Link Popularity
When beginning a discussion regarding search engine marketing there is no way you can exclude talking about the vital element of search engine rankings. This key component of a website’s marketing campaign must be looked at closely. And there are certain ways any SEO expert would go about to increasing a site’s link popularity. What you want to do is avoid the trap many webmasters fall into which involves using dishonest techniques to improve their rankings with search engines.
These days search engines have smartened up and are now on guard for “spam” pages and website that are using these artificial methods of increasing their rankings. Effective search engine marketing avoids this method because the search engine will only demote their ranking or either remove them from the index altogether.
Unfortunately, many SEO experts are finding that many legitimate websites are being mistaken for these web criminals. So it is important to be careful in order to ensure that your website doesn’t get labeled as a “spam” page or website. Fortunately there are some things that can be done to avoid this happening.
Link popularity is very closely intertwined with the quality of sites that are linked to your own. While Google first started utilizing a certain criteria to rank a website on its search engine, it is commonplace among all search engines nowadays. This means that you must be very selective as you go about the business of building links to your website. Google does impose penalties on sites they believe are linking to other sites simply for the purpose of building their link popularity. These links are labeled as “bad neighborhoods” by Google.
The good news is that your website will not be penalized if a bad neighborhood links to your website. However, when implementing SEO techniques you will need to watch out for linking your site to one of these bad neighborhood sites because you will be penalized for this. Frequent checking is a great idea in determining if you have your website linked to one of these sites so that there is no negative effect on your rankings.
If you are good about your search engine marketing you will check to see if you are linked to a penalized website. This can be done by downloading the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. This is where you can see the “pagerank” of a website, which will be represented by a sliding green scale on the toolbar. Make a habit of never linking to a website that shows no green on the scale.
When doing your SEO, if you happen to see that a website you are considering linking to have a scale that is completely gray –watch out! A gray scale indicates that pages on this website have been penalized. Should you end up linking to a site like this anyway, you are likely to soon regret it. The penalty to your own website can be like catch a deadly virus – your site may never fully recover!
This does not mean that you need to have fear of linking to websites as you implement search marketing. Just make sure there is no gray on the scale and you should be fine. Even if there is only a small amount of green showing, this site is fine and may even grow in popularity over time. The sites that show a tiny bit of green should be monitored a little more closely though to make they don’t incur a penalty later on after you have linked to them.
Hidden Text
Hidden text is another trick that sneaky webmasters not well versed in good SEO use. You see, a search engine will usually take the words on your actual website to come up with rankings. This means that when a website contains the proper keywords you will have a better chance of getting ranking higher in a particular category. The problem is that some webmasters are circumventing this formula by hiding their keywords and making them invisible to visitors on their site. This can be done making the keywords the same color as the background on a page. The human eye may not see these words, but the search engine sure does! A spider – the program used to index web pages – sees these invisible words and may end up boosting a website’s ranking.
Keep in mind that a webmaster that is using sound search engine marketing techniques is not going to use these tricks. They know that the minute the search engine figures out what is happening, the website will be penalized.
Another issue to be weary of is that often times the spider is overzealous and ends up penalizing a page that shouldn’t be penalized. This could happen let’s say if you have a put gray text inside of a black box, but your background color everywhere else is gray. The spider could very well think that you are attempting to use hidden text and penalize your website. If you have a webmaster who doesn’t know a lot about SEO, advise him or her to never use the same color text as your background – ever!
Keyword Stuffing
“Keyword stuffing” is another one of those problems that can cause a website to incur a penalty. This is done when a webmaster is seeking to please those all important spiders by placing the right keywords on their web pages. But you can go too far with this because spiders use what is called “keyphrase density” to determine if a site is keyword stuffing as a way to increase their rankings. The search engine has a limit on how often you can use a keyword before it penalizes the site.
The ratio is pretty high, so you would have to be using your keywords a ridiculous amount of times to be penalized for this. If, however, your keyword happened to be a part of your company name, keyword density might soar. For example, if your keyword was “renters insurance”, don’t use that phrase in every sentence because SEO may start looking like keyword stuffing to the search engine spider. You should always edit your text to make sure that the copy flows naturally even while you are strategically placing keywords. One rule many search engine marketing experts tell their customers is to make sure that a keyword never appears in more than 50% of the sentences on any one page.
Cloaking
The final risk that could potentially happen if you are not careful deals with “cloaking”. If you aren’t a big fan of Star Trek this term may not be very familiar to you. Cloaking happens when the server directs a visitor to a different pager than what the spider sees when indexing sites. The spider sees this “cloaked” page even though it is invisible to regular traffic. These pages are set up as a way to intentionally boost the ranking of a particular website.
Cloaking is another one of those deceptive methods those not well versed in proper SEO attempt to employ. The problem is that search engines have reacted to this by imposing penalties on websites found to be doing this. While there are valid reasons certain pages would be cloaked (like to prevent code theft), many times this is not the case. Be aware that cloaking isn’t necessary due to the use of “off page” elements which can’t be stolen.
If you are the owner of website that is being maintained by someone who claims to be a search engine marketing, make it clear that you want no cloaking on your site. This will ensure that you won’t have your website ranking penalized.
Keep in mind, the goal is to increase your link popularity and ranking. In order to do this you need to employ sound SEO techniques so that your website will grow rather than be penalized which can have the opposite effect.