Over the last few weeks of 2011, we took a break to assess the state of search engine optimization and where things were headed going into 2012. We do this in order to help our clients (…and readers of this blog) better understand where they should focus their online marketing efforts.

After reflecting on where we’ve been and where we’re going, we quickly realized that the lines between different types of search – namely organic, local, mobile and social – are now being blurred more than ever. Rather than web search strictly being the center of activity online, social is increasingly becoming the focus.

According to an exclusive web tutorial from Planet Ocean, web search was the sun and other types of search (…or planets) revolved around it. Now, instead of web search being the sun, social is quickly becoming the center of the universe with other types of search (…or planets) revolving around it.

As we’ve said here many times over the last year, being social is a critical strategy to being successful online – this will become even more critical in the coming year. A cursory review of search results for a variety of terms shows social mentions and engagement alongside traditional webpages.

Social is being aggressively integrated in Bing, who has partnerships with Facebook, Skype and Twitter. Google has basically bet the farm on its new social network Google +.

From these arrangements and others, we can ascertain that social sharing will increasingly integrate with web search. Going forward, social shares or votes will increasingly be the new links.

How many have liked, +1’d or otherwise made a comment regarding content on your site?

So how can I ensure my site continues to rank high in 2012?

Dominating your market online in the new year will require some tried and true methods mixed with some new ways of engaging your audience online.

Since the web has become increasingly social, it’s become increasingly democratized as well. Users will more and more be the driving force in determining which social networking platforms you ultimately adopt.

The key to all of this though is content – as in years past, successful online marketing will be driven by your ability to create reference grade content that helps the reader. In turn, this can lead to true engagement that builds trust and value.

Rather than a few pages earning links, success online will hinge more on how socially engaging your content is.

The more likes, +1s and buzz your content has, the better your business will do.

Besides content itself, freshness will also be a driving factor in maintaining and building high search rankings. It’s increasingly become clear that Google and others are placing a high value on ‘fresh’ content. Just in the last two months, we’ve seen Google make updates to its algorithms to reward sites with fresh content, especially in areas that are always changing.

This update though has sadly penalized some sites with great ‘evergreen’ content that’s been around awhile but still valuable. Repurposing this content will help you get around this ‘freshness’ problem, especially if you experienced a drop in rankings due to this latest update.

Also in 2012, expect to see more firms using social media tools for product development and testing as well as technical support.

What about mobile-based search? Will it continue to grow in 2012?

An emphatic yes!! It’s projected that by 2015, more users in the U.S. will access the Internet through their smartphones or tablets than a regular computer.

Mobile search is deeply tied into local search with over 40% of searches on a mobile device being for something local like a restaurant, doctor’s office or brick and mortar store. According to Google, 44% of searches from a mobile device in the 2011 holiday shopping season were for store locations and last-minute gifts.

With mobile devices, users can seamlessly float between mobile, local and product search as well as their social media activities.

In 2012, it’s imperative that local business establish their presence on places like Bing Local, Google Places, Foursquare and others. Don’t be hesitant to allow reviews – customer reviews give you an opportunity to address grievances and open yourself up to new ways of engaging customers.

So there you have it – things will continue to move at wharp speed in this new year – social and mobile is most certainly revolutionizing how people interact and find things they need.

Stay tuned to our search engine optimization blog as we slice and dice the trends and developments in the search marketing world. Most of all relax and have fun with the possibilities the online sphere will bring in 2012.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

7 Strategies for Maintaining ‘Fresh’ Content

Preparing for the Mobile Revolution – Part I

Preparing for the Mobile Revolution – Part II

3 Ways Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing Work Together

Reputation Management – Maintaining & Enhancing your Company’s Good Name

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.

One partnership our search engine marketing firm engaged in last year with gold bullion dealer Provident Metals has seen tremendous success.

When we start working with a firm to grow their online presence and by extension, traffic and revenues, we set realistic goals to accomplish the desired end. In the case of Provident Metals, traffic and search rankings for the bullion dealer’s site increased well beyond anyone’s expectations.

Since formation of the partnership in mid-2010, Provident Metals’ website has seen over a 600% increase in web traffic. Much of this traffic has been driven by the exponential increase in the company’s page 1 Google rankings. Coupled with social media engagement and a re-designed online store, the bullion dealer has experienced much success since teaming up with our firm.

