This is a follow up post to Confusing search engine marketing and SEO jargon made simple (A-F), where we hope to help demystify the world of search engine marketing.

Gateway pages – A website or web-page that exists to attract search engine traffic and re-direct it through to another site. Gateway pages (also known as doorway pages) are an example of black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engine companies.

Googlebot – The name given to the spider used by Google to crawl over, and index, web pages.
 
Google dance – The changes seen in Google results, often around the time of a change to the algorithm or update to the index. The Google dance is something all SEO professionals will be familiar with and is often a time of great stress as rankings can shoot up and down quite dramatically.

HTML - Stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the programming language in which web pages on the internet are written.
 
Hub – A web page respected as having expert content, that links out to other sites of the same subject.
 
Inbound link – Hyperlinks coming into your website from others are inbound links. Important to search engine optimisation, as the more inbound links a website has from relevant, good quality sites, the more likely it is to rank highly and increase search traffic share.
 
Keyword – The word or phrase that a user submits into a search engine query.
 
Landing page – The first page a person lands on after clicking on a Pay Per Click advert or search engine listing.
 
Link bait – Content that has been created to attract in-bound links from other sites. Common types of link bait include informative articles, videos, audio, downloads, blog posts.
 
Link farm – A group of websites which exchange links between one another. Link farming is an example of black hat SEO and if discovered, can lead to a website being penalised by the search engines.
 
Long-tail – A more targeted search made using a number of words. Whilst a broad search might be “Mercedes coupe”, a long-tail example would be “Used black Mercedes CL500 coupe”. The amount of people using long-tail searches to find information is growing, so website owners need to be aware of both the broad and long-tail keywords used in their market.
 
META data – Information held within the HTML make-up of web-pages that describe to search engines what that page is about. The META title and META descriptions need to be written well as these are displayed to users within the search engine results, and should contain keywords the page is targeting (as should the META keywords list, obviously). META data are also often referred to as META Tags.
 
Monetisation – The process of turning a normal website into an income producing one. Placing adverts or becoming an affiliate are two of the most popular ways.
 
Natural listings – The web pages displayed on the left hand side of the search engine which are not labelled as “sponsored listings”. Search Engine Optimisation is the technique used to bring websites higher up in the natural search listings.
 
Nofollow – An instruction that can be placed on a web-page that tells search engines not to follow the links from the page. Nofollow can also be applied to individual links.
 
Noindex – An instruction that can be placed on a web-page that tells search engines not to index that page.

I recently spoke at an event, teaching small business owners some of the basics of search engine marketing and optimisation. A few times I used basic industry terminology which created a sea of puzzled faces. Hopefully the following list of the more common terms will help clear up any confusion caused by SEO jargon.

Adwords – The name for Google’s Pay Per Click advertising system. Businesses that use Adwords will find their adverts displayed on the Google search results labelled as “sponsored listings”.

Affiliate – A person or business that doesn’t sell products or services, rather existing to send traffic to retail sites and take a commission or fee for any sales generated.

Alt text – A description given to an image on a webpage. Not often shown to users unless their browser cannot show graphics but important to search engine optimisation as search engines use these tags as a factor in determining keywords.

Anchor text – The blue, underlined text displayed for a hyperlink. Placing your keywords in anchor text of links pointing to your site has a positive impact on SEO.

Black hat SEO – Techniques used to trick and manipulate search engines into ranking a webpage. Examples include cloaking, gateway pages and keyword stuffing. Black hat SEO is frowned upon by search engines and can lead to a site being penalised or banned from search results.

Bounce rate – The number of visitors who leave a site without visiting any pages other than the one they land on. Shown in a percentage in website analytics tools, for the majority of sites the lower the bounce rate the better.

Canonization – Strangely, search engines see http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com as separate sites, which can lead to duplicate content penalties. Canonizing one of these URLs tells the search engines to only focus on one, and can lead to improved search engine rankings.

Cloaking – To cloak a website is to show one version to the visitors, and another to the search engines. Cloaking is an example of black-hat SEO and if discovered on your site, could lead to a falling out with the search engines.

Content Management System  (CMS) – The software that many websites come with which allows people to easily add to, and update, content such as text and images. Blogging systems are a good example of simple, user friendly CMS.

