seo blog

I have had many ask me what the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, so I thought I might throw a couple of definitions out there.

I am going to start with SEO, as it is a part of SEM. SEO is the act of optimising the html and other content of your website for relevant, targeted key phrases in order to attain higher natural listings than competing websites. SEO provides a cheaper long term solution for increased qualified traffic and generates customer enquiries that ultimately convert to sales. Thanks to ihaveawebsitenowwhat.co.uk for help with a definition.

Now SEM is broader than SEO. It includes SEO and other areas to improve a sites visibility in search engine results pages, like paid listings and paid inclusions.

You can think of SEM as more expensive and quite possibly more targeted, while SEO is free (not counting your time of course) and its purpose is to obtain better free search listings.

Personally, I would start with SEO and then move onto SEM.

SEO Voter is a Search Engine Optimization social network highlighting the hot topics in SEO, directories, tools and news.

I thought that it would be a great idea to mix a social networking site with a directory list. I am hoping it creates a great source of SEO news and a resource that is easy to search. BTW, the tagcloud and search works great and finding recent submissions is a piece of cake.

I have included revenue sharing on SEO Voter. It uses Google Adsense and each user is able to add their Adsense ID in the profile area for the system to show adds for them. So come along and add some articles and make some extra on your Adsense too!

With the Google PageRank finally complete, you can see the fruits of all your hard work on optimising your site for search engines. Though sometimes the fruit does look all the great.

If you are seeing an increase in your site’s PR, it doesn’t mean that you will see an immediate increase in the amount of traffic from Google nor see high listings in the search results. A lot of people think this and are disappointed when the see neither happening.

To explain a little… a site’s PR is continually being reviewed and calculated by Google, but they only show a public update once every so often.

As a small inspirational push - keep at your search engine optimisation and check for increased traffic and listing position more often as it won’t coincide with the PR update.

Well after writing my previous posting on SEO tactics, I thought this would fit in perfectly! HAHA… are the majority of blogs spam blogs? I wonder what the percentages are? Though we could never get an accurate measure of this…

What is white hat and black hat SEO and where do we draw the line between them? In short, white hat is used to describe techniques that are with in the guidelines of search engines and black hat (also known as spamdexing) those that use all the unethical ways to achieve top ranks (usually short-lived).

Matt’s description: “White hat SEOs adhere to the letter of the search engine guidelines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and black hat SEOs will use any method they can to promote their site while trying to avoid getting banned. Gray hats are somewhere in between these two extremes.” - Matt Cutts

Well, Matt has actually answered both questions. There are a couple of gray areas between these two forms of SEO and therefore there isn’t a definite border between the two.

It is easy to describe what white hat SEO, but I thought that it would be of help for some of you if I listed black hat activities. Not that I want you to adopt them for yourself, of course, but that you should consider steering clear from them. Such actions could possibly get your site banded from some search engines. I am not going to explain all the tricks in the black book as there are too many.

• Keyword Stuffing - well this is basically what the name says. Inserting or hiding keywords in a page to increase the density of that keyword. Search engines are wising up to this trick and can tell when keywords are being injected into the page.
• Meta Tag Stuffing - repeating unrelated keywords in the meta tags.
• Scraper Sites - also known as “made for adsense” sites. They basically scrape results/information of search engine or news sites for example. This automatically updated data provides fresh content for the site. These sites are always full of adverts; that is where this type of site got its name from.
• Hidden Links - hiding links where they can’t be seen in order to increase traffic either by search engines or unexpected clicks.
• Mirror Sites - multiple sites all containing the same content hoping that search engines may rank some of the keywords in the URL higher in more than one of the URLs.

Some others that I have not explained are URL redirects, cloaking, blog spamming, spam blogs (splogs), referrer log spamming, doorway pages, link farms and many more…

WOW, there seems to be more black hat tactics than ethical SEO methods. My advice to you is this: stick to the search engine’s guidelines, don’t tarnish you name with shifty SEO tricks and you will do just fine. What you should be aiming to accomplish is a site with quality content or something helpful that people will enjoy and recommend to friends. Keep it real!

After having a look at some of the new features added to Google’s webmaster tools, I would recommend having a look (if you haven’t already)! There are some useful features and interesting stats for your site. One of my favourite was the info on the page with the highest PageRank (it wasn’t what I thought it would be).

You have to obviously varify that the site you want to check is in fact yours, but once you have completed varification you can view reports on web crawl errors, analyse your robots.txt file, view statistics on queries and crawls, and more. Don’t forget that this is also the area where you can submit your sitemap file too.

There is another feature that I thought was rather nice. This was the one that allowed one to decide how to index their domain - with or without the www. I wonder if this will affect the PageRank by forcing all traffic to go to your preferred URL format? I guess someone will have to test it and let us know.