But search engine optimization and building search rankings go well beyond just keywords, an arbitrary amount of content and so on. It also has to be informative and interesting enough to be shared either through linking or the increasingly important social media mentions.

Simply writing generic content that doesn’t grab the reader’s attention won’t exactly yield a whole lot of benefit for your firm.

Headlines are how you grab this attention, which should intrigue the reader into continuing on for more.

Time is valuable….

Since we’re bombarded with so much information all the time, we’re only going to look at what really intrigues us and think will benefit us. Seeing a boring headline limits your content’s potential in this regard. And if it doesn’t see much in the way of traffic, links and mentions in social media, it won’t have the impact it can.

That’s why taking a few minutes to craft a headline that grabs your reader’s attention is so valuable. Headlines are an invaluable part of print media (…think about when you’re in the checkout line looking at the magazines). In the online world, headlines are doubly important due to the sheer magnitude of content that’s out there.

Nick Usborne has outlined 7 approaches to headlines that can grab readers’ attention and ignite their curiosity to keep reading. Using one of these will help you maximize the impact your content has on your bottom line.

Approach #1: Ubiquitous List

People love seeing lists, which are easy to scan and read. They are a lot of times a hit on social media. Lists can be especially valuable if you include some sort of benefit like “5 Ways to save on your Vacation,” or whatever is applicable to your business.

Approach #2: “How To”

Always a winner too…explaining how to do something will always draw a lot of attention. Be sure you say that in your headline (ex: “How to save 15% on your heating bill) so people will clearly see the benefit of reading further. Millions of people go online each day to find out how to do something – buy a car, pick a stereo, fix a flat, whatever.

Approach #3: Challenge

Another thing that compels people to read is a challenge. Do I know the answers or not? What don’t I know or what am I missing? Good example from Nick – “5 Things you don’t know about your teenagers.”

Approach #4: Intrigue

This approach is kind of like a brain-twister where the reader has to keep going to find the answer. “Body Found, Man Still Missing” is an actual headline from a newspaper. While searching for a missing person, someone else’s body was found.

Approach #5: Conspiracy

We all love a good conspiracy involving anyone in a position of authority (doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc.). Giving any indication they’ve hidden the truth will certainly entice readers for more. (Ex:  The truth about raw food diets)

Approach #6: Secrets of the Opposite Sex

People love delving into the mystery of what makes the opposite sex tick. If you’re targeting a specific gender, you will grab a lot of attention this way. (Ex: Why women love to shop or Why men love to watch sports)

Approach #7: Scarcity

Indicating scarcity of an offer or a closing window of time to do something will indeed motivate people to read further. People don’t like to miss out on something so their attention will be drawn by the prospect of a last chance. (Ex: “Last chance to get tickets” or “Deadline for applications soon”)

Examples of headlines are mainly from Nick with a few more thrown in there by me.

These 7 approaches to headlines will garner much more attention than regular, descriptive headlines. The result will be a much higher number of social media mentions, likes and shares.

Nick Usborne has an e-book on crafting killer headlines that I hope to obtain and read here soon. When I do, I’ll come back and share what I learned.

Have you taken one of these approaches in crafting a headline?

If so, did you see more conversions, shares and so forth?

Other Posts You May be Interested In

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This latest update is known as the ‘freshness update’ because of its stated goal – rank newer content higher in search results.

The search giant says these changes should affect around 35% of searches, mainly in areas where the most recent content matters – current events, hot topics, celebrity gossip, product/movie reviews and breaking news are examples of where this principal would apply. See further explanation and a list of the winners & losers in this great post from TechCrunch.

Here are a few searches you can look at for an example – “Black Friday 2011,” “Penn State scandal” or “NBA lock-out”

One thing you will notice is how top results are time-stamped and annotated more visually than before. Some of these annotations are in days while others are notated in minutes or even seconds. From these ‘time-stamps,’ we can tell that date-specific content is being served now more than ever.

Considering this emphasis on placing newer content higher in search results, consider the following 7 strategies to ‘evergreen’ your content and increase your chances of a ‘freshness’ boost in search results.

1) Start and maintain a blog

It’s clear from this update that more timely content is better. Therefore, one of the best ways to accomplish this ‘timely’ requirement is to publish content on a variety of topics on a regular, even daily basis. A blog is one of the best ways to easily get this content online.

2) Generate ‘Link Bait’ pieces

Content pieces that are informative and entertaining sometimes bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media impressions and dozens of links each day. When these types of pieces are published on your blog, you will certainly see higher rankings. Seeing the popularity and relevancy for so many people will be a strong signal to Google.

3) Use Time Stamps to your advantage

Take a look at the top results in our sample searches and you’ll notice that each one has a time stamp. Each ‘freshness’ result has a clear publication date pulled by Google from the piece. Time stamping is easy to do and automatic on many blog platforms like WordPress. Google recommends the YYYY-MM-DD format (…2011-12-12).

