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

Top 10 Ways to Connect your Customers with Good Content

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

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.

Informative and timely content serves to answer questions, reduce doubts and works to assure customers that your business can fill their needs. Since they’re not visiting you at a storefront and able to speak with you face-to-face, web content in the form of blogs, white papers and articles helps to build this rapport and trust.

But with so many options online, where should I be focusing my efforts to develop useful content for my customers?

An understandable question indeed – with web and social media marketing tools changing all the time it seems, it can be a difficult challenge to know how you should communicate your knowledge to customers through your website.

Continue reading for the top 10 ways to connect with your customers through content as identified by the Content Marketing Institute. There are many other options beyond these 10 but according CMI and their users, the following are the most tried and true methods for connecting with customers. To see all 42 and some real-world examples of each, check out their presentation online.

Top 10 Ways for Connecting with Your Customers through Content

1. Blogs

Short for ‘weblog,’ a blog provides an easy way to share quick bits of things interesting to your readers. Easy to use, good blogging platforms like WordPress provide easy ways to syndicate what you put online (RSS, social media ‘share’ and so forth). They’re also great for facilitating conversation through comments.

You should also be open to including negative comments…much about you and your company can be determined from how you handle negative feedback. And to really make blogging work, comment on other blogs and perhaps keep a ‘top-10’ list of places you visit for your readers to see.

2. E-newsletter

A means of regular communication with both current and future customers, an e-newsletter is usually distributed weekly or monthly. E-newsletters are generally delivered through email but you can also keep an archived list on your website. Both current and future customers can opt to receive your e-newsletter through a quick signup from your homepage or blog.

The e-newsletter itself can include both full-length articles and brief descriptions with links to more on your site. And they can serve as a vehicle to announce other content found on your site.

DON’T SPAM – GET PERMISSION BEFORE DISTRIBUTING AND OFFER AN OPT-OUT

3. White Papers

Generally around 8-12 pages long, white papers cover issues that require a lot of explanation. They’re great for communicating thought leadership on a particular topic important for your buyers to know. White papers can also be referred to as a ‘research report’ or ‘technical brief.’

White papers can also be available to readers in different formats – electronic PDF, print or even digital magazines.

4. Article

Flexible in both length and format, articles can provide opportunity for you to address issues, trends and concerns of interest to your intended audience. Coupled with other online mediums and in-person speaking, articles are a very traditional tool for establishing thought leadership in any particular industry.

But you have to be consistent and plan on a series of articles to create a meaningful impact. And you should also look for additional ways to spread your article around, either through print media, online syndication sites and even your blog.

5. E-book

Anywhere from 12-40 pages in length, e-books are useful for presenting very complex subjects in a very reader friendly fashion. Content is both informative and entertaining. E-books should also have a collegial tone and be formatted to facilitate skimming and scanning. You should in fact make liberal use of bullets, callouts, sidebars, graphs and so on.

And include a good call-to-action at the end and let your readers know what they should do next.

6. Case Study

Case studies are great for communicating how your products or services help a real world customer. They’re generally 1-2 pages in length and combine both the value of a customer testimonial and a story at the same time. Most follow a simple 3-stage format – challenge, solution and results.

Use direct quotes, especially in the results area, to re-enforce the story.

7. Testimonials

Boasting about ourselves doesn’t yield near the interest as a testimonial from a real-world customer does. These quick quotes from a customer or client provide a trustworthy insight that builds credibility and helps overcome skepticism.

Create a process for obtaining testimonials from your clients. Some marketers are finding LinkedIn to be a great source for obtaining these. And pepper testimonials throughout your site – don’t overwhelm your visitor with a long page of quotes.

8. Microblogging (a.k.a Twitter)

Limited to 140 characters in length, a microblog like Twitter severely limits content. But the reach and speed of microblogging provides the opportunity to converse with prospects in close to real time.  Search tools on Twitter allow you to search for hot topics and address emerging concerns.