Conversion rate – The percentage of visitors who reach a goal. Conversion goals include signing up to a newsletter, making a purchase, filling in an enquiry form, clicking an advert, etc.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – The amount of money each click costs a Pay Per Click advertiser, which can range from a penny to over £10, depending on the competitiveness of the keyword.

Duplicate content – Content on a website that is a copy, or very similar, to content that search engines have found elsewhere. Web-pages containing duplicate content are less likely to outrank the originals in the search engines.

Ecommerce – Selling products online. Many of the most popular sites on the internet are ecommerce based. Some sell a wide range of products, like traditional department stores, while some stick to one or two specialist lines of product.

Free For All (FFA) – The name given to web pages that allow anyone to place links on them. These pages are not very well respected by the search engines as a lot of the links are low quality and point to spammy websites.

A follow-up post for terminology starting with letters G-N will be made soon.

Here are five tricks used by the more unscrupulous internet marketing firms. Swindles such as these have been going on since the dawn of the internet and while some of them are just a cheeky way of getting a few pounds out of your marketing budget, some of them could cost you thousands and potentially cause long-term harm to your website.

Each of these is a scam in use today and is one that businesses we deal with have been caught out on in the past. We are highlighting them here so that you can see the types of tricks that exist and can hopefully spot them before handing over your cash.

Scam #1 - “We’ll put you top of Google for 10 of your keywords for only £200 a month”

This is a pay per click scam that has become pretty popular over the past couple of years, with a number of businesses we know falling for it, to their later regret. On the face of it, the offer seems like a good one: A company calls you saying they will put your website in the sponsored listings on Google and guarantees that your site will appear on the first page for only £200 a month. What they don’t tell you is that the search terms are ones that are rarely used so are cheap to bid on. For example, if you were an IFA that works nationally then bidding on the keyword “pension advice” would be expensive, but bidding on “independent pension advice in South Wales” wouldn’t be. These pay per click companies will bid on keywords like the latter so that not that many clicks happen, and when they do, the cost is minimal. Out of the £200, you may only receive a few pounds worth of clicks, with the company pocketing the other £190 or so as a monthly management fee.

We have also seen one company that doesn’t stop there. They will charge you an additional £50 set-up fee which they say is mandatory as it’s charged by Google. Whilst it is true that Google does charge an Adwords set-up fee, it is actually only £5, and it gets refunded out of your first few clicks anyway.

How can you avoid this scam? If anyone cold calls you offering pay per click advertising then perhaps it’s better not to sign up over the phone. Instead, take their details, stick them into a search engine, and have a look to see if they are associated with this type of con. If it looks genuine then find out whether they let you bid on the more competitive keywords or whether they just let you choose from low level ones.

Scam #2 - “We’ll submit your site to hundreds of search engines for only £10”

One of the oldest online marketing scams and one of the most pointless. The first thing you should be aware of is that there are only three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and they take up over 95% of all search queries made in the UK. Submitting a website to any others is a worthless exercise.

The next thing you need to know is that submitting a site to a search engine can potentially do more harm than good. For a long time it has been widely accepted within the online marketing world that search engines prefer to find websites via inbound links. It is believed that search engines will sooner show a website they find on their own, via another website, than one they are force fed through a submission.

If you have a new site then to get indexed, all you need is one link from a website that is popular with the search engines and your site will start showing in results pages within a matter of days or weeks.

There is a variation on this scam where companies try to get on-going money out of you by offering to re-submit your site regularly. Even if the above wasn’t true then this additional service is a complete waste of time as once the search engines know your site exists and have crawled it, they place you within their database, something they don’t need to be asked to do over and over again.

Scam #3 - “We guarantee to get you #1 on Google”

No-one can promise you the first position on Google. There are hundreds of factors that search engines use to determine the search results, many of which aren’t known to people outside of Google. If someone is making guarantees then it is highly likely that one of two things are happening. They may be offering to optimise your site for keywords that are of a very low competition level (much as the pay per click scam, above), or, more worryingly, there may be something dodgy going on.

Black hat techniques, such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, are used by some SEO companies to trick search engines into ranking a website. Whilst these often work in the short term, they can actually damage your website in the long-term. When the search engines discover that these techniques have been used they can penalise, and even ban your website from the search results. Don’t think it can’t happen to you either, as BMW once had their website disappear from Google thanks to some black hat work, and if it can happen to a company of that size, then it can happen to anyone.