4) Maximize Your Use of Social Media

Make sure you’re using social media tools to ‘push out’ new content as well as ‘pull in’ traffic     and social signals to that same content. Nothing says ‘fresh’ like a Tweet, Facebook comment or a +1 on Google’s new social network. Also, you can tap into your social networks to help write more content for you. If that isn’t possible, getting your friends to simply promote your content or leave comments will dramatically boost your ‘freshness quotient’ with Google.

5) Dynamically Update XML Sitemaps

By default, XML sitemaps include time stamps for each crawled URL within the sitemap.      Making sure these time stamps are updated regularly when new content is posted is now a pretty big deal. Blogging platforms like WordPress do this automatically but for your regular site content, it’s recommended you install a standalone XML sitemap generator that will automatically update your pages when you do.

6) Publish more Press Releases

Press releases scream ‘fresh’ and timely. In this new era of freshness though, press releases just may be the best and fastest way to feed the search engine a steady stream of the type of content they’re displaying high in search results. However, a press release will only remain fresh for a couple days up to a week so think about ways you can ‘update’ a prior press release with new, more detailed information when possible.

7) Get into Google News

Although it’s extremely difficult for a lone blogger to get into Google News, doing so can have a tremendous influence in how/if your content will find its way to the top of these ‘freshness’ results.

After reading about Google’s new fascination with freshness, you may be thinking that you can simply make changes to a previously published piece of content. According to Google’s statements though, one of the more important factors affecting which content they serve is when they first crawled a page. Making changes to your content in the hope of getting a ‘freshness boost’ will not work.

Therefore, be sure your content is correct the first time!!

One observation about these changes that we and others like our friends at Search Engine News have noticed – freshness doesn’t always equate to ‘most relevant’ in terms of returned search results. Down the road, this distinction may cause problems for Google…we’ll see of course.

Related Posts

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In our last post discussing mobile smartphones, we listed some astounding statistics on how rapid this technology is being adopted and how many users are projected to access the Internet through a smartphone in the coming years.

Many of the facts and figures we found (…some of which listed in Part I) certainly provided compelling reasons to begin thinking about smartphone technology and its role in your online marketing strategy.

In Part II, we’re going to delve in and examine the ‘how’ of building a website compatible for smartphone’ display…as far as marketing goes, it’s hard to say what works and what doesn’t. For now, let’s focus on making sure your site(s) can display on a mobile device and are properly optimized.

To start, one point from a HubSpot article on mastering mobile marketing pointed this out – “…the answer to how lies in not thinking about mobile as another PC but another limb for busy, active customers.”

That’s right – don’t look at mobile smartphones as yet another item on your long to-do list. Rather, think of it as another way customers can interact with your brand. Being accessible both through a computer and smartphone will most assuredly put you at the apex of businesses marketing online.

So getting started – the first step is for you to evaluate your users. Find out how many people visit your current site through a mobile device and which devices (I-Phone, Android, Blackberry) they use. Set realistic goals by optimizing popular content from your website for smartphones.

Next step is to understand mobile’s limitations and leverage its capabilities to your best advantage.

One of the most important things to remember is screen size and making sure your page(s) are viewable on the smaller smartphone screens. Images need to be sized properly to ensure they display and load quickly (…if images are so large they take up huge amounts of bandwidth, visitors are less likely to come back). Include ‘alt image’ descriptive copy that can display in lieu of an actual picture.

Also, if you have forms, keep them short. Studies have shown that users will not spend lots of time filling out a request form, especially on a smartphone. This goes for clicks too – don’t make your users click too many times to get to your content. The more clicks visitors have to make, the fewer of them who will stick around.

If you have a storefront for instance, including click-to-call functionality on your mobile site is an important component to have. Functionality for directions (…Google Maps) are invaluable in these cases as well.

And although mobile browsing should be more streamlined than desktop browsing, you shouldn’t neglect your calls-to-action.

One more important point – be sure you test your mobile site and content on different devices, just like you test regular web content on different browsers. Some will display certain things differently. It’s best to find this out in the beginning so you can make any necessary adjustments.

These items are just a few basic things to get you started. As we said earlier, mobile ‘marketing’ is still pretty new so there’s not much to report on what truly works. You can always consider developing an ‘app’ for I-Phones and I-Pads but it’s generally recommended you get the site down first. Apps are more for mid-level prospects anyway.

One of the best ways to learn what may work is to think about your experience using mobile smartphones. Let us know about some good mobile sites you’ve seen in the comments below.

While that stat shocked me at first, it isn’t entirely surprising once you think about. Today, you can get a cutting-edge smartphone for $200 on up. Back in the day as some of us like to say (the ‘90s), it could cost anywhere from $600 on up to get online with a PC…and that’s a conservative estimate!!

