Google gives varied reasons for banishing a website from its index databases.  Among the more common ones are the practices labeled by the search engine as “Black Hat”. Black hat methods are underground practices that attempt to manipulate search engine preferences for relevant keywords and backlinks for short-term gains.  “Keyword stuffing” and irrelevant linking are two of the more common practices.  Along with defiance of other Google guidelines, these abuses can lead to getting blacklisted.

Will disappearing from Google affect my website?

Certainly, it does.  Any webmaster looking to maximize traffic to his site needs to remain listed on every important search engine. Losing your place in Google means being invisible to about 45% of web surfers globally.

While it definitely a big setback, fortunately, being blacklisted need not be your lifelong fate.  You can change your ways and ask to be taken back on board.

What is the best way to prevent my website from disappearing?

Become familiar with, and follow, Google guidelines.  Make certain your site has content related solely to the products or services you are trying to promote. Do not over-fill your site with keywords that are not related to your services. Google may also ban your site if it does not adhere to the criteria that the engine looks for in websites. No one knows exactly what the search engine is looking for in sites and Google is not letting the cat out of the bag.  Keep your content focused and relevant and you should be fine.

How do I make my site reappear?

This can be as simple as re-submitting your site to their directory.  Getting back after being found out for Black Hat or other inappropriate tactics takes longer, though.

After submitting your URL for inclusion, you can expect a long trial period to prove you consistently abide by the guidelines once more. During this trial period, Google can assent to listing your site on one of the back pages in search results.  After about six months of “clean living”, abiding by all rules, you may notice your rank rising and traffic referred by Google starting to show up once again.

Early in the SEO game, webmasters learned that Google’s ranking setup (called “algorithms” in the profession) put substantial weight on “quality inbound links” to determine how high a web site ought to rank in search results.  Backlinks, shortcuts that allowed interested surfers to “click through” and easily reach the website represented by the link, seemed a viable indicator of popularity.  After all, in the hard numbers and metrics-oriented mentality of search engine programmers, why would another webmaster devote precious webpage space to a specious link that his own visitors might never care about?  Objectively speaking, therefore, a link back to a site is a vote for the quality and relevance of that site.

Creative as they are, webmasters figured out a way to amass links like nobody’s business:

• Friendly link swaps took place.
• Link marketplaces developed, matching “buyers” and “sellers”.
• Link farms mushroomed, content-bare web sites that led nowhere except for carrying long link lists that lifted the presumed popularity of all concerned.

Soon enough, Google and other search engines caught on, banishing link farms to cyberspace black holes and refusing to count links that were irrelevant to the site displaying them.  Greater ranking weight now went to “quality” backlinks, those bearing relevant keywords.

Ways to Get Backlinks

Natural, One-way Links

The best way to rank high in Google is by getting natural, one-way links. A natural link is very valuable but difficult to obtain. Some of the easier ways to achieve it are by submitting your site to Web directories, article directories, and social bookmarking sites. You can also post comments in blogs and include your URL together with your name.

However, keep in mind that many free directories and blogs opt to deprive you of the benefit you expected from your link; this is by setting the “nofollow” attribute.  The link remains listed and is functional because surfers can click through to your site.  However, Google introduced the “nofollow” attribute, commanding its search engine codes (the “bots”) to neither follow nor count it in your favor.  By doing this, the search industry leader thought to combat blog comment spam.  The sad part is many directory and blog Web masters applied the attribute to all links, not just the “spammy” abusers.

Reciprocal Links

Because natural one-way links are so difficult to obtain, SEO experts resort to other means to build back links. For instance, they swap links – i.e. I link to your site and you return me the favor by linking back to mine. Such links are called reciprocal links and even though they are still suspicious, they are a better alternative to buying links.