Scam #4 - “We will give you 1000 links for only £9.99”

Whilst inbound link building is an important part of search engine optimisation, the links do need to come from quality, relevant websites. Buying links in bulk, through companies that have automated link submission systems will never bring in links from good websites in relevant fields.

The links will most likely come from spammy directories that no person and no search engine is ever going to bother with. Not only will the links be completely worthless but they could highlight to the search engines that something dodgy is going on and pose harm to your existing rankings.

Scam #5 - “We will build you a high ranking sales page on our site”

Whilst micro sites and separate sales pages can work for businesses there is one fairly common trick that should be avoided. The company offers to build a one-off page, branded with your logo, optimised for your keywords, and hosted on their business directory site. This sounds good as there are no hosting or web development fees for you, but what it lacks is control. The page is a part of their site, not yours, so your monthly fee is paying them to work on improving the ranking of a website that doesn’t belong to you.

If you ever decide that you no longer want the page then you are left with nothing, and they are left with a valuable asset that they can easily sell to one of your competitors. If you decide that coming up high on the search engines is a goal for your business then it is probably wiser to work on improving your site rather than someone else’s.

While the main goal of search engine optimisation is undoubtedly to generate visitors from within a target market, one of the often overlooked side effects is the positive impact that a high ranking website can have on your company branding.
 
According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, a brand is “The set of physical attributes of a product or service, together with the beliefs and expectations surrounding it - a unique combination which the name or logo of the product or service should evoke in the mind of the audience”
 
Meaning that everything a business does contributes to the way a person views its brand and the connotations this has. Businesses are realising that being seen at the top of Google can have a very positive impact on the mindset of a surfer, and almost as if it is a vote of confidence, coming at the top of Google gives a company an instant authority.
 
If I search for “Nike running shoes” and Google, the biggest search engine (AND the search engine that I trust) thinks you are the best place to buy Nike running shoes then you must be doing something right. Even if I am already thinking of making a purchase elsewhere, seeing your site listed amongst the top results will leave an impression.
 
Not only are you more likely to take a share of the searches, but your brand will be seen by members of your target market and find itself placed into their memory. Just like traditional advertising often centring around advert repetition - trying to become memorable by presenting a message over and over again - search engine marketing can help in the same way. With constant appearances at the top of the search results for a whole range of keywords related to your industry, you should soon see a positive impact on not only your traffic, but also your perceived clout.
 
What should you do?
 
Often there may be nothing to do, as this is a by-product of having a well optimised, high ranking site. If however you want to make sure you get the maximum brand value that you can from the search engines there are a few things you could consider.
 
The first is your keywords. While you should already be targeting the terms that generate good enquiries/sales, what about the terms that will help improve your brand image? If a lot of people searched for “best shoe shop” or “environmentally friendly building supplier” then wouldn’t you want your shoe shop or DIY store to show here?
 
You could also address the call to action that people see in the search results. Your page title, meta description and URL should all contain your keywords but how about putting a message in there that meets your brand objectives? If you want to differentiate your company in a certain way then this may be how you reach those searchers that would be swayed by this characteristic.
 
Of course, the most important thing is to have the skills of experienced search engine optimisation professionals. All the branding benefit in the world will casually pass you by if your website fails to show at the top of Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If SEO isn’t your strong point then that’s where we step in…

Gift House International, an importer and supplier of wholesale giftware and gadgets, asked Liberty Marketing to help increase the traffic to its site.

The company already had a very well optimised website, but it wasn’t showing within the first 20 pages of Google for any of its main keywords.

After looking at competitor websites and the keywords used in the market it was decided that they needed more in-bound links to strengthen their placement within the search results.

The process involved a lot of off-site work, including:

Inbound link building – An intensive link building campaign was started and back links were sought from all relevant sites from within the gift and gadget industry.

Social media marketing – Activity included placing product videos on video hosting sites and commenting on industry forums and blogs with links pointing back to the site.

How has this helped the business?

Within six months the website had risen from page 20+ in the Google results to page one for all of its main keywords, including “wholesale gadgets” and “wholesale giftware”. These changes could also be seen in the Yahoo! and Bing search engines.

