Saturday, January 2, 2010

Raleigh Black Hat SEO... Really? - Part One

Black Hat SEO Companies in Raleigh, NC? - Part One

So first of all I want to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year! Let's hope 2010 is more of a blessing than 2009 was! I thought I'd start the New Year with a 2-Part post on Black Hat SEO techniques and how to spot it. This way when you spend money on improving you website rankings on google and other search engines, you can be confident that you are not getting scammed! Are there Black Hat SEO scam firms in Raleigh? Well, let's just say I'm not going to make a whole lot of friends with
these next 2 posts but hey, it's business, nothing personal!
;-)

In the last year I have seen a plethora of self proclaimed North Carolina Web Design and SEO companies pop up. In Raleigh, NC in particular there are hundreds of companies offering SEO services. In my previous post "SearchEngine Tricks at the Top", I posed the question of whether a company should be considered reputable simply because they are on page 1 of your google search results? No, do go and re-read the article I will just tell you the answer is "No Way!" There are too many SEO companies and Internet marketing agencies out there that dabble in Black Hat SEO Techniques to base your trust in Google page one results alone.

Why Should I Care?

So What? May be your first response. Well, I'll tell you why you should care. If you are a business owner who is concerned about traffic to your website you need to know who and what kind of agency you're dealing with. Why? Unfortunately there are SEO firms in Raleigh, Charlotte and across the US with one thing in mind... get you quick results, make you smiile & take your money. The problem is many of these so called "Professional" web design and search engine optimization companies are going to cause your domain (http://www.yourcompany.com/) to be banned by the search engines, google being the most strict, because of their greed, negligence or ignorance. By the time you catch on that you've been dupped they'll be well onto the next client and have no need to return your calls.

Ethical SEO Companies

How do I determine which SEO company I can trust? I am going to tell you right now. You don't buy a car or a HDTV without researching the product right? Well then let's go check out the SEO companies website that came back in your google search and see if they practice what they preach, shall we? These are important steps if your business and clients are important to you, so follow closely.

Looking Under the Hood

Open up your web browser, Internet Explorer, FireFox or whatever and go to http://www.google.com/. Let's do a search for an SEO company now. In my area, I am going to do a search for "raleigh seo companies" but for you it may be "charlotte seo companies" or "new york, ny seo companies." Now go down your results pages until you see one that you are drawn to and click on the link to go to that SEO company website. When you arrive at the SEO companies website stop and let's do some detective work to see how they attracted us there. Now in the toolbar of your web browser select "View >> Source" so that you can see the HTML source code.

Search engine robots or spider's crawl the web regularly to index web pages in their vast databases. These robots are concerned with just 2 area's of each page. The content that is in between the <HEAD> tags and also content that is between the <BODY> tags.

The <HEAD> Tag

The <head> tag is where the page title & meta data (information about that specific web page) is placed by the web developer. Search engine robots like Google, Yahoo & Bing only care about 1 of the tags of the head section and that is the <title> tag.

The <title> meta tag

The title tag of your web page should be relevent to the page contents with no more than 80 charecters total. Any more than 80 characters is considered SPAM and a great way to get your domain banned
by the googlebot. In the following examples I have changed the company names to protect the not so innocent.

This is a good title: Relevent, to the point, no repeat words and LESS than 80 characters in length.
<title>ACME Widgets & Gadgets | Raleigh, NC</title>

This is a bad title: This title that I found although relevent to the page, repeats the same keywords over and over. They get a strike against them for keyword stuffing and another for SPAM. It's also 170 characters in length and they claim to be SEO professionals?
<title>Web Design Raleigh | Raleigh Web Design | SEO Raleigh Web Development Web Hosting Raleigh Graphic Design Advertising Ad Agency Raleigh NC SEO`Name Changed - NameChanged</title>

The <description> meta tag

The description tag has very little relevence anymore because Google generates it's own description based on snippets from the description tag and the contents it collects from your website. You should keep your description tags to 1 or 2 sentences about your business overall.