Projections indicate that within the next 2 years, over a billion people will have access to the Internet through their mobile phones. Some say Internet usage through a mobile device will exceed that of laptops by 2015…presently, 25% of Internet users in the U.S. have opted for smartphones completely. In some places, people are completely bypassing the laptop and going straight for a mobile device.

Suffice it to say, businesses will have to (1) be sure their websites are compatible with mobile smartphones and (2) think about marketing strategies for reaching this burgeoning audience.

Those who do will definitely be ahead of the curve, especially considering the fact that only 6% of businesses are engaging in the medium according to Michael Tasner (…via HubSpot). Of small businesses, only 0.5% are doing any kind of mobile optimization and marketing.

Which brings us to our first reason for thinking about smartphones and your business – timing. Since so few businesses are employing mobile marketing at this time, you will certainly gain an edge before it becomes too cluttered. If you’re already marketing online, the costs though are fortunately relatively low.

Here are some other stats to consider (…courtesy of Google):

• 67% of smartphone users research an item on their phone then buy it in a store
• 53% of users purchase something as a result of their smartphone search
• 89% of users do their searches with some degree of urgency

Considering its projected there will be over 100 million smartphone users in the U.S. by 2014, any business with a serious, integrated marketing strategy has to consider mobile. Forget about (…not completely) Google+ or other new things we’ve mentioned lately – mobile smartphones are growing at a very quick pace.

As Michael Tasner says “Mobile is growing faster than any other online-marketing method, tactic, or technique.”  Why wouldn’t you start thinking about how your websites and marketing strategies play into this?

Check back with us in a few days on a brief summary of how to make sure your website(s) are mobile compatible and a few marketing techniques to consider. Since it’s so new, marketers are still figuring out the best techniques. We’ll keep our readers updated as new practices emerge.

In the meantime, check back with us later in the week for more of the how rather than the why on marketing through mobile smartphones.

Justifying the virtue of content marketing over traditional advertising can be difficult for some.

How can an online marketing professional effectively convince executives within their company (as part of a marketing team) or prospective clients (outside executives) of the value of developing informative content?

Content Marketing Institute recently compiled some tips from some of the best content marketers around on how to do this.

Here’s a couple of their responses to the question – “Content marketing can be a new way of thinking for some marketing teams. How would you explain the value of content marketing to a manager or executive who is primarily familiar with traditional advertising approaches?”

“Content Marketing has significant value in a few different ways.  For one, the content you create and distribute on the web has a much longer shelf life at a lower cost then any traditional campaigns you will run.  Each object of content you create can add the the total poll of content that represents your brand and works to get your customers talking back to you.  Over time when your collection of content grows larger, you will notice increases in online traffic and engagement.  A bigger collection attracts more interest.” Nate Riggs

“The value of content marketing lies in the engagement between the customer and your company. Traditional advertising shouts at prospect customers whereas content marketing talks with them. Essentially, it is about the creation and participation in meaningful conversations and development of relationships. Content marketing can benefit your company by increasing sales leads and positioning your company/brand as a thought leader, in addition to increasing the number of visitors to your website.” Amanda Maksymiw

Nate and Amanda hit on probably the two biggest advantages of content marketing over traditional advertising. One being cost – which one commenter says is one of the best ways to talk to someone clung to traditional advertising – and the other being the fact traditional advertising is not about the customer but about you.

As Amanda says, traditional advertising shouts while content marketing pulls up a chair and talks.

Other reasons you can provide your superiors or prospective clients include:

• Draw customers in through relevant content rather than one-size fits all materials
• More dynamic, easier to change
• Has a longer shelf life
• Easier to measure, more metrics and tools available
• Fewer risks and costs
• Reaches a wider audience
• …and more

Besides discussing the benefits of content marketing over traditional advertising, we also get a glimpse into some of the ways you can show your boss or prospective client the advantages of building content rather than using traditional advertising.

This is where testing comes in – nothing is more convincing than data to backup your claims of increased traffic, conversions and revenues. Show your prospect data from previously successful content marketing campaigns, provide word-of-mouth referrals and more.

Traditional advertising has been on a consistent downward trend for quite some time now. There are still some instances where it can work but as CMI and others say, there’s only one way to measure progress and that’s sales.

Providing these reasons along with some data to back it up will go a long way toward convincing your bosses or prospective clients that content marketing is an effective way to spend their marketing dollar.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

3 Ways Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing Work Together

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Making your Content Work for You in Better, More Valuable Ways

In the second installment of our series on what NOT to do in terms SEO and online, we’ll explore some other technical elements you should shy away from.

Doing any of the following could result in a penalty from Google. While some of these tactics are difficult for their computers to spot, a careful review by a real person will make these things apparent to Google.

If they catch you, you could be in a lot of trouble with your website. Recovering from these penalties takes a lot of time and effort – time and effort you could spend further developing your site’s resources.

