Walk the line

by Rick Biederer

Take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Internet to stay ahead of the competition.

In today’s business environment companies need to take advantage of the opportunities presented through the Internet to stay ahead of the competition.

And if you are going to do business online that means doing business with the search engines. Assuming your business already has a Web site, this means you will need to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist to make sure your Web site is getting the exposure it deserves.

Understanding the terminology and basic concepts that an SEO consultant uses is essential to getting the most benefit from the optimization services for your business. The SEO industry often refers to the type of services performed in terms of hat color; white hat, black hat and grey hat.

White hat SEO’s follow all the rules of the search engines and only perform optimization that would pass a manual inspection with flying colors. SEO consultants that practice only white hat techniques won’t find their Web sites on the receiving end of a search engine ban or penalty. On the other hand, they may not be receiving the full ROI that their Web sites are capable of.

In contrast, black hat SEO’s will do anything to get ahead in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Position) regardless of whether or not the search engines will remove their Web site if they are figured out. One black hat technique is keyword spamming, repeating a single word or phrase on a Web page hundreds of times in order to appear more important to the search engines. In January of 2006, the German BMW Web site was found to be keyword spamming by Google and subsequently removed from the search engine until they removed the excess keywords from their Web site.

Grey hat SEO’s offer a compromise between white hat and black hat techniques. Often, grey hats will push the limit of what is acceptable to squeeze the best possible results they can from a Web site. As a result, grey hat sites are sometimes the recipients of penalties for going too far towards the black.

Previously I had mentioned being banned and penalized. Being banned is one of the worst things that can happen to a Web site. If your Web site is banned it is because you or your SEO consultant has done something blatantly against the search engine policies and have been caught. Being penalized is generally the result of pushing too hard when using grey hat techniques. For example, if you have included a specific keyword on your site twelve times and are ranking very well in the SERPs, increasing that keyword count up to thirteen times may be viewed as unnatural to the search engines resulting in a penalty.

The first mistake many businesses make with regard to the search engines is to do nothing. By putting off, or ignoring, search engines you are allowing the first impression of your company to be dictated by Google, Yahoo, MSN or worse yet, your competition. If you are not being found for your business name or products, you can bet that your competitors are being found for theirs.

After business owners realize the importance of being visible in the search engines, the next mistake they make is to go overboard. After all, if having ten links pointing to your Web site has a positive effect wouldn’t having ten thousand be better? The answer to that question is that it depends. Search engines derive their results from many factors but quality and relevance is an overriding theme throughout all of them. So if those ten thousand links pointing to your Web site came from Web sites that are relevant to your Web site and were from reputable sources, then the answer is yes, it is better. If those ten thousand links came from off topic blogs, disreputable Web sites or from software claiming to give you massive amounts of free links, then the answer is a definitive no.

Another problem with acquiring those ten thousand links is in the speed in which you acquire them. When massive amounts of links are discovered to be pointing to your site in a matter of days or weeks, the search engines see this as an attempt at trying to buy or force your way into the SERPs. Since the search engines make their money by having high quality, relevant sites listed in their search results, practices such as buying too many links, keyword spamming and using software to obtain links can eventually get your site penalized or banned. These over optimization practices are usually the result of hiring a disreputable SEO firm.

The most effective way to have your Web site appear in the search engines is to find the middle ground between under optimization and over optimization. Under optimization can be avoided by learning the basics of search engines and hiring a reputable SEO consultant to properly optimize your Web site. Over optimization is often the result of hiring a disreputable SEO, get rankings quick software or pay for placement schemes.

Black hat search consultants can be avoided by understanding what the search engines want and what they do not want. Ask for a list of sites that the consultants have optimized and check to make sure that none of those sites have been banned from the search engines by doing a search on the domain names. No search results mean the site has been banned. If the SEO firm promises very good results very quickly, start asking questions on how they plan to do this. A black hat SEO firm will not outright tell you they are going to be cloaking, keyword spamming and buying massive amounts of links, but if you understand the basic concepts behind these terms you will be able to determine if this is what they intend to do.

‘Get rankings quick software’ is just another get rich quick scheme for the Internet age. What this software does is to acquire links automatically by searching out Web forums, blog pages and other Web pages that allow you to post html content. The software posts a generic message that will be repeated across many Web sites with a link back to your Web page. The search engines attribute no value to links acquired by these means, but they will not penalize a site for doing this in most circumstances due to possible abuses by competing companies.

This does not mean there are no negative consequences to using this type of software. Companies that use these link spamming techniques often find themselves the target of some very negative PR considering that the sites being spammed are often personal businesses. The brick and mortar equivalent of the get rankings quick software would be to grab a can of spray paint and randomly tag your business logo on the sides of buildings. If you wouldn’t be comfortable doing that for your business then you should avoid using get rankings quick software.

Pay for placement schemes are similar to the get rankings quick software. Both acquire large amounts of irrelevant links fast. Where the software uses automated methods, the pay for placement scheme can use either software or manual methods to bring in a large amount of links. Paying for placement is usually detected quickly by the search engines because the companies offering to do this use the same network of Web sites to distribute the links for all of their clients.

Morals and ethics are often debated among SEO experts in terms of what color of hat you wear. Whether you are a white hat purist, a black hat spammer or a middle of the road grey hat, in the end, results for your business are what really matter. Finding the fine line between doing too little for your Web site and doing too much is essential for your online success. So grab your hat and walk the line!