The Executive’s Guide to Marketing on the Internet
In this postmodern age, almost everything is self-referential and knowingly ironic. Even in the advertising world, an approach can lead to “meta,” an ambiguous pop culture concept of self-reference. Think about selling out/merchandising jokes on The Simpsons. Or a Charlie Kaufman film with the screenwriter as the main character. Continue reading ‘Visible Shops Goes Meta’
Search engine marketing (SEM) usually involves two beloved methods, SEO (search engine optimization), and PPC (pay per click). SEO involves making your website “popular” or “worthwhile” by the search engine’s standards so that it appears sooner in search engine result pages (SERP). These types of search engine results are called “organic.”
The other kind, PPC, is paying to have your website and its link appear in highly visible areas of the SERP. It’s the billboard of the Internet, basically. These searches are known as “paid” or “advertised” results. The only trick to this kind of billboard is sorting out what kind of keywords target customers will use, and having the savoir-faire to know how much to bid for those keywords.
But which of these SEM methods yields more results? Continue reading ‘Battle of the SEM Tools: SEO or PPC?’
How often and how well you place keywords in your content will have have great effect on search engine spiders. You should afford some finesse in the writing; you don’t want to repeat your keywords in a clunky fashion, or it could deter users from actually reading your content. However, here are a few guidelines you should consider when inputting keywords into your text.
Continue reading ‘How Keyword Placement in Your Content Influences Search Engines’
Because of the long and hard nature of building up SEO for a website, some developers may feel the temptation to cheat a little. Sure, a shortcut here and there may be forgivable, but a few SEO tricks may not only just backfire on you–they can get you into legal hot water. Below is a list of SEO tactics that we suggest you never try.
1. Hidden Text
Sometimes, an SEO consultant or developer may put a list of target keywords in the same font color as the background color. This invisibility cloak does not fool search engine spiders. It will be viewed as spam and will not help you in SEO endeavors.
2. Microscopic Text
The same goes for text that appears in tiny point 1 font sizes. Those same finicky search engine spiders will ignore text in super-small sizes. The whole point for search engine indexing is to place worthwhile content at the top of the search engine result pages. Who on earth would want to read a website that is filled with invisible or hard to read text?
3. Keywords in Comment Tags
Remember our post about the nofollow tag? Well, search engines do not index comment tags as well, so there is no point in packing them with target keywords. You’re better off writing meaningful blog posts and comments in order to drive traffic to your site.
4. Pagejacking
Pagejacking is essentially copying someone else’s content and submitting it as your own on your website. It may be tempting to do this with winning content that ranks highly in search engine results, but this is one practice that will definitely get you into trouble. It counts as copyright violation, and you can expect to hear from someone’s lawyer if you’re not too careful.
5. Cloaking
Now, here is a practice that might actually work, unlike gimmicky keywords in hidden text or duplicating content. However, it is a highly controversial SEO technique. Cloaking is when you submit search engine optimized pages to SEO spiders, while serving web users with content-worthy pages. This way, you do not have to worry about creating content that is both optimized for search engines and appealing to readers. This method does bring a bit of success to some websites, but we urge you to caution for a couple of reasons.
For one, all the big league search engines have declared these types of pages to be spam. Officially, you shouldn’t be doing this as it is slightly dishonest and goes against the search engines’ attempts to bring web users with qualified content. But more importantly, a search engine may come up with an algorithm or device that will successfully weed out the websites that use this process. And then from there you would have to start all over again.
In conclusion, it is best to go in for the long haul and generate content and tags that are pertinent to your subject or interest. Although SEO typically takes a while before reaping rewards, it remains one of the best ways to reach out to new consumers.
Before the close of this month, we at Visible Shops would like to impart another great guideline for link building. As you may remember, PageRank is Google’s ultra-important algorithm for determining a website’s placement in search engine results. High-quality inbound links have the largest influence on PageRank.
One type of website that you should definitely have link to you is the directory. Online directories do not get a lot of web traffic, but Google’s PageRank loves them. Why? Because they are monitored and controlled by human users, and they are exceptionally organized by systematic categories. For these reasons, directories are regarded as relatively trustworthy and dependable for determining a website’s relevance for certain categories.
Make sure to submit your website to popular directories, like Yahoo’s. You may not necessarily receive numerous visits from these sites, but receiving inbound links from them will help you out in the SEO department.