If you decide to exchange links with another site, make sure that the site is a reputable one (i.e. no scammers, hackers, cheaters and the like), that its theme is relevant (exchanging links with a FOREX site when your site is about dating is pointless) and that its page rank (PR) is at least 3-4. Being careless and indiscriminate can seriously damage your ranking.

Besides the convenience of presenting visitors with a direct link to related information, reciprocal links are powerful tools in the hands of webmasters eager to attract more “targeted” traffic to their web sites.  The leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo have been ultra-secretive about the way their search formulas (also called “algorithms”) work.  But Google, at least, has made it known that your web site stands a better chance of ranking high in search results if it is “popular”.  And it just so happens that the number of relevant inbound links on the site is one measurable index a search engine can have of how important and popular your site is.

That said, how do you acquire reciprocal links?

One informal way is to tap the fraternity of other webmasters.  Send an email to a couple you know, ask for referrals to others and the potential list of contacts expands from there.  Or a visit to discussion boards frequented by webmasters will routinely locate others looking to exchange links.  Some link exchange boards cost nothing to join, others charge a fee in return for getting ready-made code to insert the link in one’s own page.  Because exchanging links costs nothing and is mutually beneficial, it all proceeds in casual and friendly fashion.

Looking at loosely-affiliated companies, those one does business with, is a more systematic way of building more links in short order.  In one case, a webmaster might build an online multi-level marketing network.  Each website that agrees to join undertakes to sell a product, pocket some of the commissions and maintain a link back.  Hence, the network exists both to drive real sales and lift the first webmaster’s link status and presumed popularity in the view of search engines.

In a second case, an e-commerce dot-com exists solely to sell promotional goods and premium items imprinted with the logo of the businessmen, schools and civic organizations preparing for some event or other.  The dot-com is only a middle man, relying on hundreds of suppliers to produce the goods, imprint them on order and deliver to the customer.  Here, it is logical for the webmaster to tap all the suppliers for link exchanges and suddenly appear very popular to the search engines.  The fact that thousands of potential customers also visited the site each week did not hurt, either.

What is Indexing?

A bit of search code sent out by Google, the “Googlebot search spider, crawls the Web, follows the hyperlinks it finds on the way and visits the pages these hyperlinks lead to. Arriving at, say, the home page for “Cheap Cars” used car dealership, the code reads the content, looks for frequently-occurring keywords and transmits all the information back to an indexer program at Google.  There, the Google indexer might decide, based on the page title and keywords found, that “Cheap Cars” ought to be included in search results returned when surfers enter search terms like “cars”, “cheap” and “cheap cars”.

What is Ranking?

Owing to the great number of unique web sites and the multiple pages they hold, every search query returns thousands, even millions of search results. Rather than emerging in random order, these results are arranged by relevance to the search query. The most relevant results are shown first.  SEO experts strive to earn the coveted top-ranking positions because surfers typically scan just the first page, even the top half, and depart.

Can’t Rank If Your Site Is Not In The Index

If all this still sounds vague, consider this: a site that is not indexed simply does not exist in Google’s database.  Hence, there is no chance at all the site will emerge in search results, let alone rank high.  So the first step to getting any ranking in Google is to get indexed.

Will Google Index My Site?

Google regularly traverses the Net, so chances are your site will be indexed sooner or later.  It all just takes more time than many ambitious Internet marketers have the patience for.

It can happen that a site never gets indexed (completely or partially) because no links point back from other sites (meaning no one has ever put your URL anywhere else and given others the opportunity to click on it to find you) or when your site has many broken (erroneous) links and the “Googlebot” cannot complete the job of profiling all the pages those links point to.

Violate Google rules about playing it clean (using underhanded “black hat” techniques, for instance) and you can find your site blacklisted, dropped from the index. Losing all chance of appearing in search results is a sentence of death because no other SEO techniques matter.  This is a perverse example of just how vital getting indexed is.

