Ah, the Black Hat SEO world… something that invokes either a disappointing look or an evil grin.  Still, SEO practitioners – whatever their hat color – must look at black hat techniques from time to time.  Here’s why:

Your competition could be using black hat tips.  If they are, you need to understand their SEO gameplan well if you’re to outwit them.  You can only do that if you’re familiar with black hat seo techniques yourself.  Find out what their strategy is and try to beat them with your own tricks.  Or, you know, you could just report them when you find out (sneaky!).

Black hat tricks give you a better idea of how search engine algorithms work.  This is because black hat SEO practitioners exploit weaknesses in the algorithms, and use it at their own advantage.  This kind of knowledge will prove to be useful when you’re planning your SEO campaign.  Almost everyday, black hats figure out new ways to take shortcuts to the top of SERPs.  If you find out about these shortcuts, you can find a legit way to use them for your own site.

It’s much easier to explain to others what they can/can’t do during their SEO campaigns.  If you’re a web designer or SEO practitioner and your client is saying “I’ve heard something about raising your PR through a 301 redirect…” you need to know what your client is talking about.  A lot of people, especially those new to the SEO world, get a series of bad advice, often black hat in nature.  Knowing these techniques like the back of your hand can help you explain to people the downsides of applying them to their SEO campaign.

Because they make you look marginally cooler.  In other words, if you’re an SEO practitioner, you’d have more credibility if you know all the possible tricks – whether you actually apply them or not.  Although wearing an actual black hat on your head might make it seem like you’re trying too hard.

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Quicklinks, also called sitelinks, are very useful to search users because it gives them an idea of the pages they can find on a website and immediately click on the page they want to go to instead of having to navigate from the main or landing page. Below is an image of how SmartPageRank’s quicklinks appear on Google’s SERPs.

Quicklinks are also very useful for websites as well because it is better for us to have users land on the page they want to go to because of the following reasons:

less bounce rates – A lot of people, especially first time visitors, do not even take time to navigate through links and immediately close the tab/window when they find themselves in a page they don’t want to be in.
increases user satisfaction – Since they get to what they want more quickly it will increase their overall happiness of the site, thus increasing the chance of having them comeback.
data for popular landing pages – If people keep on clicking on a certain link then it will give us a better idea on which pages will be best to use as a landing page since they are, after all, what people seem to be most interested in.

So how does search engines decide whether a site should have quick links or not. And how do they decide what pages should fall under those links? Furthermore, how do they choose the anchor text that should go with each link?

On my next post I will be discussing the answers to the questions above.

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Early this month Google announced a new user agent for the robots.txt file to direct the Google News bot on what to do. The new user agent, Googlebot-News, is used just the same way you use the Googlebot agent. To make things clear though here are some of the examples given by Google on the use of the new user agent.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

According to Google “The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.” Note that you can do this for any specific page.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

In this case since Googlebot is disallowed and there is no specific instruction on what to do with Google News, the news bot will play it safe and simply not crawl the page.

Happy New Year!

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You might be quite happy with your current pagerank in search engine results pages (SERPs) but have you given consideration to your mobile presence? If you haven’t now is the time to act. We all know how rapid mobile web’s popularity is growing so think of all the opportunities you are missing out on by having no or limited presence in the mobile web.

If you are going mobile though keep in mind that you will need to go back to the drawing board. Phones and other mobile devices are very different from desktop/laptop computers, which makes mobile web design as well as mobile SEO also different. The difference in mobile SEO is, however, not as glaring as the problems faced by web designers because you will still need to stick to the basic SEO rules like the use of keywords, accessibility (both by users and search engine spiders), link building, etc. However, what you need to be more aware of is that mobile users have very different habits from desktop users. These differences are the very things that make mobile SEO challeging.

A couple of the things that you will need to adjust to when doing mobile SEO include:

• targeting lesser and shorter keywords – You need to be more picky with your target keywords because mobile users like to type a lot less than desktop users, which really affects the kind of search terms they enter.
• regionalization – Make sure you really pay attention to location-specific queries. The reason for this is that mobile users are usually location and/or task oriented. They go online for a very specific reason, which is why you want those in your business’ locale to be able to search you on their mobile devices.

There are lots more to consider when it come to mobile SEO. I’ll discuss them in future posts.

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Michael Jackson’s passing triggered a wave of sadness and remembrance all over the world. People expressed their respect and love for MJ in so many ways, from the usual dancing to SEO parallelisms. Huh? You got it. Not wanting to pirate the original content I will just be giving the outline then ask you to head on to the original post to read it in its entirety.

