Internet Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Blog

Are you sure that your website is free of hidden text? There are many ways to create hidden text unintentionally. By checking your web pages, you make sure that you won’t be penalized for something you did not intend to do.

Why is hidden text a problem?

Google doesn’t like hidden text and hidden links at all. Here’s the official text from Google’s guidelines:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. […]

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans. […]

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.

How can you hide text on your web pages?

There are many methods that allow you to hide text on your web pages:

• using white text on a white background
• including text behind an image
• using CSS to hide text
• setting the font size to 0 or a negative value

If you wittingly use some of these methods on your web pages, you should make sure that you remove them as soon as possible.

Are you sure that you don’t use hidden text unintentionally?

There are a few legitimate reasons to hide text on a web page. For example, you could use CSS to replace a text link with a more pretty graphical button.

Many content management systems (CMS) use the CSS display:none technique to create drop-down menus or other expandable web page elements. Although these elements are not designed to mislead web surfers, search engines might interpret the hidden texts as a spamming attempt.

Another way to create hidden text is to provide enhancements for visually impaired people. If a lot of text on your website can only be seen by screen reader software and not by regular web surfers then some search engines might misinterpret this as spamming.

How can Google discover hidden text on your web pages?

It’s relatively easy for Google to find out if your website contains hidden text. However, it’s difficult to find out whether a page uses hidden text for legitimate reasons or not.

Google’s spam filters might be applied to your website if the following happens:

• The hidden content contains keywords that are unrelated to the rest of your content.
• The hidden text contains too many keywords. If a large part of your web page content is hidden, your website might look suspicious.
• You overuse “legitimate” ways to hide text on your web pages. This might flag your site for a human review.
• One of your competitors reports your site to Google because he detected spam techniques on your site.

Google won’t ban your site if you use hidden text in a way that appears to be legitimate. They try to detect intent. Don’t try to cheat search engines. If you use ethical search engine optimization methods then you don’t risk getting banned from the search results.

Warren Houston
http://www.NetConneXion.com

If you want to get high rankings on search engines then you have to consider many different factors.

On-page factors and off-page factors

Regarding on-page factors, the content of your web pages is important, the position of your keywords in your web page elements is important, the keyword density matters and much more.

When it comes to off-page factors, the number of the links that point to your website is very important. It’s also important that the the links to your website contain your keywords and that the links are from related websites.

All of these factors are important. However, there is another factor that is even more important than the other ones. That single factor will determine whether your search engine optimization activities will be successful or not.

A single factor is more important than all other factors

You might have lots of inbound links with the anchor text “my great product” and your web page might be perfectly optimized for the keyword “my great product”.

You might even be number 1 on Google for the keyword “my great product”: if the wrong people or too few people search for that keyword then your SEO efforts will be in vain. The most important factor that decides whether you succeed or not are the keywords that you choose for promoting your website.

If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll waste a lot of time, energy and money.

Don’t think that you already know the answer

Many webmasters think that they already know the best keyword for their websites. If they haven’t done some research, they are usually wrong. There are several reasons for that:

• You know your business much better than anybody else. You know the special terms that are used in your branch and you know what you should search for when you’re looking for products like yours.Your customers don’t know as much as you. They don’t know your terminology and they might use totally different keywords. 
• Did you consider the intention of the searcher? Just because a keyword is used very often on search engines it doesn’t mean that you’ll get many customers. People who find your website through a special keyword might not be interested in purchasing.

It’s very important that you take some time to find the best keywords for your website. The time and efforts that you invest in finding the right keywords will pay back in no time.

Warren Houston
http://www.NetConneXion.com

High search engine rankings are important if you want to get more customers and more sales. Is it important to be listed on the first result page or is it enough to be listed in the top 30 results?

If you want to get visitors, you must be listed in the top 30 results

A study about this topic was released last year:

“Key among the findings relating to the current search engine user community is that 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, and a full 90% of search engine users click on a result within the first three pages of search results. […]

Fewer search engine users are willing to click on results past the third page now (10%).”

It’s time to act now

The study confirms the importance of being listed on the first result page. If your web site is not listed on the first result page, changes are that web surfers won’t see your site.

Many webmasters still believe that they can get top 10 rankings just by submitting their websites to search engines.

This might have been true several years ago but now you have to do a little bit more to get high rankings.

How to get listed on the first three result pages on Google

1. Start by choosing the right keywords. This is very important.

It makes no sense to target general keywords such as “business” because you have no chance of getting the number 1 listing for such a keyword. In addition, general keywords usually don’t convert to sales.

The best keywords have little competition and a high conversion rate. Use this keyword analysis research tool to find these keywords.

2. Create a content rich web site that can be optimized for many different keyword combinations.

The more different web pages you have the more likely it is that search engines will list your web site on the first position for a keyword and that web surfers will find your web site relevant to their needs.