1. Creating doorway pages

Another tactic used by aggressive SEOs is to create large numbers of pages whose only purpose is to rank well for as many keywords as possible. These pages are generally very low quality. Many of them are automatically generated by software programs designed to optimize pages around a specific long-tail keyword.

Two tools are generally used to create these pages.

One is a software program that copies or scrapes content from other web pages or RSS feeds. These pages are republished and link or re-direct visitors to main sales pages on the site.

The other tool is what’s known as Markov chain content generation. This tool uses special algorithms to combine words in unique ways. These pages generally escape many spam filters but read as complete Pig Latin to humans.

Here’s an example of Markov chain content generation:

A bowling ball daydreams, because a power drill eats the maelstrom about another polygon. Another highly paid spider buries the college-educated line dancer.

Whatever you do, do NOT use software to automatically generate content. While it’s fine to use content management systems and other software to MANAGE your site’s content, it should be created by real people.

2. Using Meta & JavaScript Redirects

If you’ve been surfing the net and noticed your browser loading a different page, sometimes on completely different sites, you’ve been redirected. The process generally only takes a split second and is hardly noticeable by site visitors.

Redirects are in fact common, and okay, if they’re used to guide visitors to the most up-to-date content on your site. We use 301 redirects all the time to funnel visitors to the most relevant pages.

This is a little different and if used improperly, could land you in hot water.

What search marketers do is build a keyword-rich page designed to rank the site high in the search engines. However, the redirect will send the visitor to a page more suitable for real people.

Two ways search marketers use redirects for nefarious purposes include the meta refresh and JavaScript.

Meta refresh is a section in the HTML code that causes the browser to redirect the visitor to the desired page. See below:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1”; url=index.html”>

The “content=1” section indicates the number of seconds the keyword-rich page will display before the visitor is redirected. Search marketers do this in the hopes Google will index the keyword laden page.

JavaScript, the other tactic, redirects visitors to the right page but leaves Google to index the shadow one since they cannot handle JavaScript. Therefore, search engines ignore the redirect and index the keyword-rich page.

While redirects do serve an important and legitimate purpose, we recommend you avoid meta redirects and JavaScript. Use a 301 redirect if you’re updating your site’s pages and content.

3. Not having unique content

Many ecommerce sites around the Internet use product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or someone else. It’s likely several sites contain the same exact language.

While duplicating product descriptions isn’t considered spam by Google and others, it will result in your pages being removed.

In light of this, you should consider this to be spam.

Therefore, if you’re an affiliate or reselling products, you should add value and unique content to product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or seller. One way to do this effectively is to create comparison charts for your products for example.

But if you don’t do anything and simply cut & paste product descriptions from elsewhere, there will be no way to differentiate your site from the hundreds of others using the same text. You also run the risk of being buried or de-listed on the search engines.

4. Using IP delivery – or what’s known as cloaking

Most commonly referred to as cloaking, IP Delivery is perhaps one of the most controversial and complex SEO strategies. What it basically does a serve one site to the real visitor while showing a different page to search engine spiders. Search engines don’t like this at all and will penalize (…smaller) sites for engaging in cloaking.

What cloaking basically does is detect the IP address the visitor is coming from. If the IP address isn’t assigned to a search engine spider, the site will assume the visitor is human and give them that version of the page. If it’s determined the IP address is from a search engine spider, the other version is shown.

But while we do say cloaking is bad, there are a few instances where it’s okay. Web pages built using Macromedia Flash is one example. Since search engines don’t index Flash content very well, a SEO might ‘cloak’ the Flash page in order to give the spider meaningful content to index.

In this sense, cloaking is okay but is ripe for exploitation, which is what the controversy boils down to.

Google engages in this practice to an extent so in one sense, they’re okay with it. Let’s say you’re in Florida looking for a tire shop. If you go type-in ‘tire shops’ in a Google search, you’re likely to see all the shops in your area. They do this by identifying where your IP address is based.

So obviously, Google thinks IP delivery is okay is some extent.

Plenty of brand names, including Google, use cloaking with impunity. Since Google trusts these names, they turn a blind eye to cloaking. But smaller, less known names engage in cloaking all of the time and get penalized.

That’s what it all boils down to – whether your site is known and trusted or not.

The only instance where cloaking is accepted for sure is Google’s First Click Free program, which enables password-protected subscription sites to be indexed while only allowing a visitor to see a single page of content.  By nature, you have to use cloaking with these kinds sites.

So unless you’re a well known brand that Google trusts to use cloaking (…I mean IP Delivery) in the right ways or are a subscription based site, you should consider this an unsafe SEO strategy.

These practices mentioned here and in part I of our series on SEO tricks should be avoided altogether really.

Although you may think you can get around the search engine spiders, a manual review by a real person at the search engine will certainly yield these tactics and result in a penalty.

So play it safe and stick with the basics. While it may seem daunting at first, the benefits will be much better and sustainable.