A campaign landing page is the intermediate destination for visitors who click on Internet marketing links anywhere: email, search, referrals, etc.  Companies use the landing page to gather information (such as name, email address, source of awareness) from potential customers.  For their part, prospects affirm their interest in the information offered without needless exposure to extraneous information such as the rich content on the main company web page..

What are the best ways to get good results from my landing page?

According to recent studies, a website has only eight seconds to make a good impression on a visitor. A focused landing page that reiterates strong selling points while telling the consumer exactly what is required of them to receive the information they seek makes all the difference between a visit and a sale.

Secondly, winning campaign landing pages capture the attention of consumers by re-creating the look and feel of that email, display ad or other marketing channel that provoked their interest.

Keep the form short, limited to the essentials. A good basic landing page form need only ask for the person’s name, email address, and possibly home phone numbers.  But if you really have to have extensive background information (like banks, credit card issuers, beta test sites, a university processing applicants, and job sites), do the next best thing by separating the long form into manageable chunks on different pages.  Build in transitions like “10 questions to go, 5 items left”.  Offer an incentive or premium.  Be effusive about how you appreciate their cooperation.

Are there any other things I should do?

• Make sure your call to action is prominent.
• Reinforce with benefits, more benefits and still more benefits. This is true whether you are in a B2B or B2C situation.
• Lay the assurances on thick, especially if calling for a high-involvement, high-risk and premium-priced buy.  Consider endorsements, contact information for the company Chairman and assurances by experts.  Selling cosmetic surgery is way different from hawking a widget.
• In this day and age of cable internet and DSL, provide illustrations, diagrams, charts, and pictures to save your potential customer from having to absorb long blocks of text.
• Above all, remember to engage your brand-new prospect.  Get down and personal.  Talk one-on-one.

Follow these guidelines, get a superb designer on your side and you will be well on the way to an effective landing page!

Nonetheless, there are action items to help fix that SEO gap.

Tips for Creating a Domain Name

Because your choice of domain name significantly affects SEO performance, you owe it to yourself to choose one that best reflects the business of the company.  For starters, choose a domain name that is short, descriptive, suits the common domain name extensions (.com, biz, etc.), includes a keyword, and is easy to spell.  All these help with brand name recall.

Short Domain Name

This is clear enough.  Think of all the global brands seven letters or shorter: IBM, Coke, Xerox, Avon, Exxon.

Descriptive Domain Name

It is sound business and good PR to choose a name that accurately describes what the website is about. If you were selling shoes, allshoes.com makes sense.  ”Pizza Hut” is an even better example of a company name that incorporates a product keyword.

Good Web Extension

Try .com before any other extension. Since .com is the most common and still most popular domain extension it is a good idea to try and find an available .com domain name. If all the .com names you want are already taken, try .net, .org, and a few others before moving on to the newer types.

Include a Keyword in your Name

Try and include at least one of your keywords in your domain name. This will play a significant role in increasing your search engine rankings. When someone searches on a keyword phrase that includes your domain name, your website has a good chance of being in page one of the results list.  Case in point: Roget’s exists in www.thesaurus.com ; clearly, they own the search right away.

Easy to Spell

Domain names that need to be written down or require reference to an encyclopedia to look up the correct spelling must be replaced. Double letters or dashes invite misspelling.   If your corporate name suffers from these weaknesses, use your top-selling brand.  The Marketing Department has covered all these bases before investing marketing dollars.

Generic or Exclusive?

The answer is pretty straightforward: adopt a generic name if you can file a trademark registration or copyright on it.  The best idea is to buy generic domain names that are related to your specific business category and redirect visitors to your URL.

So, what’s in a name?

Since domain name does have a bearing on SEO performance, it bears serious thought. The next time you ask, “what’s in a name?” realize that it should be as powerful and effective as the one ultimately chosen for your stable of brands.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the first PPC campaign benchmark to look at. Generally, a higher CTR is just great  because it means that users are interested in your ad and they click on it to visit your site.  You have solved one puzzle that eludes many Internet marketers: how to write the most compelling but brief ad copy in the world.