3. Get inbound links to your web site. High search engine rankings are the result of optimized web page content and good inbound links. If you want to have rankings, your web site must have both.

Top 30 search engine rankings will bring your website more visitors and more sales if you target the right keywords. Find detailed information on how to get top 10 rankings on major search engines.

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com
Search Engine Marketing Toronto

Many webmasters are unsure whether they should advertise their website with SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click advertising).

Actually, most commercial websites work best if you use both SEO and PPC. The exact mix depends on your goals.

Pay per click advertising (PPC)

Advantages:

• You get instant results. If you advertise your website on pay per click search engines, then you will get traffic now and not several months later.
• PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales.
• You can stop PPC ads at any time.
• PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing pages.
• PPC ads also work with websites that are not very well designed and wouldn’t get good search engine rankings.
• PPC ads allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords, including misspellings and other keyword variations that you cannot put on your web pages.

Disadvantages:

• PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don’t calculate the maximum bid price correctly.
• Click fraud can be a problem. Not all clickers are potential customers.

If you advertise your website with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads then you should use a ROI tracking tool to make sure that you don’t waste your money.

Search engine optimization (SEO):

Advantages:

• Traffic through organic search engine results is almost free if the up-front work has been done.
• After optimizing your website you can use your money for different things and the optimized site will still run.
• A larger number of visitors and search result clickers is not a problem.
• Search engine optimization delivers long term results that don’t require permanent financial input.

Disadvantages:

• SEO can be relatively time-consuming up-front.
• SEO can require a redesign of your web pages to make your website search engine friendly. However, this usually also results in a better user experience.

Search engine optimization, delivers lasting results and it costs considerably less in the long term. However, you must make sure that you optimize your website correctly, if your want to get high search engine rankings.

Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization both contribute to the success of your website. If you use both wisely, you can get many new visitors and customers without spending a fortune. 

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com
Search Engine Optimization Toronto
Pay Per Click Toronto

A simple but POWERFUL tip for getting better CTR’s from your Pay-Per-Click ads.

Notice the two ads below, they are identical except for one word:

Easy Self Defense  (0.8% CTR)
Simple Self Defense  (1.3% CTR)

It’s amazing how much difference one word can make, isn’t it?

I have a fun little theory about why “Simple” worked better than “Easy”:

Sometimes - and you’ll need to check this before you laugh at me - the RHYTHM of the copy in your ad can make all the difference. It’s true. Ads that roll more naturally off
the tongue will often be more effective in bringing in clicks.

“Simple Self Defense” has a rythmic quality that “Easy Self Defense” doesn’t have.

Often capitalizing the first letter of each word in your ad can make it more readable, and more impactful. And believe or not, even capitalizing key letters in your URL can draw in
more traffic.

www.yourwebsite.com vs. www.YourWebSite.com

Now… here’s the simplest working formula I’ve found for arranging the content of your AdWords ads:

First line:  The keywords you’re bidding on, preferably an action-invoking statement

(”Simple Self Defense”)

Second line:  A benefit

(”Fast Personal Protection Training”)

Third line:  A feature

(”For Ordinary People”)

Don’t forget to check out http://www.netconnexion.com for your search engine marketing needs!

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com

There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

What are one-way links?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn’t link back to your website then it’s a one-way link from your site to their site.

What are reciprocal links?

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you.

That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.

What are three-way links?

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don’t help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That’s why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other.

It’s important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won’t count much. However, that’s also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.

It doesn’t matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won’t.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get web links from web pages that have something to do with your site.

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com

Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest spamming techniques on the Internet. Many webmasters still use that technique although most search engines can detect it nowadays.

Last week, Google’s anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts made fun of a website that used keyword stuffing. Apart from the rather dubious content of the web page, the webmaster included a very long list of related and unrelated keywords in a small text box at the end of the page.

Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing

“Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.” (Wikipedia definition)

Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing at all. If Google detects keyword stuffing on a web page, that page will be banned from Google’s index. Google’s Matt Cutts puts it that way:

“Webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action on keyword stuffing.”

You might use keyword stuffing on your web pages without knowing it

While most keyword stuffing is done intentional, it can also happen that your web pages trigger Google’s spam filters although you didn’t want to spam.

For example, if you have very similar keywords that are used often on your web pages, this might look like keyword stuffing.

How to avoid unintentional keyword stuffing

If you’re unsure if you use a certain keyword too often on a web page then use NetConneXion’s optimizer tool. The optimizer tool will analyze your web pages and compare it to the web pages that currently have a top 10 ranking for that keyword.

NetConneXion will tell you in plain English sentences how often you should use your keywords on your web page so that your site can get top 10 rankings. NetConneXion will also tell you in which web page elements you should put the keywords (and how often) so that you get the best results.

Spamming search engines is not a good idea. Although most spam techniques will work for some time, all of them will get your website banned sooner or later. Better focus on ethical search engine optimization methods to get lasting results.

Warren Houston
http://www.netconnexion.com