, i.e., the entire institution and not just particular programs, by
agencies on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting
Agencies. These include both “Regional Institutional Accrediting Agencies” and “National
Institutional and Specialized Accrediting Bodies” recognized by the U.S. Department
of Education.

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Website Success Metrics Seo

Although website content optimization is basically common sense—who doesn’t
want a fast, easy-to-find site with engaging content?—it helps to know the real
impact that it can have on your audience growth, engagement, and ultimately, conversion
and monetization. The following are generally accepted, simple metrics that
you can change through the optimization techniques.

Unique visitors
Hits are not what you think. A server hit is an HTTP request for a single web
object. One web page view can require many hits to the server. The true mark of
how you should measure your audience is in unique visitors. You want to
increase your unique audience by providing fast, engaging, relevant, and navigable
web pages. Tracking new unique visitors can help you track audience
growth.

Average time on site (ATOS) and length of visit
How long are your users sticking around? According to ClickTracks, ATOS is
one of the best measures of user engagement and the propensity to buy.

Pages per visit
The number of pages that were consumed during a visit is a broad and simple
measure of user engagement. Pages per visit and ATOS are two measures that
can indicate possible flow states of high engagement.

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Top 10 Tips for Optimizing CSS Seo

The following 10 best practices are designed to speed-optimize your CSS, and your
HTML markup:
1. Replace inline style with type selectors to target multiple instances of identical
elements.
2. Use descendant selectors to avoid inline classes.
3. Group selectors with common declarations.
4. Group declarations with common selectors.
5. Combine common styles into shared classes.
6. Use inheritance to eliminate duplicate declarations.
7. Use CSS shorthand to abbreviate rules and colors.
8. Abbreviate long class and ID names.
9. Use CSS2 and CSS3.x techniques.
10. Replace JavaScript behavior with CSS techniques.
In addition, you can eliminate extraneous whitespace by removing tabs, comments,
and returns.

Tip #1: Replace Inline Style with Type Selectors
This section starts with simple type selectors to streamline markup, and then it
moves through grouping, inheritance, and CSS shorthand, and finally to some
applied techniques to replace JavaScript behavior.

Web pages that use inline style pepper HTML code with unnecessary font and style
tags. This effectively hardcodes the presentation directly within the HTML. Unless
the style is used only once, it is more efficient to create a CSS rule and target all elements
of a certain kind with type selectors (i.e., p, ul, h2, etc.). For example, this:
<h2 style="font-size:1.2em;color:red;">Little red Corvette</h2>
<h2 style="font-size:1.2em;color:red;">Baby you're much too fast to embed</h2>
<h2 style="font-size:1.2em;color:red;">Little red Corvette</h2>
<h2 style="font-size:1.2em;color:red;">You need a love that's gonna last</h2>
becomes this, by abstracting the inline style to a block style:
<style type="text/css"><!--
#main h2{font-size:1.2em;color:red;}
--></style>
The corresponding HTML cleans up to this:
<div id="main">
<h2>Little red Corvette</h2>
<h2>Baby you're much too fast</h2>
<h2>Little red Corvette</h2>
<h2>You need a love that's gonna last</h2>
</div>
Note how clean the code becomes after you remove the inline styles. This CSS technique
also helps search engine optimization (SEO) by boosting keyword density and
prominence.

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Image SEO

Images are integral to content. Meaningful or unusual images that attract attention also serve to
associate your content in the reader's mind. Think of an image as an internal reference that helps
readers remember a piece of content.


Image SEO is also crucial because Google recognizes the importance of images. I do the following:
• provide meaningful file names with SEO keyphrases
• provide Alt and Title tags with SEO keyphrases
This has helped me to drive traffic for hugely competitive SEO keywords via images instead of
content alone.

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Lead paragraph SEO

I don't beat around the bush. I open my articles with a sentence that reiterates the page heading and
explains what the reader will get from the content.
This is great for SEO for two reasons:
• it creates a meaningful content teaser for humans viewing search results
• it allows you to use the primary SEO keyphrase again in a natural way
By making your opening paragraph as meaningful as possible, and as closely related to the page
header as possible, you encourage Google to return that portion of the page in the search results.
Bonus SEO tip: I use the lead paragraph in the META description tag of my HTML too.

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