By Benjamin Wigoder
Current Positions At the time of writing my site ranksfor the term 'website hacking' (no quotes needed): MSN:
Introduction The web started out as one big irrelevantmass of pages, you would have to guess URLs or remember all ofthem! Then along came the first search engines, these relied onmanual submissions from webmasters and so developed slowly, thenalong came search engine spiders. As soon as these searchengines were “crawling” or “spidering” thousands of pages,people immediately saw this as an opportunity to help peopleboost their search engine rankings. Unfortunately, as I shallshow you throughout the article, not everybody goes about thisbusiness in the right way.
Relevancy The key to a good search engine ranking isrelevancy, is your website relevant to the search terms you aretargeting? Many times clients have wanted to be listed for termswhich have nothing to do with their website. One notable examplewas a client who wanted to be #1 ranked for the phrase: “onlineclothing” when he was in fact selling deodorants andantiperspirants. Even if he made his ranking the visitors wouldnot be interested in his product!
Competition & Keyword Choice The second thing to look outfor is competition, the “keyword modifier” or second keyword canmake all the difference, rather than “games”, try “board games”,rather than “parties”, try “birthday parties”. Not only will youget more relevant visitors but you will also find it easier toget top listings as the competition is not so great.
Link Exchanges Do not go about this the wrong away. Asyou can read in a recent article by Mike Banks Valentine(http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2004/nov/25.html) you can ruinyour chances if you employ bad tactics or do not research your“friends” thoroughly. I rarely accept people into a linkexchange – they must have a PR or 4 or higher, they must notemploy bad SEO tactics and they must have good original content,because otherwise my sites could be penalised for the bad workof others. I also cross-check their name across black-lists tosee if they have already been caught doing something wrong.
Doorway Pages Never ever use doorway pages. I recentlysaw a piece of doorway page generation software which was freeand which claimed to be compliant to search engine guidelines.As the very notion of doorway pages is despised by all searchengines this is impossible. Do not use them as they can only doharm.
However, as many are sceptical of whether or not this is true, Iran a recent experiment: I optimized my site for the searchengines using the strategies above and at the same time aslaunching this site I launched an identical one on a URL Icannot publish. I used 1000 doorway pages generatedautomatically and pointed them to the main page from the samedomain. With the first domain Google sends me hundreds ofvisitors a day, while the second example with the doorway pagesis nowhere in the results, probably banned, for employing “blackhat” SEO techniques.
Conclusion The moral of the day is simple, do not try andwork around the search engines, work with them. Concentrate onrelevancy, keyword choice and link exchanges, as these are theonly ways you can legitimately get a top search engine ranking.Remember, content is King and relevance is Queen, there is nopoint having good content and irrelevant keywords andvice-versa, only aim for what can be achieved, watch yourcompetition and be an honest SEO.
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