Use Twitter as a listening post to see what people are saying about you and your industry. It’s practically impossible for you to be in control so don’t invest much time in trying to shape the conversation. Tools like TweetDeck and others can help you manage your engagements on Twitter.

9. Webinar/Webcast

An online equivalent to a live presentation, a webinar (audio and slides) or webcast (audio, video and slides) delivers content visually slide by slide. Users can either sign-up to see a live version or download the presentation and watch it at their leisure.

Webinars should also include a good call-to-action at the end and links to relevant e-books, articles and other content on your site. You should also promote your webinar aggressively in other areas of your website and blog.

10. Video

Once difficult, innovative sites like YouTube and Vimeo has made uploading and sharing videos much easier. Embed codes allow you to place the video directly on your site and social sharing tools on YouTube and others makes it easier for your video to go viral.

If you’ve given a presentation at a conference, upload the video and embed it on your blog and website. Or create a series of videos on topics interesting to your target audience. Don’t obsess over perfection but do take a few minutes to make edits and make your video look more professional. iMovie and Final Cut are two inexpensive tools to help you easily make more professional looking videos.

As you can see, options for generating web content vary far and wide. There are other methods too that we didn’t discuss here but these top 10 are recognized as both some of the easiest and most effective methods for building content for your site.

Remember, it’s about much more than just satisfying search engines. You also have to present valuable information that answers questions, addresses concerns and overcomes skepticism.

We’ve always extolled (…and still do) the value of generating a steady flow of press releases announcing news at your company – a new product, new hire or a professional award or recognition – are just a few newsworthy topics you can announce through a press release.

Considering the fact that 92% of journalists use search engine feeds like Google News or Yahoo! News to find newsworthy topics (…daily for 81% of journalists according to research firm Marketing Sherpa), not developing a steady schedule of press releases can put you at extreme disadvantage.

And recent research from TEKGroup International analyzing journalists on media relations practices found over 70% journalists read one or more blogs daily…just under 30% regularly use social media in their jobs and approximately 37% subscribe to RSS feeds…50% regularly visit Google News.

We can even glean more information from the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from the Social Media Examiner. Over 80% of respondents in this survey say they plan to either increase press release frequency or keep it the same.  Of those respondents who say they will increase their frequency of press releases (43%), approximately 52% were small business owners while only 24% were larger companies.

Another interesting fact from the report – when asked to rank all types of marketing they were using or planning to implement, respondents ranked press releases at #4 at 57%, just below event marketing.

Despite the fact Google’s Panda update somewhat diminished the value of links from distribution sites, we can see still see the inherent value of developing newsworthy press releases.

Remember one important point – write press releases with both the search engines and social media networks in mind.

Doing so will ensure you reach both your target audience and hungry journalists looking for a great news topic.

Proper press release optimization and targeting not only helps you rank high in Google News and other outlets, they help you engage both your audience and journalists. Eventhough the link value has diminished somewhat, be sure you still include press releases in your online marketing strategy.

Related Posts

5 Common Mistakes that Stop Press Releases Cold

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Free Press Release Distribution – A Great Way to Get your PR Noticed

Despite this, we thought some of these tips regarding Twitter would be a good substitute for now.

As you know from prior posts on the matter, Twitter is a powerful social media marketing tool taking the online world by storm.

Everyone from politicians to musicians and athletes to businesses are using this innovative tool to connect with prospective customers. It’s also a great way to engage with those who are already customers, turning them from simply people doing business with you into ‘evangelists’ for your brand.

We hope to eventually provide a synopsis of HubSpot’s webinar on optimizing relationships with social media soon.

But in the mean time, we invite you to examine 4 ways you can use Twitter to improve search rankings. There’s been a lot of discussion on whether Twitter helps boost search engine rankings. It can, provided it’s done properly according to Misti Sandefur and Danny Sullivan, who recently interviewed Google and Bing and confirmed this point.

Continue reading to learn more about how you can use this versatile ‘micro-blogging’ utility to boost your company’s position in Google and other search engines.