This is a good description: Again, this is relevent, to the point, and contains no spam.
<meta name="description" content="ACME Widgets & Gadgets - Raleigh, North Carolina based manufacturer of Widget and Gadgets since 1984. Shop online or call (919)555-1212" />
This is a bad description: This description from my example site is bad practice. Keyword stuffing is SPAM and will cause poor seach engine results and finally domain name banning.
<meta name="description" content="Raleigh Web Design. Name Changed Web Design Raleigh. NameChanged SEO Raleigh Web Development Raleigh Web Hosting Raleigh Graphic Design. Raleigh SEO Raleigh Advertising Agency Raleigh NC. Name Changed a Raleigh Ad Agency Specalizes in Web Development And Print Advertising." />

The <keywords> meta tag

"Oh, but what about the keywords tag? That's important right?" No. The keywords tag is not used anymore since so many web designers and would be SEO agencies in the late 1990s used it to mischeiviously attract web surfer's to irrelevent websites. For those search engines that may still use the keywords tag, less is more so never go over 20 total keywords and don't repeat yourself to the point of spam.

This is a good keywords tag: Again
<meta name="keywords" content="widgets, gadgets, raleigh, north carolina, nc, acme widgets & gadgets" />

This is a bad keywords tag: This is just senseless spam and should never be done. If your pages look like this... fire your web team on the spot!
<meta name="keywords" content="raleigh web design, web design raleigh, raleigh web development, web development raleigh, raleigh web hosting, web hosting raleigh, raleigh seo, seo raleigh, raleigh graphic design, graphic design raleigh, raleigh ad agency, ad agency raleigh, raleigh advertising agency, advertising agency raleigh, raleigh print advertising agency, print advertising agency raleigh, Name Changed, NameChanged raleigh, NameChanged, raleigh web design, web design raleigh, ad agency, agency, internet marketing, web design, website design, web development, hosting, seo, raleigh nc, raleigh north carolina, rtp, triangle nc, Name Changed" />

What are all those other <META> tags for?

I'll run some others down real quick here. Some have an actual function but most have no use to search engines. I'll use the same example I pulled out of my Google search for this explanation.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Used for web browser page rendering. No SEO relevence.
<meta name="robots" content="index" />
There is no need for multiple "robots" tags as it just confuses the spider. This tag should be combined with the following tag for better SEO performance like this. <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="follow" />
<meta name="coverage" content="Worldwide" />
No SEO relevence.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="4 days" />
Tells search robots how often the site changes. Typically 30 days, 60 days, 90 days,or NEVER, work just fine.
<meta name="author" content="http://www.NameChanged.com" />
No SEO relevence. Just the person who wrote the content.
<meta name="copyright" content="http://www.NameChanged.com Copyright (c) NameChanged. All rights reserved." />
No SEO relevence.
<meta name="classification" content="http://www.NameChanged.com" />
No SEO relevence. For Netscape users only, whoever they are. Deprecated.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
No SEO relevence.
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false" />
No SEO relevence. This tells IE not to show it's toolbar when you hover your cursor over an image.
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
No SEO relevence. Leftover tag from a long abandonned Microsoft project.
<meta name="Rating" content="General" />
No SEO relevence. Provides a parental rating.
<meta name="doc-class" content="Living Document" />
No SEO relevence. Tells the browser the document type.
<meta name="abstract" content="Name Changed is a leading website design firm in Raleigh North Carolina. Our Raleigh web development applications, Raleigh SEO, Raleigh Hosting, and Raleigh Graphic Design Agency Specializes in Web Development, Hosting, SEO and Print Advertising. Name Changed is based in Raleigh North Carolina and proudly serves Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Apex, Chapel Hill, RTP and The Greater Triangle Area of North Carolina." />
No SEO relevence, IMHO, since the top search engines no longer use the description meta tag; the abstract tag is pointless. It used to be a default if no description tagwas found.

In my next blog post I'll show you some basic items to look for in the <body> tag of an HTML document. This is where the bulk of Black Hat SEO takes place. Remember, a little foul-play in your SEO may have great results with the search engines in the beginning, but the robots are built to look for these mischeivious practices. They will eventually catch it and then when you are dropped out of the index completely the results are devastating.

