© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Search Engine Marketing by Stephan Spencer President, Netconcepts

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Where do searchers look? The top of the natural results! (Enquiro / Did-it / Eyetools Study)

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Some Highlights from the Study  72% of searchers click on the first link of interest  25.5% read all listings first, then decide  85% click on “natural” (unpaid) results  The top 4 PPC slots on the right are equivalent in views to being ranked at #7 - #10 natural

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Spammers Never Prosper  Sooner or later, you’ll get caught –Automated search engine algorithms –Manual quality review by evaluators –Spam reports (  Consequences –Ranking penalties –Total site ban (i.e. getting “graybarred”) –Incomplete indexation (partial site ban) –Removal of your “voting” power

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Spam (“Black Hat”) Practices  Sneaky redirects  Hidden or tiny text –e.g. noscript, noframes, iframes, hidden divs, etc.  Keyword stuffing  Targeting irrelevant keywords  Automated submitting, resubmitting or deep submitting  Trademark infringement  Duplicating content

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Spam (“Black Hat”) Practices  Spamglish  Doorway pages  Machine-generating pages  Pagejacking  Cloaking content  Link farms & “FFA” pages  Buying expired domains w/ high PageRank

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Spam (“Black Hat”) Practices  Multiple domains w/out redirecting  Linking to bad neighborhoods  Blog comment spamming  Guestbook spamming  Splogging

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Example 1: Doorway Pages & Keyword Stuffing

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Doorway page spam

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Doorway page spam

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Keyword stuffing

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Keyword stuffing in the “meta tags” too

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Example 2: Link Hiding  PRNewswire.co.uk embeds keyword-rich text links within a tag on their home page that not visible to ordinary users: – Search Engine Marketing Search Engine News Release Optimization

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Example 3: Text Hiding (& Spamglish)

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Link Building  Inbound links play a key role in determining rankings  It’s not just about quantity (“link popularity”); it’s about quality (importance of the page, topically relevant/authoritative)  PageRank™ – Google’s algorithm for measuring a page’s importance; Yahoo & MSN have similar measures  Each web page (not site) has its own PageRank score  PageRank scores from 0 to 10; logarithmic scale

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Link Building  Check your link popularity at  Check your PageRank with the Google Toolbar (download it from toolbar.google.com) –And/or check your home page’s PageRank using the Google Directory (directory.google.com) –Listings are ranked in order of PageRank –Makes it possible to see your site make small PageRank shifts relative to other sites in your category

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Google Directory – listings are organized by PageRank

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Link Building  Find link targets –Review links of competitive sites, sites in your keyword market Use the Link Checker tool at Yahoo’s linkdomain: query is particularly useful Run a link: query on –Check sites with high rankings for relevant keywords –The fewer the number of links on their page, the better  Offer link-worthy content. Keep it fresh.  Consider providing an RSS feed

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Link Building  BONUS: Sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper by Googlebot  Types of links that are likely to get discounted: –Reciprocal links –Affiliated sites (on the same IP range or hostname) –Footer links (at the bottom of the page) –Site-wide links  Don’t participate in “link farms” or link to “bad neighborhoods” –Hallmarks of a link farm = more urls per page & less organization  Try to get good keywords in the hyperlink text

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts “Google Bombing”  Inbound contextual links alone can drive a site to the top of Google (e.g. “miserable failure”)  Also works on Yahoo, MSN Search, etc.

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Do’s  Targeting relevant and popular keywords  Lead off with keywords in the title tag  Use H1 (heading) tags  Make body copy sufficiently long and keyword-rich  Include keywords in your link text  Include text links to your important secondary pages  Have a site map that contains text links  Make your directory structure flat

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Do’s  Build up your PageRank scores  Get listed in Open Directory  Write meta descriptions that contain the targeted keywords & a compelling call-to-action  Have a custom error page  Use clean, simple URLs that contain keywords

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Don’t  Engage in any above-mentioned “black hat” tactics  Use dropdown boxes, Flash, Java, or JavaScript for navigation  Have a "splash page"  Use frames  Include multiple ampersands or "cgi-bin” or session IDs or underscores in your URLs  Put your text content within Flash or graphics

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Flash – a roadblock

© 2006 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Don’ts  Have the same title tag on multiple pages  Put important content into pop-ups  "Click here" links  Superfluous text like "Welcome to" at beginning of your title tags  Redirect on your home page