As search engine optimization has grown more popular, so has the use of unethical search engine optimization. What are these “black hat” techniques? Why are they so bad? Better yet, what can you, as a web site owner, do to legitimately increase your search engine ranking with a blog or other website?

So what are “Black Hat” techniques?

“Black Hat” techniques are unethical techniques that some site owners use to get their site listed on search engines. Here is a list of three common “Black Hat” techniques
you should avoid if you want to please search engine spiders.

1. Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords in a piece of content. Generally, this is repeating the same keywords over and over just to achieve a higher search engine ranking.
2. Invisible text. Quite a few cheap sites use this tactic, which involves making keywords in a font that is the same color as the background, so that readers can’t see the massive amounts of keywords, but search engine spiders can.
3. Doorway pages. These are pages that regular visitors cannot see, but search engine spiders can. They are done to trick the search engines so that the site gets a higher ranking.

Why are “Black Hat” techniques bad?

They’re bad because they go against the rules set forth by
search engines.

Do “Black Hat” techniques work?

These techniques only work temporarily. Eventually the search engine spiders catch on and your site is permanently banned from being listed.

Fortunately, there are multiple techniques that you can use to get your site legitimately listed high on search engines.

Keywords

Natural use of keywords is perfectly fine. By natural, we mean keywords that are spread throughout a document in a way that isn’t blatant.

You should take a few minutes to identify some keywords that are relevant to your site. Then, begin to write the content. Try to incorporate the keywords you have picked out in a natural way throughout the content.

Ideally, if your content is 600 words, you’ll want to
use the main keyword between 6-18 times, which is a keyword density of 1-3%(keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total words of a document).

Linking

Linking is a very common practice between web sites. How do you do it? Well, you ask a site that is relevant to yours to post a link to your site on their site.

How does this help your listing? Well, each time a search engine spider visits a page with a link to your site on it, the spider will then visit your site.

There are countless methods that you can use to generate fresh traffic to your blogs. Before we begin however, you should understand what RSS means and how important it is when generating traffic to your blog.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of delivering content on a regular basis to news sites, online publishers, and other blogs.

Bloggers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed that is made available to anyone interested in becoming a subscriber.

The more subscribers you have, the more people are reading your updates and visiting your website.

The great thing about RSS is that you do not have to create it manually, it’s built into the WordPress system, and each time you create a blog post it will be added to your RSS feed.

However, In order to offer your visitors the ability to subscribe to your RSS feed, you will want to subscribe to a free service such as http://www.FeedBurner.com

Feedburner, owned and managed by Google.com, is one of the most popular methods of serving up your RSS feeds through visitor subscriptions.

In addition, Feedburner provides additional information including stats relating to your blog. You can just log into your Feedburner account and look at your stats and charts.

If you manage multiple blogs, you can create and track feeds for all of them with FeedBurner.

Feedburner also makes it extremely easy to encourage your visitors to become RSS subscribers by offering you a piece of code that once inserted into your blog, will offer a RSS subscription box, enabling your visitors to instantly subscribe to your feed.

Once you have created your Feedburner account, you will want to locate the code that allows your readers to use your new Feedburner feed.

You can do this by using the Feedburner plugin available to WordPress users running self hosted blogs.

http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483

Or you can add it to your sidebar manually, by copy and pasting your Feedburner code into your blogs sidebar.php page to make it available to everyone who visits your blog.

WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.

The Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. So people browsing sites like Technorati can find your most recent posts.

When you look at the pinging services your blog may state that it has failed . You need a list of ping services rather than just one because of this .

WordPress comes with the pingomatic service listed under options within WP itself. An alternative is FeedShark which pings some 60 services free.

Title Tags

Modifying wordpress title tags within the pages that you will create directly affects the SEO of your entire wordpress blog.

To ensure that these are set up correctly you will need to modify the header.php page associated with the current wordpress theme you are using.

Note: Some of the newer wordpress themes are already optimized for SEO, however it’s important to check to ensure that they are before you begin to use the theme.

To do this, click on DESIGN and then click on Theme Editor.

You will see a listing of files associated with your current theme. Look for the one titled “header.php” and click on it to load the code into the editing window.

In order to edit any pages of your theme, you will have to change the permissions of the file by logging into your FTP, clicking on the header.php page and setting the permissions to 777, so it can be writeable (changed).

Once you have made the changes, you can set the permissions back to their default settings.

Within this header.php file, you want to replace the code that is contained within the tag with the following:

elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: ";
echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?>

Like I mentioned previously, check the current page before modifying it as it may already be optimized this way.

Click “Save” to apply your changes.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you are entering in titles for your blog posts and pages.

Google only shows the first 70 characters of your title within search results, so be sure to include your most important keywords within each title, stripping away any clutter.

You should also focus on using different page titles for each post, and avoid using the same keyword at the start of every page title as well to optimise the wordpress seo results.

Mix it up and be creative with your titles while remaining consistent and taking measures to ensure that each of your titles directly describes the content of each particular page.