“Liberty Marketing helped us with keyword research and advised us on an online marketing strategy. They then built in-bound links for us over a 6 month period. Before the work started you couldn’t find our site in the top 100 results but now we are coming up on the first page of all the search engines for all of our chosen keywords. Our website is now receiving its highest ever level of traffic” - Marc Mitchell, Gift House International Ltd

Kingswood Associates, the property finance and commercial mortgage specialist, asked Liberty Marketing to improve the ranking of its newly launched site at the beginning of 2009.

We already had a working relationship with Kingswood, managing their Pay Per Click advertising and email marketing, and now were responsible for greatly increasing traffic from the natural search listings.

The process involved a lot of on-site and off-site work, including:

SEO consultancy – We provided keyword research to find the phrases that could be competed for, would bring in traffic and would fit in with the business objectives. We then worked with Kingswood to build an online marketing strategy based on the main keywords chosen.

SEO copywriting – Amendments were made to many pages and entirely new ones were created to give the site more strength in the search engines. Keywords now feature more prominently where needed on each page and within the site structure.

Inbound link building – An intensive, on-going link building campaign has been in place where the site is connected to relevant directories and websites. The link building service generates direct traffic as well as helps push the site up the search results.

How has this benefited the business?

Within a few months the company has gone from barely being found on the search engines to coming up on the first page of Google for many local terms such as “mortgages Cardiff”, “mortgage brokers Cardiff”   and “buy to let mortgages Cardiff” as well as some competitive national phrases such as “residential mortgage broker” (coming in the top 5 listings out of over 3 million results).

Having such a large presence on the search engines has led to thousands of new visitors coming to the site over the past few months, and new mortgage enquiries every day of the week.

There is now enough traffic that the Pay Per Click advertising spend has be greatly reduced, meaning that Kingswood is now enjoying high levels of traffic and enquiries but is actually spending far less money on marketing.

A piece of recent news from the online marketing world, which largely escaped the mainstream media, was the announced demise of GeoCities.

If you ever surfed the web in the late 90’s or early 00’s then you’ll be familiar with GeoCities.com. The site started way back in the mid-nineties, offering amateur webmasters the chance to create their own homepages for free. People took up the offer in droves and the site soon had a lot of traffic, with thousands of new GeoCities subdomains starting up each week. By 1999 (the height of the dot com boom) it was worth $3.57 billion according to Yahoo!, as that’s what they paid to acquire it.

Unfortunately, since then Yahoo! has failed to make a profit from GeoCities. Despite it still enjoying high user levels and considerable traffic (an estimated 177 million users in 2008!) Yahoo! decided that it just couldn’t compete with new social media sites like Facebook, and decided that it will close GeoCities down.

This decision will be felt by owners of other websites that offer users something for free. The big problem with many popular sites is just how to turn their large visitor numbers into revenue, i.e. how do you monetize a site where people only come because you give something away for free?

That’s a discussion to have at another time, as there’s another reason, besides nostalgia, why we decided to highlight this topic on an online marketing blog. Looking behind the headlines, the closure of GeoCities could have serious implications on the search engine optimisation of many websites.

Some of the sites on GeoCities are almost 15 years old. They contain some of the oldest content on the web AND some of the oldest links on the web. Consider the value in some of these links, coming from trusted, established sites and having been in place for years. These are often the exact types of links that companies seek to boost their search engine rankings, and the types of links that hold many websites on the first page of Google. Once GeoCities gets taken down it could have quite an effect on the ranking of a lot of websites.

If your site has quite a few in-bound links from Geocities sites then you may soon find that your search engine rankings start to slip.

Find out how at risk you are by going to Yahoo.co.uk typing “linkdomain:YourURL” into the search box, i.e. linkdomain:libertymarketing.co.uk. The results will show all the links pointing to your site and you’ll be able to see if any of these are from GeoCities sites.

If you want to ensure your site still ranks highly, or generally want to improve search engine rankings, then it is important that you start to use link building techniques. The more relevant, varied in-bound links that point to your site, the more Google will trust you, and the more likely you are to appear on the first page results for keywords.

Fast Track Room Booking is a meeting room booking system developed by Intelligent Information Systems (iiS). Having worked with iiS for a number of years, providing Pay Per Click advertising management, they asked us to improve the natural rankings of the website via SEO and link building.