1. ‘Follow’ people in your industry who are considered authority figures

Most people you follow on Twitter will not follow you back. But if you’re following people relevant to what you do, the higher likelihood they will follow you back. For those who do, they will likely notice links to new content on your site or blog.

The result?

They very well may ‘re-tweet’ your post and share it with their friends. These links, over time, will provide a big boost to your search engine rankings.

2. ‘Re-tweet’ posts from other authority figures in your industry

It’s a two-way street. If you spot something on Twitter you find interesting, re-tweet it for your followers. Doing so will likely result in a ‘re-tweet’ on the other end for any good content you post on Twitter.

3. Add Twitter and other social media widgets at the end of articles and blog posts

You’ve probably noticed how all of our blog posts include a ‘share’ button where readers can share our articles through Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels. Including this capability not only makes sharing your content easier, it will make it more likely readers will want to share your content with their friends since hey, it’s so easy!

4. Use #hashtags when posting when posting tips and links

Twitter #hashtags are an easy way for people to spot what something is about. Therefore, find popular #hashtags relevant to your industry and use those in the beginning of your Twitter posts. Examples include: #jobs, #retail, #webmarketing and so on. See a more comprehensive list here.

The other important thing to consider when using Twitter is how you become an authority on the micro-blogging platform. Being considered an ‘authority’ figure in your industry will ensure you maintain a high number of followers. Becoming an authority figure takes time but posting relevant content and communicating with others on the network will help build your credibility.

Simply ‘tweeting’ blog content on Twitter isn’t enough. You need to also look at others’ content and comment on it as well.

As we’ve said before, the quality of your followers is more important than quantity.

With that said, keep in mind that things don’t happen overnight. But be patient and persistent…your efforts will eventually pay off.

Related Posts

Large Numbers of Followers Doesn’t Always Mean More Benefits

Social Media Architect Provides Valuable Twitter Advice

Can Twitter Get a Site Indexed in the Search Engines All By Itself?

5 Ways You Can Optimize your ‘Tweets’ for Search

Businesses looking for expert search engine optimization and online marketing services turn to TopSeos for unvarnished opinion on who can best deliver results online. They regularly evaluate and rank firms in a variety of areas, including content creation, search engine optimization, social media and more.

Building content not only drives high search engine rankings, it also establishes credibility and trust with your readers.

With Google’s recent update affecting ‘content farms,’ unique, relevant and informative content is now more important than ever. Businesses and websites can no longer afford to neglect content. Simple ‘cut & paste’ and other quick tactics will no longer work.

We invite you to check out TopSeos and see their rankings for search engine and online marketing firms in all areas of concern…they provide great summaries of what each company offers.

To see how building an online presence can help your company succeed, check out our expert web copywriting services as well as our SEO, graphic design and social media services.

And check back with us here later in the week as we review a new e-book from HubSpot on how you can use social media to turn prospects into dedicated ‘brand evangelists.’ Experts offer great tips on how you can go from having a simple profile to one where your ‘friends’ actively engage their friends vis-à-vis your company’s products and services.

From reading our web marketing blog and other resources on building search rankings, unique content is one of the major pillars to successfully harnessing online marketing channels.

And if you’ve seen anything related to the recent Google ‘Farmer’ update, you know that unique content is an absolute must.

With that in mind, it’s easy to think content can just go up on your site and be forgotten about…I’ve certainly thought this way in the past but experience now tells me this simply isn’t true.

Content like articles can be repurposed into blogs or even white papers or e-books and vice versa. Circumstances and information is certain change, requiring you update your content from time to time.

You want to be sure you’re providing your readers with the most up-to-date information – you do this to not only keep the hungry search engine spiders happy but to build credibility among your readers as well.

But getting that far is only half the battle

Just because you’ve got this great content promoting your brand and educating your prospects doesn’t quite mean you’re going to see significantly more clicks on the ‘buy’ or ‘contact’ button.

Unfortunately no…to really increase conversions and the average time someone spends on your site or associated social media channels, you not only need to create relative content that’s informative, you’ve got to make it accessible to where your readers are online.

