Optimize Pages With SEO Best Practices

The best guide to SEO Best Practices is the Google 2012 Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which includes the following topics in its Table of Contents.

• Unique, accurate page titles
• Description tags
• Improved site structure
• Improved URL structure
• Easy navigation
• Optimized content
• Offering quality content and services
• Writing better anchor text
• Optimizing images
• Proper use of heading tags
• Dealing with crawlers
• Elective use of robots.txt
• Using rel=”nofollow” for links
• SEO for mobile sites
• Submitting mobile sites to search engines
• Guiding mobile users accurately
• Promotions and analysis
• Promoting your website appropriately
• Using free webmaster tools
• If you take the time to implement these tactics as time allows, you will get gradual improvements in your rankings along with increased conversions.

Implement Social Media Tactics
Today’s consumers are increasingly going to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for information, influencing their purchasing decisions. They also share their own retail experiences with others on these sites. This results in brand mentions and recommendations from friends and strangers alike.

As a result, consumers have been turning to social media for product research before purchase.

• 76 percent of consumers recommend companies they trust to a friend or colleague (Edelman Digital)
• 62 percent of all online shoppers read product-related comments from friends on Facebook, and 75% of these shoppers click through to the retail site (Sociable Labs, 2012)
• Customers who participate and/or interact with you on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook are 150% more likely to buy merchandise (eTail Blog, 2012).

With increased social recommendations influencing product search and discovery, it is important that Web merchants take advantage of these touch points, creating opportunities for consumer engagement.

You can encourage your customers to share positive experiences on social media sites, and you also have the opportunity to defend yourself from complaints on these sites. Some brands can benefit by using social media advertising to target their audience and drive new customers to their sites.

Build Mobile Pages And/Or Mobile Apps
Optimized mobile pages and mobile apps provide a great user experience for consumers on the go. In fact, shoppers expect to find them when searching on their mobile devices.

Optimize your mobile site and apps with the following features:

• Location Specific Calls to Action
• Location Phone Number, Address, Hours
• Driving Directions
• Local Store Promotions
• Local Store Pictures
• Company YouTube Videos
• In-Store Offers
• Social Network Sharing
• Links to Promotions
• Click to Call Features
• Build Local Pages

In addition to the most basic local business information, aggregators wish to acquire as much “enhanced data” or local business details as possible. The more enhanced your local business data is, the more value it has for display to searching consumers.

Enhanced data can include, but is not limited to:

• Additional business category types
• Business descriptions
• Operating hours
• Web page links
• Images and logos of the business
• Images and descriptions of products your business offers
• The white paper, How to Achieve Remarkable Results in Local & Mobile Search: A Step by Step Guide, can provide you with more information.

Optimize Map Listings With Local Landing Page URLs
First, ensure there are no data inconsistencies in your listings; then, manage and update your Local Maps data.

Fix Data Inconsistencies

There is a single point of contact for managing multiple business listings in the map areas of search result pages. Increase local map rankings for targeted categories relevant to business service offerings.

Ensure consistency in your local business NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) information to local maps when changes are made to your local business listings. Always link your local landing pages to your Maps pages to increase local relevancy.

Manage & Update Local Maps Data

Data consistency reinforces confidence from search engines and provides the best user experience and search engine rankings.

When claiming and managing listings directly on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, it enables the optimization and distribution of enhanced data with video, images, local descriptions, targeted categories, social media links, areas served, specials, hours/holiday hours and other enhanced content.

Local maps distribution networks include: Google+ Local, Yahoo! Local and Bing Business Portal for listing optimization and management. This includes direct management of all business data, validated business listings, targeted keyword categories, easy updates with landing page control.

Optimize IYPs & Data Aggregators For Consistent Data Validation
You can overwrite incorrect Local Business data and achieve higher rankings through “data consistency.” Local search ranking algorithms used by the search engines to determine rankings are heavily dependent upon consistent local business data.

To maximize local search rankings, it is critical to manage your listing presence on all information services – not just a single or limited service.

Manage and update your Local Business Data including the information below:

• Business name, address, telephone, manager information, neighborhood information, areas served, logo and storefront images, description, categories, operating and holiday hours, landing page URL, special offers and events, social networks URLs, local map URLs and review site URLs.
• Local Search Directories and Internet Yellow Page Distribution Networks Include: LocalEze, InfoUSA, Axciom, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Yelp, FourSquare, Facebook, Local.com, GPS Devices and more than 300 Local IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages).

Improve SERP Visibility With Semantic Markup
Adding semantic markup to your pages will enhance your page-one listings with increased click-through rates (CTR). GoodRelations RDFa is frequently used by e-commerce sites. You can find more information on GoodRelations markup on the GoodRelations Community Wiki.

Schema.org was adopted by the three major search engines in 2011 and will be increasingly implemented on websites in 2013. For more information on using structured markup, see Aaron Bradley’s article, E-commerce SEO Using Schema.org Just Got A Lot More Granular and Barbara Starr’s article, How To Leverage Structured Markup To Create E-Commerce Web Portals.

Takeaways for 2013
Since SEO tactics have transformed over the past year, it’s important for website owners to update their websites and marketing tactics. Two tactics I highly recommend are local search optimization and implementing structured markup on your pages. These tactics can give you better visibility in the SERPs fairly quickly.

In closing, all the Web marketing tactics above can improve your presence in the SERPs, drive more traffic to your site and increase your conversions in 2013.

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:

black hat by googlisti

Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.

IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.

301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.

Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com

Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.

Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.

Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.

Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.

Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.

Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.

Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.

Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.

Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.

Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.

Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.

Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.

New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.

Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.

Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.

Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.

Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.

Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.

Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.

Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.

Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.

Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.

Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.

Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.

Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.

Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

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• 30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically (seointernetmarketingtipsandtricks.wordpress.com)