Now that the new site design is complete and a large catalog of informative content is established, we’re now working to target some super-competitive phrases related to PM’s industry – think ‘gold bullion’, ‘silver bullion’ and others.

Dominating these keyword phrases will vault Provident Metals into the elite circles of the bullion industry.

We’ll continue to work with Provident Metals to build informative web content that builds search rankings and engages the reader to act. Providing timely and informative content is key to building thought leadership and trust with customers.

We’re excited to be working with such a reputable company that prides itself on superior customer service. Stay tuned for more important updates on our exciting work. In the meantime, read more about the partnership in our latest press release.

And if you’re searching for an online partner dedicated to helping businesses grow, contact search marketing consultants at SEO Advantage today to find out how you can effectively harness online channels to build website traffic and revenues.

In today’s uncertain economy, many companies are looking for lower cost ways to reach new customers. Many traditional advertising venues like TV, print and radio – known as ‘outbound marketing’ – not only carry a high cost, but simply don’t yield the benefits they once did.

In fact, HubSpot compared the average cost-per-lead for inbound vs. outbound marketing in a recently published e-book and found the average cost for inbound, or online channels, was 62% lower than traditional marketing channels.

If you’re reading this web marketing blog, you’re probably already aware of the vast potential the web offers entrepreneurs, small businesses and even large companies. You’ve certainly seen the cultural & technological shift toward smart phones and other devices that facilitate web-based commerce, information and relationships.

Understanding the myriad of options for harnessing these online channels is a big challenge for many, even professionals

In terms of your business, just how do you go about successfully using the web to drive leads, revenues and engagement?

Well that’s a pretty broad question that could take all day. But going a step further and as the title of this post says, how can you better engage online followers and turn them into ‘evangelists,’ which if pursued in a methodical way, can yield tremendous results.

Many large brands like Coca-Cola and M&Ms are able to do this on a large scale.

In fact any company, be it they’re a well known brand or a small enterprise, can capture much more traffic and engagement by doing a few simple things…data in fact shows companies who blog see 79% more Twitter followers.

Data also shows company’s who blog see, on average, 55% more website visitors.

What methods should I use to meet these kinds of goals?

The general consensus and methodology for accomplishing more web traffic, Twitter followers and general engagement online is to:

1.       Create outstanding content that’s timely and informative

2.       Optimize content for both search engines and people

3.       Promote this content strategically through various channels and analyze the results

Content itself can come in many forms – articles, e-books, blog posts, video, white papers, press releases, photos and so on. Content in fact can be re-packaged and distributed in other ways (i.e. take a series of blog posts and make a ‘podcast,’ which you can eventually turn into an e-book).

One important part of your content should be a blog. Blogging gives you the opportunity to talk about more appealing topics with your audience and make interesting correlations. Your blog is where you can target long-tail keywords, attract more inbound links and generate conversations in your comment section.

But to really drive conversions, you can’t just write something and throw it up there. While you will see increased traffic, conversions are what you really desire. To boost this number, you should also include what’s known as a ‘call-to-action’ at the end of each of your blog posts. As you will see at the end here shortly, we will include some instruction, suggestion or invitation on what you can do next.

Now that we’ve covered traffic and conversions, what about the free promotion part?

Here’s where it can get a little tricky but with persistence, many companies have seen tremendous benefit from actual social media engagement.

Before you do anything though, you need to listen to the groups of people talking about your industry…this ‘buzz’ is important to understanding where and how you can engage people online.

There are many tools available like Google Alerts, Twilert (Twitter), TweetDeck (Twitter) and others to help you do this.

Once you’ve evaluated where the ‘buzz’ in your industry, it’s time to go engage these prospective and current customers. For B2C companies, Twitter is a commonly used tool where companies can easily build a following. Sometimes, these followers post ‘thank you’ messages or other promotional type language talking about their experience.

But in order to make this happen effectively, you need to – be responsive, answer questions and respond to complaints in a timely and respectful matter

Being a good ambassador, sharing good content and carefully evaluating the ‘buzz’ on your company and industry will certainly yield a strong online following.  Some of these followers will in turn praise your products and services to their friends online.

As you can probably tell, this new type of ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising is quite powerful.

In the old days (…and even still today), many successful enterprises thrived on word-of-mouth advertising, which hardly costs anything except a good reputation and quality work.

Today, social media, blogs and discussion boards are changing the way people find information. Having your own ‘evangelists’ out there who share their good experiences will have big impacts on new customers seeing if what you offer suits their needs.