Until Next Time... Happy Surfing

Bill @ GNIDESIGN

Labels: Bing, Black Hat SEO, Google, Keywords, NC, Professional, Raleigh, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web Design, Yahoo

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Search Engine Tricks at the Top

I started researching facts for this article tonight when I stumbled upon the Associated Press (AP) website. Lo and behold, I see the article I had been planning to write! OK, sort of. My article was leaning toward a slightly different context but had the same premise. So rather than recreate the wheel, I thought I'd just bring out the important stuff and point you all to the meat and potatoes over at the AP site.

The bottom line is this, just because a company achieves a number 1 or 2 ranking in the search engines, should you trust them? Absolutely not! Although we all aspire to be number 1 on google, Jordan Robertson quickly points out in his article that it is very easy for deviant people to achieve high search ranking by exploiting the algorithms of top search engines like google search, yahoo search and bling search.

According to the article, security researcher Jim Stickley performed an investigative experiment where he created a website that mimicked the legitimate financial institution website of the Credit Union of Southern California. By implementing known "black hat" Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, Strickley's phishing website obtained a "No. 2 ranking on Yahoo Inc.'s search engine and landed in the top slot on Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, ahead of even the credit union's real site" (Roberton 2009). These results were achieved seemingly overnight.

You can read the entire article at the AP website but the important point I want to bring out as a SEO expert is this, -there are real Search Engine Optimization firms in Raleigh, as there are SEO companies in North Carolina and across the United States that specialize in black hat SEO techniques. These companies will happily take your money and even get you a top spot in the Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs)... BUT... this comes at a high price because the large Search Engines are looking for this and will quickly remove your site from the index and ban your domain. This is not a good a position for your business to be in, no pun intended.

Until next time...

Happy Surfing!

Bill @ gnidesign.com

Oh I almost forgot! If you want legitimate search engine results that will last and are done right the first time, ask me for a free search engine analysis of your current website.

Labels: Domain Name, NC, North Carolina, Raleigh, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web Design

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Can You Get Me Page One Google Search Results for My Keywords?

Since I started GNIDESIGN and got into the business of web design and search engine optimization in 1996, there is possibly no other question I have been asked more than the one in the subject line of this blog. If I had a dollar for every time I was asked the question "Can You Get Me Page One Google Search Results for My Keywords?" I could retire from the glamorous life of software architecture and become a prize Bass fisherman, partner with Bill Dance and focus on winning the Bass Masters Tournament.

But all kidding aside, the short answer is YES! Of course, I can get first page Google ranking results and you can see my results in the images to the left and at the bottom of this page. Page one, second position is pretty good considering I only used Organic SEO methods on this. But the reality is, depending on how much competition is competing for your targeted SEO keyword or phrase, page 1 Google results can take a lot of time and money. This is why it is important to first qualify your clients intentions and budget before wasting a lot of their time as well as your own.

What a client usually doesn't understand is that there are so many variables that affect search engine results. Even as an experienced search engine marketing professional, it is possible that I could perform perfect organic search engine optimization, research and pick the very best keywords and phrases for my clients target audience, and still wind up on page 99 of the search engines. Thankfully, I've never had this experience but it can happen!

For this reason, I never promise my clients that I will obtain 1st page SEO results on Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine. Even clients that have been with me for 10 plus years will not hear me make that promise despite the fact that I HAVE been able to achieve those first page rankings for them (see below). In fact, I always advise my clients, should they have a firm that does promise them first page Google results, they should turn and run in the opposite direction because they're probably dealing in black hat SEO techniques.

So Why Do I NOT Promise 1st Page SEO Results?

Several reasons really, here are the half dozen that come to mind right away.

