Saturday, December 20, 2008

SEO Spam – An Unethical Practice

Spamming is a technique or trick played on the search engines by using deceptive means to gain a higher ranking in the search engine page results. It is used by inferior websites to inflate artificially the relevancy and value of the site. Webmasters often promise their clients of superior rankings and try to find loopholes they can exploit to achieve their target. It should be remembered that Google does not like their results to be manipulated by using deceptive means. It raises a red flag against any techniques that it finds unethical or misleading.

Emails are the most preferred choice of communication for many people today. But it is often annoying to receive a lot of unsolicited spam mails every morning. These emails crowd your connection and can even corrupt your server and computer. You should never respond to them as the sender will get more information about you. Spam emails are always illegal and unwanted. The spammers are actually criminals who abuse emails to earn their own profits. So what can you do to get rid of such mails?
Know the Importance of Installing a Spam Filter

It is always better to protect your computer from any such unwanted data. Using the latest version of spam filter can block email spam from creating any damage but spammers today are getting more ingenious day by day and are trying all the alternative means to penetrate even the latest filtering software. Checking the performance of the anti spam software can ensure your transactions to a certain extent, so it is a better option to introduce an internet hosted filtering solution. Spam filters will prevent the spam from reaching your mailbox and it will leave your internet connection free of traffic generated by these spams. It will also spare the major havoc caused to your system by these intrusive computer viruses. Spam prevention is always better than restoring the damaged system and a business. This will further ensure the immunity of your system from sophisticated viruses and even protect your server.

Webmasters should always follow certain guidelines so that Google does not consider the email as a spam. The rules are as follows:

• Doorway pages just created for search engines
• Pages that are loaded with irrelevant keywords
• Hidden links or hidden text
• Multiple domains, sub-domains and pages containing the same or duplicate content
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects
It is better to avoid using such practices as the search engines are not answerable to anyone. If your email or content is considered as a spam by the search engines then it is probably of no use.

How to Make the Best Use of Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is considered to be very lucrative if you are clear about your target group and your business requirements. You have to know the proper methods of using forums if you are keenly interested for promoting your affiliate products. For the beginners, it is important to sign up for an account at the forum. Usually forum accounts are free and to gain the confidence of the readers you have to introduce yourself properly, before trying to promote anything.

Forum offers the most eccentric platform for exploiting your writing skills as well as other skills like discussing important issues. If you are creative you can make a good start by contributing new threads in forums. The forum should be appealing and convincing and the language should impress the readers. Forum marketing should be done very carefully as any posts that are obvious advertisements are considered as spam. Never promote the products in your post although you are allowed to post about topics that are related to your product.

Forum advertising helps you to get more traffic to your website and here are certain steps that you can follow to be successful:

• Introduce Yourself
Forums have a space where you can introduce yourself and invite the readers. Don’t discuss anything related to your business at the beginning as people may not take interest in it. Be innovative and draw the attention of the readers through interesting posts and then slowly introduce them to your products.

• Write Quality Posts
The posts that you have written are displayed whenever your profile is shown in the forum. Writing any posts won’t work as you have to maintain the quality and add new materials to it. If you want to increase your post number, write threads that are not related to your business.

• Follow the Rules
You may get banned if you don’t obey the forum rules and this will have a negative effect. People will ignore you as you are not doing the things right. This will decrease the visits to your website.

• Endorse your Website
After writing quality posts when you have built trust, people will be willing to know more about you and your work. You can offer them incentives to sign up and slowly get them introduced to your services. Forum can thus be defined as a web application intended to hold discussion and post on certain topics.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) - the First Impression is the Last Impression

It has taken many years to mould and craft search engine optimization for websites into an art, with companies depending on its strategies to considerably increase the performance of ranking on organic search listing. The power of SEO is astounding but did you ever realize the power of Social Media Optimization (SMO)? Let’s go through this piece of writing and get a clear concept of the tactics of SMO.

SMO involves certain changes in order to optimize a site so as to make it more linkable and more visible in social media search engines and be frequently included in relevant blogs, podcasts, wikis etc. One thing may strike your mind; does your site really contain something in it to create a rich ground for SMO? Just because it is still in a budding stage, benefits and uses are discovered everyday. The target of SMO is to promote a site and to ensure quality traffic from prospective clients. The right link attracts the right audience like a magnet and for a new born company getting to the front page of Digg can offer immediate visibility and credibility.

The Rules of SMO

• Increases link ability of a site.
• Encourages inbound links.
• Let others use your content.
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy.
• Portable content.
• Be a resource user.
• Reward valuable and helpful users.
• Spread the message by participation.
• Don’t fake.
• Know the kind of content that will work for you.
• Know how to appeal to your audience.
• Try creative ideas and remain fresh.
• Don’t be carried away, be modest.

Most Popular Sites for SMO

• Digg: Members of this site can vote, bury and even comment on stories that are submitted by others. A position in the front page often generates huge traffic to your site and the effects are long lasting. Create unique titles for your stories and implant the ‘Digg This’ button so that users can easily submit their content.

• Del.icio.us: It is a Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site and users might click through when they find the bookmarks in the search engine rankings.

• You Tube: Popular video upload site. The sites that bring traffic to You Tube get a link back from the sites. Leaving aside Google, it might help you to get a rank in other search engines.

• Stumble upon: It helps to match the web sites of your interests based on the videos, images etc.

• Newsvine: It is a social news site where members can submit stories and create connections with regular users

Know the Secrets of Getting a Higher Page Rank

Page rank is a score or a numeric value that defines the importance of a page on the web. It is a method used by Google to determine the rank of a page in the search result. The higher the number of votes cast for the page the more important a page is. It is a tool that judges the quality and effectiveness of a site based upon the number of quality back links. Websites with a higher page rank appears on top of the SERPs and a higher page rank is important and desirable for all sites.
Page rank depends uniquely on the democratic nature of a site and it is the link building structure that acts as an indicator for a particular page. Google uses a mathematical formula to calculate the page rank of a website. The method is kept as a secret in order to avoid manipulation, spamming and spoofing, because everybody wants their sites to attain a higher rank in the SERPs. The ranking totally depends upon the quantity of inbound links and upon the ranking of the pages providing the links. Google records that if one page links to another page, an effective vote is casted for the other page. These votes casted are of great importance to the page and helps to secure a good rank effectively.

Does it Take a Long Time to get a Page Rank
This is the most common question asked by the website owners. Page rank is calculated on how relevant the web page is and on the quality and quantity of the inbound links and outbound links. Google assigns scores ranging from 0 to 10. The page rank of a site can be easily tracked by downloading the Google toolbar. The purpose of it is to indicate the relative importance of the site. 0 is very bad and 10 is exceptionally good. Initially you may not score a high ranking but with continual effort of link building, a good position can be acquired. It may take a long time, nearly three months before your efforts make any difference. Google only updates the database once in three months, so be patient and take the opportunity of learning from the mistakes you have made earlier.

The Flaws in Page Rank
We cannot say that the page ranking system is a flawless method of ranking a website. There are certain loopholes and people have come to know about them. They try to manipulate the data and try to attain a higher ranking. Link Framing is such an attempt of controlling a page rank. Here links are created with irrelevant pages and it is often automated. These collections of random links are a bad concept as Google uses filters to find if the content is a spam.