Be aware, though, that CTR metrics can be dirty if tainted by click fraud. Click fraud is the poison of PPC and advertising networks do take measures to prevent it.  Still, it can be galling to wonder which sly competitor gleefully clicks on your search engine ad all day long to inflate what you will owe Yahoo or Google by the end of the week.

On something more actionable, consider that CTR rates vary across markets.  For some health sites CTR rates of 20% or more are quite possible, while 1% is something to crow about in thin, high-technology markets.  One reason for the latter, as market research might reveal, is that technology decision-makers are averse to advertising.  They tend to be loyal to the pricey brands they already own because the cost of conversion is stressful.  Hence, it takes other channels (direct selling, for instance) to break down their inertia even to perfectly-targeted keywords.

Traffic and Profit

Do the math.  How much visitor traffic did you obtain, how well did the web site convert them, what was revenue and margin per customer?  Generated profit may be the most important because high CTR and tons of traffic count for nothing in the face of low registrations, sales or whatever acid test of new customer relationships matter to your organization.

Cost Efficiency

When you already know how much you earned from the campaign, the next thing to consider is the cost. It does make a difference if you spend $100 and earn $1,000 and if you spend $100 and earn $110.  And we have not even factored in cost of goods.  A money-losing campaign is a strong signal to stop, and re-evaluate your choice of keywords and media.

Wrong Keywords or Wrong Media?

If you are running multiple campaigns on the same keywords and these campaigns perform differently, then it is obvious that the problem lies with the media mix. The solution is simple – quit the weakest medium and concentrate on the more profitable ones.

However, if your PPC campaign is not working on most of the media you are using, then the problem is most likely poor keyword selection. You can try other keywords, trusting that this time you will be luckier.

A Content Management System is essentially a set of programs that permit storage of many different files types, many-to-many authoring and distribution, and quite a variety of functional end-uses.

Any CMS can store and index photos and video, computer files, audio, electronic documents such as PDF’s or filled-up forms and web content.

So, is this just a newfangled name for electronic file storage?  Far from it.  Properly set up, a CMS can shepherd an important document through many stages of writing and editing at different levels in an organization.  An even more important feature is to provide project management coordination.

Thirdly, a CMS can both archive and serve up that great variety of content to visitors on a web site.  This means the site runs more smoothly, responds quickly and on the whole, gives surfers an enhanced experience.

CMS in the Backroom

Many systems are fine-tuned to manage projects.  This covers functionality like assigning and defining roles to users, tracking the many different versions of a plan, and the formatting of content to adhere to the same template set forth by the administrator.

And for the Website

An e-commerce site like Amazon illustrates complexity that CMS’s can handle.  Amazon does one thing well: sell books.  All content on the site is oriented toward that goal.  As a prospective buyer scrutinizes a book of romantic fiction, for example, the system puts forward a variety of “reasons why”: past searches and purchases the customer has made, romance bestsellers he might consider too, reviews by the publisher and devoted Amazon users, related “my book lists” and vivid cover art everywhere.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) looks simple for being text-based.  When there are high-interest breaking stories, the job of joint reporting and editing is greatly facilitated by a CMS called a “wiki”.

In these days of dispersed work teams and business process outsourcing, it comes as no surprise that an Apple Computer executive sitting in Cupertino views overnight summaries (with extensive drill-down capability) for quality monitoring reports on a web-based platform.  The CMS generated these while tying together Louisiana QA monitors remotely listening in on customer service representatives operating out of Vancouver.

Is a CMS for me?

If you have a site that deals with a large amount of content to be published and stored, then a Content Management System deserves serious consideration.  This will ensure your site is working up to its full potential and seriously cut back on time-consuming admin donkey work.  Thanks to brisk demand, there are many price-performance options.

What Is Cloaking?

