Search Engine Marketing Australia - Free SEM Resource

What is “black hat” Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:27:55 +0000

“Black Hat” Search Engine Optimisation is any strategy that manipulates a web page for the purpose of giving it an artificial boost in the search engine rankings. Each of the major search engines provide specific guidelines describing what should and should not be done to web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking.

Some methods which are universally considered “black hat” technqiues, include hidden text, doorway pages, and mirror pages.

“Black Hat” SEO is also known as SEO spam.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:27:13 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the act of modifying a web site to improve its in the organic search results of search engines. Search Engine Optimisation techniques include: keyword optimisation, optimisation of web page attributes used by search engines (modifying the HTML and CSS code), removal of barriers to search engine crawlers, link campaigns and other link building tactics.

How do search engines find websites?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:26:49 +0000

Search engines use software known as “spiders” or “crawlers” to crawl the web on a regular basis to find websites to add to their indexes.

As it visits each page the spider creates a copy of the page for later indexing by the search engine.

Generally, a search engine crawler will start off with a list of known web pages to visit and then, as it visits each page, it will identify all of the links contained on this page and add these new pages to the list of pages to be crawled.

For more information, see “How do search engines find you?“

Do “alt tags” alternetive text, play a part in optimising a web page?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:26:01 +0000

HTML “Alt Tags” can be used in SEO in a couple of ways:

Re-enforcing keywords (placing keywords in the tag) – but be careful not to take this too far and be seen as “keyword stuffing”
By describing the image content or what the image depicts (which should be relevant to the sites messages and therefore keywords).

The Alt tags can be used by Google to place images in their Image Search results.

What is Search Engine Advertising?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:25:26 +0000

As well as unpaid (or organic) search results Search Engines show paid ads based on the search terms entered by a user. Advertisers pay a fee each time a user clicks through on the advertisement (i.e. pay per click).

This type of advertising is variously known as Search Engine Advertising, Pay Per Click advertising or Paid Placement.

How do Search Engines rank websites?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:24:54 +0000

When a user submits a search query to a search engine, there are potentially millions of pages on the web that satisfy the keywords specified. The search engine, therefore, has to have a mechanism for determining which of these pages are the most relevant to the user’s request.

Each of the major search engines have come up with their own algorithms for determining a page’s relevance to a particular query.

In general, these algorithms consider the following major factors in determining search results:

Keyword density, frequency & location
Link analysis

For more information, see “How do search engines place websites in their rankings?“

Which Search Engine should I use for my Search Engine Advertising campaigns?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:23:13 +0000

The Search Engine Advertising (SEA) market can effectively be split into the main player, Google (commanding the vast majority – 68% – of search traffic) and Yahoo, which holds around 25% market share. A number of smaller players make up ‘the rest’.

Choosing which Search Enginie to advertise with will be influenced by a company’s target audience. For instance, Google is predominately the player of choice for business-to-business marketing in Australia, whereas in consumer-orientated marketing, a company may choose to spread its advertising across Google and Yahoo (and, if budget permits, other minority players).

Ideally, a company would spread their Search Engine Advertising ‘bets’ over Google and Yahoo to test and determine where they get the most success. But this process is very expensive – establishing, monitoring and comparing campaigns operating within multiple search engines is a significant exercise beyond the resources of most SMEs.

How important are meta tags now?

L3admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:35:28 +0000

The “Description” meta tag and “keyword” meta tag were initially introduced to make using the web easier. Unfortunately, over the years these tags have been abused to the point where search engines have reduced their importance in their algorithms. Though meta keywords tag and meta description tags are not the main factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should still be included on each page of your site.