Have you used any of these tactics to rank high in the search engines?

If so, what was your experience? Were you penalized? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.

Anyone entering the world to search engine optimization certainly will learn pretty quickly about different neat tricks of the trade. Some of these practices are legitimate (…in the eyes of Google) and will not result in a penalty or outright ban from the search engines.

But others – known in the trade as ‘black hat’ – are questionable at best these days. Some of these practices were okay back in the 90’s when search engines were still in their infancy. Today they’re much more advanced though and can easily spot many of the practices I’ll outline below.

One thing you need to remember though – when we say search engines, we primarily mean Google. They capture over 2/3 of the Internet’s searches. When you’re optimizing a website for the search engines, you’re primarily working with Google from an SEO perspective.

Continue reading for 8 SEO tricks you want to avoid altogether. Doing so is your best insurance against being penalized by Google.

Because once you’re in that hole, it’s a real challenge to dig yourself out.

8 ‘Black Hat’ SEO practices you should avoid at all costs (1-4)

The practices described below are generally considered by Google to be ‘black hat.’ If they decide to manually review your site’s code and remove you from their listing, it can take a long time to recover. It’s best to avoid these practices involving keywords, links and other technical elements of your website.

1. Keyword stuffing – a practice that’s been around awhile

Keyword stuffing is perhaps the oldest trick in the book when it comes to SEO. Search engines loathe keyword stuffing and can absolutely detect it. Basically, keyword stuffing consists of repeating keywords over and over again. It usually appears at the bottom of a page in very small text.

If you’re trying to target the phrase ‘mountain vacations’, one common keyword stuffing move would look like this in your site’s code:

<h6>mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations</h6>

As you may or may not know, an <h6> heading makes text very tiny. Including this on the bottom of a webpage isn’t noticeable by people but is noticed by search engines. In the early days of SEO, this is how webmasters got their sites to the top of the search engines.

Keyword stuffing can also be done in meta-description, keyword and image ALT tags.

For ALT tags, say we have an image and include our keyword in the alt and title tags for the image. This is considered keyword stuffing by Google and will land you in trouble.

To see if any webpage has any of these elements, simply use the ‘Source Code’ feature on your browser.

While it’s possible to trick the search engines for awhile if you’re really experienced, they almost always detect keyword stuffing and act accordingly. Also, it’s possible competitors will file spam reports with Google so avoid keyword stuffing.

2. Invisible, barely visible or hidden text

A constant dilemma for search engine marketers is to develop web pages that appeal to both visitors and the search engines. The dilemma is the fact that search engines love simple pages with lots of content.

Real people like pages with animation, graphics and lots of special effects – the very same elements search engines cannot crawl and index.

One of the ways SEOs used to get around this was to create text that’s invisible or hidden. But with today’s more sophisticated search engines, this can be construed as keyword stuffing and get you in trouble.

One way webmasters would do this is to create text as the same, or near identical, color of the page’s background. Doing this in effect means the visitor won’t see any words but the search engines will find all of those keywords.

For example, you can have a white background <bgcolor=”#FFFFFF> with a text font of white <fontcolor=”FFFFFF”>. It’s also possible to use a slightly different text color by offsetting one of the colors a little bit. This will be a little harder for the spiders to detect but if Google manually reviews it, they will definitely catch it.

CSS is another creative way webmasters have adapted the hidden text strategy. They basically would use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to hide text from humans while making it available to search engines.

Below is an example of our keyword using a CSS visibility: hidden font format.

<div style=”visibility:hidden;”>mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations</div>

To see the text, someone will have to look at your page’s source code.

Human reviewers at Google do review sites so once they check yours out, they’ll certainly see you’ve done this if you have. There’s only one instance where it’s okay and that’s if you use CSS sheets that let you tab hidden and unhidden text. These kinds of things are common with product listings on ecommerce sites.

This is generally viewed to be okay we think but in order for that to be the case, the user must have the option to choose whether or not to view the text.

One more way to hide text using CSS sheets is to use layers and place text behind pictures or other objects on the page. Known as the z-index function, the webmaster would simply assign the viewable item a higher z-index number than the hidden text.

Next, they would use another CSS function called absolute positioning to position the text and image in the same exact location.

Again, this tactic is harder for a computer to detect but careful review by someone will certainly reveal it. It’s best to avoid this or any other tactics designed to hide text from visitors but make it viewable by the search engine spiders.

3. Selling links for the purpose of increasing a target URL’s PageRank

Another practice search engines frown profoundly on is selling links on your site. Paid links often look unnatural and if you see them, none of them have anything in common. Take the following example for instance, which you may have seen across the bottom of some web pages:

Mountain vacations – Plastic Surgeons in Florida – Buy Gold – Used Cars for Sale

As you can tell, none of these have anything to do with the other, which is a tell-tale sign of selling links. If the links are all for businesses located in the same town for example, then there’s no problem. But if a page has links going to an offshore gambling site, then there’s more risk of getting into trouble.