In the case of an existing website, there's no clear way of knowing what the practices of the previous webmaster or firm might have been. If they practiced black hat SEO techniques that resulted in the domain name being blacklisted I may never get the site indexed.
How saturated is the client’s targeted area with similar businesses competing for the same SEO keywords and phrases?
How old is the client’s domain name? Google definitely prefers domain names that have been around for a while. Preferably 2 years or more. So if you have a domain that was just registered last week, you increase the challenge of reaching page 1 in most of the search engines but it can still be done.
How much content is currently available and how much will be available on an on-going basis for the website? Content is KING! If the clients site consists of a single home page with very little meat and a contact form, there is going to be quite a lot of work to do and a price tag to match. This is especially true if you have to hire additional writers.
How much budget is the client willing to spend on a thorough SEO and SEM campaign? Are they willing to sign up for the long haul if need be or are they looking for an overnight fix? Getting to page 1 on Google requires a large commitment, can take several months, and cost thousands of dollars to get there. Granted, once you get high rankings the cost is irrelevant in contrast to the amount of profit coming in, but can the client make the investment?
Most importantly, does your client get it? Are they willing to listen to your expertise on the subject or do they have all the answers? I had a potential client tell me recently that NOBODY ever looks beyond page 1 on Google and was quite adamant about it. Frankly, he's missing the whole point of SEO. Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process. It’s not like a newspaper ad you run once and hope customers come to the store on the day of the sale. You do your SEO work on the site and then you wait to see the results. That wait could be a few weeks or it could drag out a few months before you begin seeing your results. But results you will see.

So all of this and I finally arrive at a closing point. Hopefully to help you, the reader, unravel the mystery of SEO. If you have a website that has no search results at all, then you have to start somewhere. If within a few weeks of roll out you suddenly appear on page 10 of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), this is a big deal and cause to get excited. Then the real fun begins as you tweak and add content, you appear on SERPs #4, #3, #2, gaining ground on your competition? It’s very exciting to see with your own eyes that all of the hard work is paying off. These are advertizing dollars that are quantifiable. Using Google Analytics you begin to see the amount of traffic that your website is getting. Then finally one day you wake up and the phone rings. “Wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring …” “This is Bill Kearns, What can I do for you?”

The rest is another SEO success story.

Here is a first page Google result for a client.

Another first page Google result.

Happy surfing!

Bill @ gnidesign

GET A FREE SEO ANALYSIS FROM GNIDESIGN FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Labels: Domain Name, NC, Professional, Raleigh, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, Web Design, Website

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Twine Leads The Way To Web 3.0

It's been a while since my last entry, my apologies. Largely due to the revamping of our own website at gnidesign and an overload of Search Engine Optimization projects. But with the Thanksgiving holiday break I finally have some time to catch up. So without further adue... let's talk about Twine as it relates to your small business and social networking.

What is Twine?
Not to be confused with my Raleigh, NC based social media guru friends at Twine Interactive, Twine is a new type of social network that I find extremely useful. They push the limits beyond the typical bookmarking website and implement some neat Web 3.0 ideaologies. Twine.com offers the ability to gather and stay on top of your interests by providing a method of managing and sharing your knowledge on the web.

I like Twine over other bookmarking websites because of its collective intelligence of both machines and humans. OK, so what does that mean? Like Delicious and Digg bookmarking web sites, you can use Twine as a collection of information that you've acquired. However, by teaming up with other twine social media users, you begin to reap the benefits of a live and growing collection of information based on your specific interests. These collections are called Twines.

The content on twine is added by humans but then the machine logic adds semantic web tags to your content which enables automatic organizing of your information. On the the social media end of Twine. As you add content to your Twine profile, the engine helps you to discover new people and thought leaders who share the same interests as you.

So whether your interests are seo, web design, computer science, football, cooking or scrap booking. Twine is a great place to meet other folks who share those interests and collaborate on new ideas.

Until next time...

Happy Coding

Bill @ gnidesign

Request a Search Engine Optimization Analysis with no obligations.

Labels: NC, Raleigh, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, Social Networks, Twine, Web Design, Web Development

: Name: Bill Kearns; Location: Raleigh, NC, United States

I'm a Software Architect with a Bachelor of Science in Business Systems Information Technology. I started in graphic design with Photoshop 1.0 in 1988 and began developing websites in 1996. I'm with gnidesign now and I have learned a few things along the way and am happy to share them with you.

View my complete profile

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