Archive for the ‘Ethical SEO’ Category

What Everyone Should Know about #SEO #Marketing Bots

Monday, October 25th, 2010
SEO bots can be both helpful and hurtful in the work of search engine marketing. Photo courtesy of Bouncehouse Marketing.

SEO bots can be both helpful and hurtful in the work of search engine marketing. Photo courtesy of Bouncehouse Marketing.

In the world of SEO marketing there are various (ro)bots used to perform tasks like crawl Websites, check search rankings, automate social media and more. In some cases these bots are good tools that help gain faster access to information. However, some bots are used to steal content, toy with PPC ad campaigns and more. These bots can end up costing the business owners lots of money. Here are 6 SEO marketing bots and what you need to know about them.

Website Scrapers: These bots find and download text or images from a Web site. They can save marketing administrators time; however, scraping is usually associated with taking someone else’s content and using it as your own, a big no-no.

Website Crawlers: These bots are sent by search engines to index content from your Web site. This is what helps rank your Web site in the search engine. Once this bot crawls your site you’ll be able to get a higher search engine page ranking. However, in order to make sure your site is search-engine friendly, you need to learn how this bot works, which can be difficult.

Twitter Bots: These bots automatically follow, un-follow, retweet and more. They can help you gain followers quickly and without effort. However, if your followers realize they are following a bot, they’ll most likely unfollow and your company’s reputation can be tarnished. Also if you use bots too often and Twitter catches on, you could be banned from the Web site.

Facebook Bots: These bots can friend people, message, post on walls and more. They can build your friend/fan base quickly as well as update your status, however, excessive use can get you banned from Facebook.

PPC Bots: These dangerous bots can click on your competitor’s PPC ad, influence bounce rates and skew with Adwords accounts. PPC bots are unethical and using them will put you and your site at risk for the Google blacklist, which is somewhere you don’t want to be.

Comment Spam Bots: These bots post spam comments on blogs and forums in order to build links. Using comment spam bots is another way to get your site banned from Google and other search engines.

Although some SEO bots can be good, like search engine bots, many are used for spamming and other unethical marketing techniques that can end up getting your site banned from the top search engines, which is definitely bad for business.

Ethical SEO IS Not To Blame For Poor Sales

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Ethical SEO is never the cause for poor sales

Ethical SEO is never the cause for poor sales

You are still waiting for your SEO strategies to convert your traffic into customers. Now, this doesn’t mean you should turn to the dark side of SEO and start keyword stuffing, link spamming, creating hidden text and you certainly don’t want to steal content from popular sites to create a scraper site. While these black hat SEO techniques may increase your Web site traffic, they will not convert your traffic into customers, but they will certainly get your Web site banned by search engines. So you need to stick with ethical SEO practices because poor sales are not the result of SEO.

Here are a few examples of practical ethical SEO strategies that could improve those poor sales:

Web site Design: Your Web site may not have initially been designed for SEO and that’s why it took you so long to optimize it, but is it user-friendly? Is it hard to navigate the Web site? Is it loaded with fuzzy images, horrid text coloring and annoying flash videos? Remember that flash videos and vivid images can make a site attractive, but it is more important that the site is useful to the consumer to find out about your company and its products and services. Make sure it easy for traffic to find out how to contact you, if this part is challenging then your traffic will be hitting the back button in no time.  While ethical SEO is important, creating a user-friendly site that users can easily use as a tool to access what they need or want, is crucial to keep them coming back and to converting them into loyal consumers.

Content: Performing ethical SEO techniques and user-friendly site design will attract search bots and people to your site, but if you aren’t saying much or anything at all on your site that could be a problem when it comes to converting traffic to consumers. If you post useful content on your company site it will boost your company’s credibility and appeal. Good content will also increase your site’s search engine result ranking especially when other sites link to your site. So create content that helps people understand more about your company, products, services, industry and which keeps them in the loop on current events that involve your company. It is also a good idea to create a company blog to establish two way communication between you and your site visitors. If you are really creative, you can use your company blog for public relations, marketing, advertising and market research; now, doesn’t that sound appealing?

Products: This may be the hardest part for some business owners to analyze, but it is essential. No matter how useful your Web site is and the ethical SEO techniques you used, if your products or services are not attractive to people then you will not convert them into consumers. Make sure your products or services are not yesterday’s fad by performing proper research on today’s market.

To read the full article about this topic please visit Search Engine Optimization Journal.

What Does the Yahoo/Microsoft Deal Mean for Search Engine Optimization?

Friday, August 7th, 2009

2508933484_6b4e6e189c_m How will the deal between the two giant technology companies change SEO strategies? What will stay the same? If you’ve been puzzled over the repercussions of Yahoo/Microsoft deal–don’t worry–we’ve put together a Squidoo guide that answers the most pressing questions. Don’t get tripped up by the latest major changes to the search marketing landscape. Keep up with the latest info at our Squidoo lens page. Then let us know what you think about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal on our Squidoo guestbook.