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

You can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings depending on your competition. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To potentially increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords.. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

Website content

Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather thangreat graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into Google to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a good ranking  text is essential. However, the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

Next we come to what is called META tags. Many people believe that META tags are the key to a high ranking. It’s worth adding them in the event that a Search Engine will use META tags in their ranking formula.

To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are META tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a META tag would read: META name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in.

Search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in “free link popularity check” in an engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to you. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours,  consider launching a link popularity campaign.

Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine ranking has a limit in the traditional sense because of the developing web social media sites out there or web 2.0 as some internet marketers call it. That is another reason in my mind for you to have and develop your own blog. The new positioning is that of visitor interaction or Visitor Optimization Experience. Think VEO rather than traditonal SEO alone in your website traffic marketing.

Phew! Another BIG day of surfing the Internet looking for new info about website traffic marketing AND I found this awesome article I just had to share with you!

Check it out below, I’m sure you’ll find it really interesting.

Make sure you come back and click on the link at the end of the sentence if you’re still interested in more info about website traffic marketing.

What do we mean by human factor? It is the power of individual persons to influence the popularity of a website through word of mouth, independent reviews, and voluntary, unreciprocated linking to a website. Nothing can replace the opinions of human beings like yourself who think a website is good or bad. This is why “content is king,” as they say. People judge a site by the quality of its content, whether that content happens to be text, graphics, audio or video.

Now the other website traffic marketing methods cited earlier in this article can get you people’s attention. But there are more direct ways. And given the vastness of the Internet and the unlimited number of choices your audience has when looking for information, you want your contact with other people to be as direct, solid and up-to-date as possible.

A good way to cement this kind of relationship is through forums. By participating in discussion boards related to your website’s topic, you meet people who share your interests and make your expertise known. You can give advice to other members, share your work, and engage in intelligent talks with them. As time goes on, you earn a name for yourself in your circle. People will hear about your website and go there because they have seen you “in action” in the forums.

Aside from this, you will also make good friends who share a genuine love for what you do. You can help others who are less knowledgeable than you, which is always a good thing. In the long run, you stand to gain many loyal “followers” for your website.

This kind of website traffic marketing is not the fastest, nor is it the easiest. But it can be the most effective and rewarding. Especially if you’re working on a topic that has a fairly exclusive audience. Any traffic you get from this method is sure to be targeted. You won’t get a lot of “random” hits from people who either have no clear idea of what they want, or are just surfing around.

You will make a name for yourself among your peers. While there is no guarantee you will make a lot of money (this depends largely on the marketability of your topic in the first place), it is a sure way to gain the attention of the type of crowd you want. Some day, if you decide to publish a book on Photoshop effects, sell a rare biography of yesterday’s rock star, or even join a reality TV show, you can be sure you’ll have a group watching out for it. You won’t have to start from scratch since your months, or even years of selfless work at the forums will have made a “fan base” for you already.

If you are looking to Increase Website Traffic I can show you a method that actually gets results. Yes, a lot of methods are totally useless. They may send you a bit of traffic. However, it is usually untargeted and does not convert.

You need conversions to make a profit. It is as simple as that. Get no conversions and you are wasting your time. If you are spending significant time trying to build your online business, you want to know the methods that actually get results. After all, who wants to spend hours a day trying to build your online business for pennies! I certainly don’t and so if you are in the same boat, then you must check out this method. I guarantee you it will bring you traffic, and not just any traffic but traffic that converts into dollars.

This article was written by: Gerry Walter

Good article, wasn’t it? I knew you’d like it. Check out the info here if you want to know EVEN more about website traffic marketing.

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Photo Credit: dannysullivan

Trying to run your own blog is like trying to run uphill on a windy day in France.  No one seems to speak your language anymore, and even if you did find someone who understands, you are too breathless to speak.  It was supposed to be about expressing yourself, but instead you find that you are putting the majority of your energy into generating website traffic.  Marketing is a fact of life for any business, but it seems especially cruel and twisted when you realize that you started your blog because you wanted to be creative and spontaneous.  There are solutions available, however.  If you are committed to making your blog a success, then you need to read on.

To have a good blog requires a lot of website traffic.  Marketing alone can only do so much when it is undertaken by a single person with limited income.  You owe it to yourself to take advantage of the best tools available for web success.  To start getting some of that advertising money that is being pumped onto the Internet, you first have to spend some time and thought on developing a strategy that will get you the traffic you need.

The good news is that people like Jean-Philippe Schoeffel have developed tools for people just like you.  The suite of three programs offered by this developer are available at wp traffic dot com, and they can save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars.  The ability to publish is what makes a blog a blog, and JP has built a great program that simplifies this process.  Next in line is submitting your new posts to social bookmarking sites, and there is a program that has automated that entire process.  Lastly, you want the right kind of website traffic.  Marketing directly to your niche readers is the object of the third program.  See for yourself how much fun writing can become again!
Photo Credit: d70focus

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