Using reciprocal link directories can also result in a penalty in some situations, especially if they have a wide focus of unrelated content.

Somewhat related to selling links is the risk for your site getting infected by Malware or being hacked. If you’ve setup your Google Webmaster’s Toolbox, then you should receive a warning from Google saying your site has been hacked or hosting Malware.

If you end up in Google’s penalty box for selling links, it can take some time and effort to get out. First you should remove the links and promise Google to never do it again. It usually takes 3 months or longer between the time they set your PageRank to zero and you get back in.

Many webmasters though find the profits too good to pass up despite the rigid warnings and penalties for selling links. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to learn more about their position on this topic.

4. Hidden Links and the Phantom Pixel

Another couple of practices involving links that Google really can’t stand and loves to penalize sites for are hidden links and what’s known as the phantom pixel.

Hidden links are basically links obscured from a visitor’s view that are strategically placed to direct the search engine to an unrelated site. The webmaster likely wants these off-topic sites to be indexed and rank well. Using hidden links boosts link juice (…or PageRank) on favored web pages.

Whether paid for or not, the point is the links are NOT there for the site visitor to find. Since they hold no value for the site visitor, Google and other search engines penalize sites that have them.

Techniques for hiding links are quite similar to invisible/semi-visible strategies for keywords. CSS layering like we discuss above is another strategy. Heck, you can even include links in the period at the end of a sentence. Even though the link is still technically invisible, search engines will still consider it a hidden link and act accordingly.

Phantom pixels are much like the invisible or hidden link in a period at the end of a sentence but instead the link is placed in a 1×1-pixel image. These images can also contain keywords in their alt tag like we talk about above but webmasters also use these super small images for hiding links.

Like other things we’ve talked about today, phantom pixels are another way for your site to be penalized or even banned – assuming Google discovers these ‘black hat’ tricks on your site.

And eventually you can assume you will be caught.

While the search engine spiders may not be able to catch everything, a manual review of your site’s source code certainly will…so take our word for it, be careful by not using any of these or the other 4 ‘black hat’ SEO tricks we’ll get into next time.

Check back with us late Monday to learn about the other 4 ‘black hat’ SEO tricks you should avoid like plague.

And if you’ve used any of these techniques, briefly tell us about your experience and how you dealt with any penalties.

Being successful at blogging requires a steady stream of fresh, engaging content. The more the better but usually once a week is the absolute minimum. Two years ago for instance, we were posting 3 posts a week on SEOe.

But building that content takes time – time to research, time to write, time to edit and time to manage comments and so on. With only so many hours in the day, it may seem daunting and maybe even impossible to write enough posts readers find engaging and informative.

If I had a nickel for every blog that gets started and putters out, I could retire to a life of leisure tomorrow.

Unfortunately though, many blog owners and small businesses find it very challenging to maintain a flow of consistent copy.

MyBlogGuest.com is a service where you can connect with other bloggers and find great guest material

Guest posting has several benefits for both blog owners and blog writers.

One benefit for you – the blog owner – is that you can maintain steady flow of content much easier. For example, if you’re too busy to write something from scratch yourself, find an article on MyBlogGuest.com to use.

Two ways blog owners can get material for their blog

One is to find articles authors have already posted on the site. There’s a wide range of topics available.

The other is to find authors in your niche and contact them directly.

Of course, guest posts benefit the blog owner by widening the audience. If you have a guest posting something on your blog, their readers are naturally going to be interested. And don’t forget the opportunities for networking and getting a fresh new perspective from others in your field.

For writers, guest blogging helps build their brand, reach new audiences and build links to their site(s).

To get more benefit from MyBlogGuest.com, you should write two or three posts/articles and put them on the site for distribution. Someone will eventually pick them up and use them on their blog. Of course, they have to be members to do this and must follow strict guidelines for crediting the author and linking to their site.

Ann Smarty, creator of MyBlogGuest.com, has a tremendously powerful tool here. I look forward to using it and helping others use tools like this to help them build their blogs. Expect to see more guest posts (…perhaps one a month) here on SEOe going forward.

And if you find any other services like these, let us know by leaving a comment.

He also outlines other issues to like accessibility for people with disabilities and the importance of including elements in your page to help ALL visitors, not just the perfect ones you’ve identified through market research. The final chapter quickly discusses ways to convince your boss of the validity of your recommendations. Some bosses and executives may have a difficult time understanding the virtue of good web usability. Krug gives some great examples for you to consider.

If you haven’t seen them yet, read parts I and II of our book review to fully understand the intricacies of web usability.

Section IV – Larger Concerns and Outside Influences

Chapter 10: “Usability as common courtesy – Why your Web site should be a mensch”

Besides building clarity into your website, you also need to be considerate of your users as well. Is your site clear? Does it behave badly and erode goodwill among users?

