SEO Consult Blog

Online searches

Online marketing and SEO go hand in hand and anyone who tells you different truly has no idea what he is talking about. The Internet and online marketing has evolved and it’s a cutthroat business; without smart SEO campaigns you will not get very far.

It is all about the rankings. If you do not rank high you will lose clients for people are impatient, they do not want to search through pages and pages for what they want, they want it fast and extremely visible when they do a search.

Get a foot in the door

It is all good and well to have a stunning website and yes, if it is eye-catching it will make an impact on visitors and they will remember your site, but you first have to get the visitors to actually go to your website. You have to think about what you do when you search for something yourself; how fast do you want to find it and how much time do you spend online searching for products and services you need.

Humans are creatures of habit, so if you want to search fast, that is exactly how potential clients will search. You have to rank high if you do not want to lose all your potential clients to your competitors who make use of smart SEO techniques, if you don’t utilise SEO as an effective tool your website will fade into the background and your business will soon follow.

How SEO benefits your business

Your targeted traffic can be pulled towards specific pages on your website and with each product or service page that the search engine pulls up, you throw a wider net open that attracts clients. Traffic is directed to your site with each business related keyword used and your ranking climbs higher with promotion and reinforcement of your brand through SEO. Customers find you easily and you appeal to an international market, no matter the size of your business.

Your SEO campaign is cost effective as you receive long term returns as your marketing is 24/7 across the world. A high ranking shows searchers that you are a credible business with high traffic. If you combine an attractive, user-friendly website with the crucial benefits that SEO brings, this leads to high visibility, higher ranking of your profile and that brings in the visitors; this leads to more business for you and increased profits.

Website analytics shows all the information necessary about clients and their interests that can be fully utilized though SEI tweaking that keeps your website high in the rankings. The world of online marketing is in many respects a leveller of the playing fields for with smart SEO a small business can often outgun far larger companies in the ranking war.

It has been statistically proven that more people now prefer to use a search engine to making use of the old standby; the Yellow Pages therefore any business gains huge benefits through SEO.

Defining Spamdexing or ‘spam’ as it is generally known

Spamdexing occurs when selective unethical methods are used to index web pages. These pages have been positioned as extraordinary high ranking by search engines and it allows the spamdexer to obtain an objective by sending users unsolicited information.

This is usually most annoying or repulsive by both the search engine providers as well as users. Other terms used for this practice are search spam or search engine spam. Spamdexing is in many cases used to increase website trafficking and this can turn out to be very profitable. With more and more sophisticated technology being introduced into the search engines; combating these illegal activities has become very sophisticated as well.

Types of Spamdexing

The 2 classes of spamdexing can be categorized in to content and link spamming.
Content spamdexing happens when a searched engine is ‘fooled’ by what appears in the content of a page and what the actual display of the page is. Example of these spamming techniques is keyword stuffing, mega tag stuffing, invisible and unrelated text and scraper sites.
Link spamming is designed to create links that will increase website ranking. Example is hidden links, spam blogs, and cookie stuffing.

Sophisticated Spamdexing

Google bombing was the term used when the use of hyperlinks were made to create an unusually high search engine ranking. Bloggers used this method to display offensive or distasteful messages. The Google bomb fortunately had its ‘final’ explosion when Google introduced algorithms to put it out of play.

Algorithms are frequently used by search engines to determine how relevant the website and its contents are and therefore increase the quality of the information. Search engines can pick up or spot spamdexing and immediately remove the suspected pages from the site. During the late 1990’s the Page Rank link analysis system put Google on the map as the search engine that could best produce search results and eliminate keyword spamming.

Cloaking is a technique used by spammers to display content on the search engine that is not the same as when displayed on the user’s browser. Also known as a black hat search engine optimization technique, the hidden content is sent through a script to the web page of the user. This method of ‘fooling’ search engines has also been used to push websites in to higher rankings. If this form of deception is reported, the sites will immediately be delisted as the guidelines have been violated. These serious offences sooner or later become exposed as the growth and evolving of search engines are expanding at a tremendous rate. The perpetrator could lose his ranking and kiss his entire hard work goodbye or simply face having his website permanently banned.

URL redirection is another form of black hat spamdexing. The user is clicked on to site that is not asked for where more often than not pornographic material is displayed. Mirror websites used for spamdexing are now more than ever successfully combated by search engines.