IMD405 - Assignment 2 Wk 9 Learning Journal

White Hat SEO Vs. Black Hat SEO... Whats Your Definition?

Author: Joseph Alvini Added: Dec 03, 2009


Okay so i was posed with a question today, by a colleague of mine on the age old debate of white hat vs. black hat SEO. While i will not get into my views on white hat vs. black hat i will say this "Its Common Sense". We are taught growing up the difference between right and wrong... But hold on this is not (at least for most people) a difference between right and wrong but a difference between getting caught and not getting caught. Hmm lets just take a minute to ponder that. We all know - buying links are wrong but how many BIG companies actually do it? Okay i know what the rebuttals would be on that one. You will say that any business must spend money to make money and what's the harm in spending that money on links. right?
Okay I will break this down to you in 4 short words "WE'RE IN GOOGLE'S WORLD".. Yes that's right google's world. This is they're playground. They set the rules. We cannot change them. Maybe we might feel that they are unfair at times. But that is just to bad. There is nothing we can do about it but try to work with it. OR we can try to find other ways to market. Google is not the only search engine out there and SEO is not the only way to promote your site.
Okay i apologize for deferring off topic but i really felt like you needed to hear that...
Back to the subject...
Wikipedia' definition of black hat SEO is as follows: Content spam.
These techniques involve altering the logical view that a search engine has over the page's contents. They all aim at variants of the vector space model for information retrieval on text collections.

Read more: www.webdesign.org

IMD405 - Assignment 2 Wk 8 Learning Journal

SEO Tools
(http://www.seotools.com/)

I found this website quick and easy to use.
The Domain reporting tool gives you PageRank and reports how many pages are indexed on Google, Yahoo and Bing and also provides a little graph of the indexed pages.

It has a cloaking Checker, The Ranking Checker is not working for some reason, a Hide Google Options add-on:

"This add-on lets you decide whether to show or hide Google options in the left-hand column of search results pages. Available for the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers."

They have a server response checker to make sure the spiders are hitting all the pages you want hit, an SEO/KSP tool which reports approximate keyword search traffic as derived from search-engine-provided statistics and they also have a toolbar you can install if you want it.

I found it useful.

IMD405 - Assignment 2 Wk 7 Learning Journal

How to turn Black hat SEO into a White hat approach

(taken from SearchEngineJournal.com)
The SEO industry has seen its share of horrendous grey and black hat approaches for many years. It is truly amazing to me that I still see these spammy approaches being implemented by so called white hat SEO firms. For those of you that don’t know what I am referring to when I say a black hat SEO, here is a link that contains some good information, here. Simply put, white hat SEO is “by the book” or closely following the webmaster guidelines of the major search engines. Black hat SEO is any technique that games or tricks the “system” or search engines to make ranking pages and generating visitors from organic search move faster.
My philosophy is and always has been white hat. I personally believe that is you are building business then it is always good to play it safe and stay white hat. Black hat is a different philosophy (that I do not agree with) but still none the less a different type of philosophy. Some great white hat SEO sources of information that I recommend are: Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, SEO Journal and Search Engine Guide.
SEO is a form of inbound marketing and it is important to stress “marketing” is a main ingredient. Search engine optimization is not about (or should not be about) tricks or the latest “thing” it is about creating good quality content, targeting the right relevant keywords for this well written content and driving relevant links to your website over time.
There are hundreds of black hat SEO techniques (many of which I did not cover in this blog post) but these are some of the black hat techniques that I have recently seen and how to change them over to a white hat SEO approach:

Read more . . .

IMD405 - Assignment 2 Wk 6 Learning Journal

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords
SEO Tip #2: Discover What Your Competitors are Doing
SEO Tip #3: Write Very Linkable & Sharable Content
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your Title and Meta Tags
SEO Tip #5: Optimizing Your Headings and Subheadings
SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes
SEO Tip #7: Optimizing File Nomenclatures
SEO Tip #8: Tell the Search Engines What to Index
SEO Tip #9: Feed Search Engines Static and XML Site Maps
SEO Tip #10: Use Checklists and Validators

Read more . . .

IMD405 - Assignment 2 Wk 5 Post 1 Learning Journal

[Email post from the Atlanta Web Design Group]
"SEO is about getting ranked higher, but the goal is getting more qualified traffic to your website (eg sales if you're an ecommerce site, readers if you're a blogger, etc...). There's no point in getting a higher rank, and more traffic, and bigger bandwidth bills, if it doesn't lead to more sales. The actual metrics that are used in measuring improvements in rankings aren't very clear cut, especially with regards to things like Google’s web search personalization. My main goal in SEO is to make the sites deepest pages easy to access (in as few clicks as possible) from the page with the most traffic, which on most sites is the FrontPage. Also the menu and sitemap are important in achieving that goal. In Google's original page rank paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, you'll see that they are generally modeling the way a user would surf the web. I think that generally holds true for other search engines as well. Basically make the search engines job easier. For example, they quickly index blog posts because it's easy for them to find your rss feed and then they only have to fetch the newest posts, and the older posts or other deep content gets updated on the next full site crawl. Also having an rss feed for all the newest comments on your blog and a feed for each post as well is the nice thing about wordpress. It kind of makes me wonder if there's some way for a traditional CMS to have some way of showing a search engine what information was changed or added in an article? But I guess that's what the new microformats (and possibly RDFa 1.1* ???) will do?
Sincerely,

Justin Goldberg"

IMD405 - Assignment 2 Wk 3 Post 1 Learning Journal

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

For the other tips check out (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/ )

IMD405 - Assignment 5 - Research Presentation

Assignment 5 - Research Presentation