Cloaking involves preparing two or more versions of the same page: the readable version for human visitors and another for search engine robots. The version for search engines is usually optimized to give the appearance that the page is keyword-rich, for instance, so that the site makes headway in search engine listings.  But if all the keywords (dozens, even hundreds of vaguely relevant possibilities) were in the readable content, it would quickly irritate human readers.

It’s cheating, right?

Yes. Cloaking is outright cheating and an attempt to manipulate search engines. It is a constant battle of wits with search engines that need to neutralize such attempts for fear of antagonizing their own customers. Otherwise, the integrity of search results is at risk.

How Is Cloaking Done?

Cloaking is a server-side operation. A special script is deployed on the server.  When a request arrives, the script delivers the version appropriate to the IP and the user agent of the request. Since search engines identify themselves as spiders, not as browsers, the user agent check results in serving up the especially-prepared page.

Is There a Positive Side to It?

On the other hand, a technique similar to cloaking is also routinely used for serving up, in the lingo of Internet marketing, targeted content.  This is geotargeting (short for “geographical targeting”), a server–side technique for discriminating the geographical location of a visitor and displaying appropriate content.  A well-known example of this is when a Vancouver resident and a Hong Kong businessman both type in the www.google.com URL.  The former receives google.ca (with local merchant advertising, naturally) while the latter is pleased to get the Chinese-language version.  Similarly, Canadians who type in www.sears.com never reach the New York headquarters.  They receive www.sears.ca instead.

Geotargeting is a legitimate application of cloaking because, privacy issues aside, the web site merely provides what is logically the appropriate or preferable version to each user.  As we have seen, search engines already practice cloaking and selective display of query results.

As you can see, there is a line that separates unethical and ethical cloaking. Make sure you do not cross over.

Black hat SEO is unorthodox, at best, because it seems to rely greatly on gray areas, manipulating the formulas search engines use to rank web sites against the related search terms entered by surfers.  Knowing that links count in drawing inferences about the popularity of a site and betting that more is better, for instance, a black hat SEO fellow might send out variations of the same blog post to over a hundred known book marking sites, trusting that a few interested souls will click on the link and hoodwink the search engine into classifying his site as suddenly a popular one.

This is done with full knowledge that one is “spamming” the book marking sites, much like sending out spam (unwanted) email in the thousands or even millions and being a nuisance to most just to play the numbers.  It is not, strictly speaking, illegal but counts as abuse of finite bandwidth and wastes space on third-party sites.

Sooner or later, the search engines get wise to the fact that the dozens of posts are nearly identical, decide a spammer is at work, and proceed to penalize his site ranking or blacklist the site.

Like teaching women to defend themselves against muggers and con men, it helps to know what black hat SEO involves so one does not fall into the trap and incur the ultimate penalty from search engines, being banned at least for a time.

Types of Spam

Black hat SEO deploys two kinds of spam indexing techniques: content or link spam.

Content Spam

The black hat artist alters the structure, underlying code or content of a web page so that the search engine spider counts embellishments that are pointless to human visitors.  There are five types of content spam:

Keyword Stuffing: This involves overloading a page with keywords beyond what might be expected for meaningful content.

Hidden or invisible text: To avoid exceeding a limit of, say, 6% keyword density in visible content, the excessive keywords are concealed in the background or by hiding them within HTML code.

Meta Tag: Unrelated keywords meant to troll for visitors who leave anyway as soon as they see the site is irrelevant to their search.

Gateway or Doorway Pages: Low-quality web pages with virtually no relevant information.

Scraper sites: Contain nothing but advertising.

Link spam

The most notorious of these are “link farms”, sites that contain nothing but dozens of links and no intrinsic value.  Other link spam techniques are page hijacking, spam blogs, mirror websites, and cloaking.

The final word

Black hat SEO techniques may yield short-term gains in point of higher page rank. In the long run, however, a vigilant search engine can simply reverse everything and leave a webmaster worse off.