Social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon and others have revolutionized the way people interact online. Gone are the days where they exclusively had to come to you.

That’s why content for social media is so important.

When you write a new blog or article, post it on your company’s Facebook and Twitter profiles. Developing exclusive content for social media is also a plus. For example, you could offer a quick overview of an important topic on Facebook then link to more extensive resources on your site.

Or you could hold a contest but require participants to ‘Like’ or otherwise interact with your Facebook profile.

One radical approach could be to develop a separate site devoted exclusively to interacting with your company through social media channels. Kate Spade women’s clothing and accessories is an example of someone who’s used this approach successfully.

Courtesy of Nick Usborne and WebContentCafe.com

While they do have their regular website, this site puts the visitor in a position to interact with the New York fashion company on their favorite social media networks.

Of course, this option works for this kind of company and may not for yours.

In addition to social media channels, adding links to other relevant content at the end of a blog post or article is also a valuable way to keep people on your site.

You may think that simply writing great copy will keep visitors on your site…when they’re through reading, they’ll gladly scroll back up the page and use your site’s navigation to keep looking around.

Yet another trap less experienced site owners and online marketers find themselves in

When you read a news story on a major site, you always see related stories linked from the bottom of the article. Many of these really big sites have automated systems that create this.

In addition to links at the end of your piece(s), you can link to other relevant content within your posts like we do in many of our blog articles on SEO-e.

But to really keep someone engaged and on your site, you need to show them what to do next.

That’s why having a list a 3-5 related articles at the end of your posts is a great idea to try. The longer you keep someone engaged on your site, the more likely they will move from being a ‘prospect’ to being a ‘customer.’

Going forward, we’re going to try this with SEO-e and see if it helps our readers learn more while they’re here. And if you’re on Facebook, ‘Like’ us and know precisely when we get new content online.

Related SEO-e posts:

7 Things Google’s Farmer Update Penalized Sites For – and What You Can Do About It

Latent Semantic Indexing and Keywords – A New Way to Look at Copy

Which Social Media Channel is Right for My Business?

By setup, I mean the actual infrastructure we use to post things to SEO-e and other blogs we handle.

WordPress is an open-source blogging platform used by many websites to build out their pages. Some simply use a URL through WordPress (yoursite.wordpress.com) but to build search rankings for your business, you need to use your own domain…like ours – (http://www.seo-e.com/).

This ensures your site and business get the search engine benefits of building out your site’s content.

WordPress though is more than just a blogging platform. With a few widgets, themes, plugins and coding, it’s also a very useful content management system.

According to Wikipedia, a content management system is a “software system which provides website authoring, collaboration and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage the site’s content with relative ease.”

You may have heard of these systems as often being used to manage content on large sites.

The problem with many of them – especially older versions – is that they cause several problems from an SEO perspective…you’ve probably seen some of these before.

Dirty URLs, especially common on large ecommerce sites, is one disadvantage of a content management system. If you see a URL with a ‘?’ in it, all of the characters past the question mark constitute the dirty URL.

Another drawback of content management systems (…especially older ones) is the tendency for content to be placed too deep in a sub-domain, example – http://www.yoursite.com/articles/how-to/use-our-products/model 2613.

Having this occur causes your pages and site to bleed PageRank. As you know, PageRank is a big factor in how Google ranks sites. The higher your PageRank, the better your rankings for the keyword terms you’re targeting.

In other words, websites using older CMS systems to manage their content usually don’t generate web pages crawlable by the search engines.

That’s why many search engine optimization pros like us don’t use them since one of the fundamental tenets to being successful online involves having a site that’s easy for the search engines to crawl and index.

With a few slight modifications though, WordPress is one content management system you can be sure will yield crawlable web pages.

And the best part is once you’re setup with a domain, design, categories and the necessary modifications to make WordPress into a CMS system, it’s as easy as pie to post new content online.

This post and SEO blog is one example of the easiness of this system.

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.