Here’s Virginia Nusseys “Five Ways the Moonwalk is Like SEO”

1. It changed the game.
2. The beauty is in the simplicity.
3. Everyone thinks they can do it. (I need to disagree on this one. I always knew I couldn’t do the moonwalk. I tried the moves again after I read the post. I’m still right.)
4. It’s part of a larger whole.
5. To the uninitiated, it seems like magic.

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Pagerank sculpting, which as defined by Matt Cutts is simply trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using different methods such as the “nofollow” tag, is still plausible, however, in his post “PageRank Sculpting” he tells us why he doesn’t think you should bother doing it. Here’s an excerpt of his post on pagerank sculpting.

I wouldn’t recommend it [pagerank sculpting], because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

So when is pagerank sculpting useful? According to Matt Cutts it is useful to use the “nofollow” tag for some pages such as links to a shopping cart or links to log-in pages but only “because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.” Other than that it would pay more if you spent your time optimizing your site in other ways.

Again make sure you make the best use of your time by giving attention to your site architecture and to your site’s actual content. Make sure that users find the info they need just a few clicks away from the main page and make sure that all pages you want indexed are crawlable.

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Every single link counts. That’s my motto when it comes to link building. While it is true that some links pass more value than other in my opinion you still shouldn’t overlook opportunities to get a backlink, whether it’s just one or a couple or a whole load of links. This is also true whether the page rank of the linking page is zero or ten. A link is still a link.

However, when link building remember that while links always count it can count AGAINST you. We all know what I mean by this – those links that associate you to black hat methods that will get you penalized by the great Google and the other search engines. A clear example of such links is links that you got from link farms. Make sure you do not sabotage your efforts by joining link farms. Getting backlinks by paying websites to link to your page(s) is also a big no-no IF you do this to get link juice passed on to you. You can only solicit paid links if you make sure that those links don’t get to pass value to your pagerank. So I guess in SEO terms there’s absolutely no point in doing this. However if your motive is to simply generate traffic to your site or create awareness then there is no problem. Just make sure you specifically ask webmasters of the sites with paid links to your site to use the “no follow” tag.

Again, remember every link counts so make sure the back links you get count in the way you want them to.

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Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all came together early this year to support the use of canonical tags. But what are canonical tags and what’s the use to us?

Canonical tags were created to help address the problem of duplicate content. We already know that there are already existing ways to address this problem such as 301 redirects and the use of sitemaps, however, in many instances these solutions are not enough. To make life easier for webmasters canonical tags were created. The tags help with duplicate content by telling search engines what URL you want them to index in place of a page’s uglier URL version. The syntax is also very simple and makes use of only one line that needs to be typed into the HEAD part of the page document. For example if you have a page with a URL like http://www.somepage.com/ example.html?sid=54321 you of course would prefer the search engine not to index that URL, especially if you have a nicer duplicate URL like http://www.somepage.com/example.html. So what do you do? All you need to do is type in:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.somepage.com/example.html"/>

And search engines will automatically honor your wishes. No sweat. Duplicate issues resolved. Now that’s one less problem you won’t need to worry about.

You can also watch Matt Cutts’ interview with WebProNews last February to learn more about canonical tags.

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In my last post about images I gave some tips on how to optimise images. There is said that you should:

• Store images in a single directory;
• Use keywords in the file names; and
• Use Alt text.

These still hold true and are very sound ways to make sure that your images on your pages help your SEO efforts. Aside from these though here are more tips. They’re mostly common sense but like in most things the obvious once are the very things we overlook.

• Use relevant images only – Make sure each image you use is relevant to the content near it.
• Size matters – I’m talking about the actual size of the image and not the file size here. File size does matter but you want it to be smaller to make loading pages faster. On the other hand for the actual image size note that search engines think that the bigger the image is the more relevant it is to the site’s content. So do not go making a non-relevant decorative image larger than the important ones.
• Image quality is important – You want to choose good quality images over poor ones. The quality I’m referring to is the clarity, contrast, etc. Of course you have to compromise between quality and file size. Find the right compromise.
• Place important images at the top if possible – This affects not only SEO but also user-friendliness. However in cases where the images accompany a certain paragraph as illustration it is more important to place it near that paragraph since you want the image near the relevant text.

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Learn a lesson from big brands. That’s how I view the recent changes in Google’s ranking algorithm that resulted in more branded sites appearing among the top results in Google’s SERPs.

Though it might appear that Google is biased towards branding the good performance of these sites carrying brands is actually the result of the quality of the site’s content. After all they are the pages that are able to deliver the search users the results that they need, and Google is all about giving users the best results possible. As Matt Cutts said in his You Tube video, “I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands. We really don’t think about ‘brands’ in Search Quality that much. It’s not that we try to always return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users…we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank.” It just so happens that creating a brand is also about the same things: trust, reputation and authority. Established brands even before they went online already tackled the three issues to get where they are. This is what you should do and the pagerank will follow.

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