I Love this DIYThemes Call Out of TMZ and Pointing Out Bad SEO
For the aspiring webmaster who wants to create a blog and make it big, they have to generate website traffic hits. Web surfers don’t come on their own, that’s for sure. And it’s an interesting learning curve on what a website owner can learn about the all-important world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other related issues.
As you delve into this seemingly easy world of the web, you’ll start noticing that there are good ways and bad ways to try and trick Google and other search engines into liking your website.
There are the basics that ProBlogger and DIY Themes can teach you. And as you grow, you’ll notice that different sites do different things to capture traffic. Some nice, some tricky. Some sites use open-ended questions in their titles to bait the curious. Some will use titles making you think they have certain content in the article, but all you get is a “to be posted soon” notice in the article. Then there’s something like what DIY Themes made note of in how TMZ had reported one event many months back.
DIY makes mention of ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO practices in their article. That is, doing article creation like a human might do or say it, using all the right key words, but using catch phrases when appropriate. Then there’s ‘black hat’ techniques… that would be like stuffing your titles or web paths or images with keywords, trying to capture traffic.
In this case, here’s the example URL that DIY pointed out from TMZ:
http……randy-savage-car-accident-
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As you see, the title isn’t a simple sentence or phrase, but rather, it’s jammed packed with catch words related to the event. This slippery little trick is in hopes of catching web traffic for key-word searches. For sites as large as TMZ and such, they seem immune to being dinged by search engine rankings.
But the little guy needs to be careful.
For example, early in 2010, I had hit upon a practice of internal linking that seemed to work. I hid the links so that competitors wouldn’t catch on to what I was doing. But Google see’s link hiding as a bad practice and the site took an interesting dive in traffic. Once I figured out that Google didn’t like this practice, I stopped it. But dang.
Another facet you may have noticed is how some sites don’t have dates in, on or around their articles or links. That’s so Google doesn’t ding them for being out-dated in the search realm. For me… I thought about it, but it’s not fair to you my readership. If you’re researching something but don’t know when it was written/created, then one of two things happen. If you trust the website as a source and report old news as new news, you’re screwed. Or, lack of dates makes a website useless as a resource.
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So as DIY Themes points out, some practices are not cool and if you’re a small website trying to grow, some of these black-hat practices are a bad thing to do. Just because bigger sites do things like this doesn’t always make it right.
So beware in your struggle to grow your small start-up site and if you follow by example, beware the examples. They’re not all good. Be patient and use some basic, common-sense in approaching this industry.
http://diythemes.com/thesis/