Consider this:

You’re booked on a flight but a pilots’ strike begins two days before you’re scheduled to leave. You go to the airline’s website to find information about the strike. After searching for awhile you give up amid frustration. Undoubtedly, this erodes much goodwill you had toward the airline.

Users in fact, including you, have a reservoir of goodwill. You begin very optimistic and eager to find what you’re looking for. Not

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

everyone’s reservoir is the same…some people have a shorter fuse than others. And this also depends on the situation. Your goodwill will drain away quicker if you’re in a hurry.

Fortunately, goodwill is refillable so if the site makes some mistakes but makes up for it, the user will leave in a good mood and more likely to return.

Here are some things that erode goodwill:

1.       Hiding information people are looking for

2.       Punishing users for not doing things your way

3.       Asking for information you don’t really need

4.       Shucking and jiving users

5.       Putting too much ‘sizzle’ (i.e. Flash intro) in the way

6.       Site looks amateurish

And some things that increase goodwill:

1.       Knowing what your visitors are looking for and making it obvious and easy

2.       Telling your visitors what they want to know

3.       Saving steps

4.       Putting effort into your site

5.       Making it easy to recover from errors

6.       Providing creature comforts like printer-friendly pages

Doing things like this and more to increase goodwill is not only courteous, but good business practice. If people coming to your site have an easy time and enjoy themselves, they’ll be more likely to return and tell their friends.

Chapter 11: “Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheet, and you”

Unless you decide all of your users are perfect in every way, you’re going to need to think about accessibility. Adding features into your site for disabled persons is not only good business, it’s the law.

Specifically, the law is what’s known as Section 508 of the 1988 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act, which specifies information technology accessibility standards for companies wanting to do business with the U.S. Government.

When discussing accessibility, designers and developers naturally get a little anxious since it potentially means more work for them. Making a site accessible is definitely harder than it should be, but well worth it from both a legal and business standpoint.

To understand how to make your site accessible, there are several articles and books you can read like Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark and Constructing Accessible Websites by Jim Thatcher and others.

Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is one thing you can do to make an accessible website. In the beginning of the Internet, everything was text. Designers and developers didn’t have much control over layout so they began using tables.

CSS sheets give you much more control over formatting, consistency among browsers and other benefits. CSS sheets also allow you to make specific changes in your site’s HTML code to make it more accessible.

Chapter 12: “Help! My boss wants me to_______”

There will be times your boss will want you to do things that are not good from a usability standpoint.

Maybe they’ll want the site to ask users for more personal information than you need. Or maybe they want more ‘pizazz’ to the site – things like splash pages, animation and music.

Steve provides some great examples of letter he’s written to CEOs and other executives warning them about the dangers of doing these things and others.

Well that brings us to the conclusion of Don’t Make Me Think. It’s a very interesting read and easy too – if you’ve got about 4-6 spare hours (…whew, who does?), you can easily read it in one sitting. If not, put it down and easily pick up right where you left off.

To conclude, all of the tips or ‘rules’ outlined here and detailed more in the book are not iron clad. There are certain situations – or interfaces – where doing something contrary to what’s in the book or on here is okay. If your site for instance is designed to make people think, puzzle or challenge them, then by all means do what you got to do.

You can buy Don’t Make Me Think on Amazon for a great price. I certainly recommend it if you want to learn more about a core issue

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

to being successful online.

Let us know if you’ve picked up a copy and your thoughts…we’ll provide further updates into the year.

Until next time…

No matter if it’s a website, an electronic device or a really nice car – if you can’t easily use it, you’re going to get frustrated pretty quickly.

This is especially true of websites…they must be user-friendly for each type of visitor coming to your website. There’s no one-size fits all here!!

With that said the title of a book I recently read on the subject – Don’t Make Me Think – sums up the purpose and spirit of making

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

sure your website is easily usable. If you remember anything from this, remember those 4 important words and you will understand the essence of good web usability, which should answer four important questions in a matter of seconds without the user having to think.

First of all, I’d like to say this easy-to-read book by Steve Krug is a must have for anyone wanting to market a business online. Krug’s strong visuals and eloquent prose help you easily visualize how homepages, sales pages and any other page on your site should be structured.

Besides the good writing and illustrations, the book is an easy read as well. Like Krug says in his introduction, it can easily be read in the time it takes to fly from New York to L.A.

Well enough of the glim and glam, let’s get down to the book and what it’s about. Continue reading for a brief overview of each chapter and the concepts Krug explores. Of course to fully understand web usability, I strongly suggest you get a copy of Don’t Make Me Think the first chance you get.

While this book isn’t very long, a blog post summarizing all of the important points would be. With that in mind, this review will be broken into two parts. Below is the first part of our review for your enjoyment and enlightenment. Check back in a few days for a summary of more of Krug’s insights (…and illustrations too).

Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

Krug’s nearly 200 page book comes jam packed with illustrations and tips for making your website more usable. It’s divided into 4 sections and contains 12 chapters in all. Continue reading for a quick overview of each chapter.

Section I – Guiding Principles

Chapter 1 – Don’t make me think!

Krug’s first law of usability and the one thing you must remember when designing a website. Website visitors should be able to “get it” – what it is and how to use it – without having to think about it. In other words, it needs to be self evident to the point that someone with absolutely no knowledge of what you do can understand it in a matter of seconds.

Making people think when they land on your website saps their mental energy to continue. If your website is hard to navigate, it won’t take very long for someone to get mentally exhausted and leave.

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

Many websites contain things that do make us think. Cute or clever names are typical culprits along with marketing-induced names, company-specific names and unfamiliar technical terms. Links to buttons that aren’t obviously clickable is another source of question.

Rather than providing another checklist to follow, Krug says you should simply understand the basic principle of eliminating question marks. If you do that, you will be well on your way to making a very user-friendly website.

Chapter 2: How we really use the web

If you stop and think about it for a minute, most of us don’t read a webpage word for word. We glance at a page, scan some text and click on the first link that we think has what we’re looking for. Many web designers though create websites under the assumption people will laboriously pore over each page and weigh their options before choosing where to go next…nothing could farther from the truth.

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

Many designers think their sites are works of great literature while the reality is much closer to a “billboard going by at 60 mph.”

Below are 3 facts regarding real world web use:

1.       We don’t read web pages, we scan them

2.       Since most of us are in a hurry, we don’t make optimal choices, we just ‘satisfice’

3.       We don’t figure things out, we muddle

Krug in fact said something very interesting about muddling and that is experts aren’t really experts, they’re simply “…muddling through at a higher level.” Remember that the next time someone poses as an expert.

Chapter 3: Billboard Design 101

Considering web users are generally surfing the web at lightning speeds, web designers and marketers need to view their homepage and other pages as billboards rather than great works of art.

Those of us who have worked on web pages take great pride in our work. While this is admirable, it’s important we view our web pages in the proper context in order for them to be successful.

In Chapter 3, Krug outlines 5 things you can do to make sure users see and understand as much about your site as possible. These include:

1.       Creating a clear visual hierarchy on every page

2.       Taking advantage of conventions (both naming and graphic)

3.       Breaking pages into clearly defined areas

4.       Making it obvious what constitutes a clickable link

5.       Minimizing noise

There’s nothing new about visual hierarchies in fact. Prominence, grouping and nesting are concepts used in newspapers for ages.

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

They’re basically designed to give the reader useful information on the contents of the page before the reader actually reads anything. Conventions are also something newspapers have used for ages. Headlines, sub-headlines, picture captions are some examples of both traditional and online conventions.

#3 is pretty obvious…clearly defined areas are a must. Again, this feeds into the goal of creating a webpage users can figure out in a matter of seconds without any thought.

Making sure links clearly state they’re clickable is also important for maintaining patience and goodwill among your users. And finally, keep noise to a minimum. Visual noise can kill an otherwise good page. Having too many things on a webpage can overwhelm users and cause more of them to just leave.

Chapter 4: Animal, vegetable or mineral? Why users like mindless choices.

Over the years, web designers and usability professionals have spent lots of time debating how many clicks you should expect a user to go through to get what they want without getting too frustrated…many designers in fact have rules specifying the maximum number of clicks to get to any page on a site.

Krug thinks numbers aren’t so important though – while it seems like a useful criteria to him, it’s generally safe to assume most users don’t mind a lot of clicks as long as they’re effortless.

Making choices as mindless as possible is in fact one main task to making a site easy to use. Be sure links and drop-down menus are clear in what they offer.

Chapter 5: Omit needless words – The art of not writing for the web.

Considering the vast majority of web users scan web pages and don’t read them word for word, having needless words in your copy will only frustrate matters from a usability perspective.

In his Elements of Style book, E.B. White details several rules, the 17^th of which is the following:

Omit needless words

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Omitting needless words has several benefits, including:

• Reducing noise level on a page
• Making useful content more prominent
• Making pages shorter, which allows users to see more of the page without having to scroll

Therefore, if you’re going to omit needless words, all the happy talk (i.e. self-congratulatory promotional writing) must go. You can tell when you’re reading some. In the back of your head, you hear voices saying, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…”

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

Another way to omit needless words is to eliminate instructions. No one is going to read them unless they’ve failed several times at just ‘muddling’ through. Eliminate instructions by making everything as self-explanatory as possible.

From Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. © 2006 Steve Krug. Used by permission

This brings us to the end of part I of Don’t Make Me Think, which outlined some guiding principles you need to understand in order to build a useful website. Check back with us in a few days to learn how you should design your navigation, homepage and even how you can deal with the inherent controversies that stem from building a website for your company in part II of our review and summary.