To learn more about these tactics for social media engagement, check back with us again or take a little while to review the e-book from HubSpot. And check out related posts below to see how this all ties together with other elements of marketing a business online.

Related Posts

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

Which Social Media Channel is Right for My Business?

WordPress CMS – The Easiest Way to Build an Optimized Site

Content Marketing over Traditional Advertising – Making the Case

Specifically and technically speaking, this particular update was algorithmic rather than manual in nature. All told, it affected over 12% of search queries in the U.S.

That adds up to some pretty significant numbers so therefore, it’s logical to see how more than just ‘content farm’ type sites were affected…many sites with good, high-quality sites were affected to. Many forums back this up as some sites say they lost as much as 50% of their U.S. based traffic from Google.

So what exactly were the issues surrounding Google’s Panda update and how do they affect my site?

While many of these affected sites claim they generated 100% original content, a deeper examination yielded of some of the example sites shown on forums and articles weren’t quite 100% original.

Specifically, sites affected by the update included one or more of the following 7 criteria:

(There were many more actually but these were the 7 most common)

1. Incorrectly or failing to use a canonical tag – especially common among e-commerce sites as Google would index two identical URLs

2. Excessive use of RSS feeds

3. Not providing unique content – as decided by Google. Essentially, they decide if your site is ‘authoritative’ enough and if they trust it

4. Optimizing for search engines rather than your audience

5. Using boilerplates too much and across too many pages

6. Having too many ads ‘above the fold’

7. Any site previously blocked manually by Google Chrome Personal

It’s safe to say sites undeserving of these kinds of penalties got caught in the cross-fire…Google even setup a Webmaster forum on the topic and has even admitted that it’s possible considering the fact this update was algorithmic rather than manual in nature.

Google says in reply to questions on its forum that since the Panda update was completely algorithmic in nature, Google cannot make any individual exceptions.

So basically what they’re saying is tough luck, too bad or whatever euphemism you can come up with to describe the situation. Considering this fact, it won’t do you much good to appeal to Google but if you find other, non-content related issues, then we suggest (…and our friends at Search Engine News do too) you contact Google about those issues.

To address these problems, we want you to remember this one important axiom – content is king!

It’s likely there are specific pages in your site that’s causing you to lose traffic. Isolate those pages and see if they fit any of the 7 criteria mentioned above. Either way, you should ensure those pages have 100% unique content.

If you’re an e-commerce site, generate product descriptions starting with your big products and working your way down. Not only does this prevent negative impacts from these updates, it will position your site for better long-term rankings.

Consisting mostly of business-to-business (B2B) type firms, LinkedIn is also increasingly a good tool for B2C firms as well.

While LinkedIn is a valuable social/professional networking tool, it’s mixed with many other social media platforms businesses use. Depending on your firm, LinkedIn is certainly one tool you and your company should consider.

LinkedIn marketing if you will can be broken down into two main levels: profiles and groups

Your personal and business profile is there to showcase you and your company to the multitude of LinkedIn members. You can (…and should) have one profile for yourself and one for your company.

(Example – My personal LinkedIn profile is located at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seocopywriting while our SEO Advantage profile is located at http://LinkedIn.seoadvantage.com)

All of your employees should have their own profile setup. And it pays to have a completed profile. Ones looking incomplete will see little activity so be sure you have done everything you can in setting up your profile.

Once you have a profile setup and begin making connections with fellow employees, customers and other professional acquaintances, you can then begin engaging with others in your industry. Frequent status updates, answering others’ questions work to engage potential leads and develop thought leadership.

Posting company announcements, events and new products also work as part of an overall ‘engagement’ strategy you should consider when working with LinkedIn.

Another way to develop this all important thought leadership is to participate in groups on LinkedIn and perhaps start your own if there isn’t much out there on what you do already.  To get a group started, promote it through other social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

And if you’re starting a group, you have to be really proactive is starting conversations. Get people talking to build a larger, more engaged following. After awhile, conversations will start organically on their own and build – but in the beginning you have to be proactive and engaging to build that following.

Beyond this, we invite you to check out some of HubSpot’s resources on LinkedIn. They in fact just started a group for online marketers – there you can a lot of the latest ‘buzz’ on what’s happening.

We’re always developing our social media expertise and use of tools like LinkedIn so check us out and see how we harness this professional networking tool to reach out to other interested professionals – whether they’re in our industry or not.

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.

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…