SEO advice

We started by looking at the keywords their market used when searching for this type of software and helped them place these keywords into the site and the copy. We then advised them on some of the more technical elements of SEO that the site needed to have in place in order to make it more search engine friendly and to help avoid Google penalties.

Inbound link building

Once the website was in better shape to attract and convert traffic we started building links to the site. We encouraged links from other relevant websites, looking for links that would help generate targeted traffic as well as boost the Google rankings.

The result?

So far we have generated first page results for many of the main keywords including “room booking” and “room booking software”, terms which now bring in hundreds of new visitors each month as well as additional enquiries each week. As the number of in-bound links grows, the list of keywords the website will be found for will also grow, and the positions within the search results will continue to improve.

SEO (search engine optimisation) has become a mainstream marketing practice used by businesses large and small, all over the globe. Most companies recognise that to take advantage of the keyword searches within their markets they need to outsource their SEO to a specialist online marketing agency. What a lot of these businesses aren’t aware of is that there are two different types of search engine optimiser: white-hat (ethical) and black-hat (unethical). Choosing a black-hat SEO could mean techniques are used that go directly against what the search engines favour.

If black-hat is bad, then why does it exist?

There are two main reasons why SEO’s aren’t all using white-hat, best practices techniques to improve client rankings:

1. Black-hat SEO can work. It can bring in quick results but the downside is it opens your site up to long-term risk. If you have agreed to pay a search engine optimisation to get you to the top of Google then white-hat techniques can take months, whereas using some unethical tricks they could have you there a lot quicker. The problem you’ll face is that once Google spots that these methods have been used to manipulate the search results you will soon find your website has been penalised or even dropped from the index altogether, resulting in plummeting traffic levels.

2. Black-hat SEO is easy. A lot of research is needed to stay ahead in search engine marketing. At Liberty we spend tens of hours each month and thousands of pounds each year on researching and testing the latest techniques. For many companies this isn’t an option, so they choose to stick to old black-hat techniques that they know inside out.

What black-hat techniques should you look out for?

The most common types on unethical optimisation include keyword stuffing, cloaking and invisible text.

Keyword stuffing – When keywords are used in too great a volume.  You will no doubt have seen this on websites where the same keyword is repeated over and over in a piece of copy or where a long list of keywords are bundled together at the bottom of a page.

Cloaking – Presenting one version of a page to the search engines and another to the visitor. If you’ve ever searched for something and found yourself surprised that the website you clicked on is for something completely different then this is probably an example of cloaking.

Invisible text – Making the background colour and the colour used for the text the same. You can only see the text if you select it so although it looks like a big open use of colour, it’s trying to trick the search engines into scanning a whole load of extra copy.

Despite it being common knowledge for years that these techniques could get your site banned, many SEO companies still use them. If you see examples of these in use by your potential online marketing agency then run a mile.

Probably the most common mistake I see on websites is that the pages are all created in the exact same way. Many sites will have the same page descriptions or keywords across their whole site, rather than using each pages as separate way of competing for keywords. If two pages are talking about different topics, but appear to be optimised for the same keywords, then it is likely to confuse the search engine spiders which they should rank. Treating each page separately is one of the strongest ways of increasing the search engine friendliness of your website.

What should you do?

Create a list of the keywords you want to be found for and then assign each web page with one of these keyword. When you have decided upon your list of main keywords and the pages that best represent each one you need to really optimise that page for the keyword. To do this you:

- Make sure the keyword features in the URL of the page (if you have a static site or use a CMS system that allows URL re-writing)
- Place the keyword in the page Title tag (close to the beginning)
- Make sure the keyword features in the start of the meta keywords list for the page
- Put the keyword in the meta description of the page (close to the beginning)
- Write the body copy so that the keyword features for around 5% of the text
- If you can then you should put the keyword in the H1, H2, H3 tags
- If an image is on that page then add the keyword to the image Alt text
- If possible, add the keywords into the links that point to that page from other places on your site

By following the above pattern for each page you will have the start of a strongly SEO’d site, and therefore better chance of ranking for your keywords than the many businesses that write the same page titles for their whole site, or are trying to optimise every page for the exact same keywords.