SEO « Slick Affiliate

How To: Report Competitors Black Hat SEO Techniques to Google

Have a keyword where you have one of the top search engine rankings for, only to have someone came out of nowhere to outrank you? With few exceptions, websites don’t jump 5-10 spots overnight without some help, so I always get suspicious. This happened to me recently, so I figured I’d share how to recognize why this happens and what you can do to prevent it!

For those unfamiliar with black hat SEO techniques, “black hat” is a term commonly used to describe SEO techniques that aren’t allowed by Google or other search engines. Common black hat techniques include hidden text or links (an example would be making words white while on a white background so they can’t be seen by readers, but search engines see them), misleading or repeated words, cloaked pages, deceptive redirects, doorway pages, etc.

On the flip side, there are “white hat” SEO techniques which are approved or allowed techniques that are encouraged by search engines. Examples include sitemaps, meta tags, and of course optimizing your websites structure (header tags in the right spots, breadcrumbs, etc.) so search engines can read your entire site and figure out what exactly your site is about.

I am fortunate in that I’ve got a few different highly competitive keywords where my sites have top rankings in. While doing my standard review of my rankings (at least bi-weekly) for these keywords, I noticed a website had come out of nowhere and was now ranked higher than my site!

After my surprise subsided, I began researching this site (which is an established site, but never ranked very highly before) and noticed that the footer of their theme had some links for the three most prominent keywords within this niche. Thing is, they were hidden using CSS, so they couldn’t be seen by human readers.

This is the kind of thing that Google wants to avoid, so being the Google fanboy that I am, I went ahead and reported the spam to Google. This is my third time doing this, but the first time the spam affected me directly. The other two times I just discovered it on accident so I reported it.

The SEO Benefits of Article Marketing

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, SEO

Are you using article marketing to increase your niche sites inbound links? Recently the Affiliate Classroom blog wrote a great post about the importance of article marketing, and why this strategy is possibly the best SEO for affiliate marketers. After reading through it, I wanted to mention it here.

There are actually 8 reasons listed, but I wanted to point out a few important ones that I think people fail to think about:

Links are one-way. Some SEO experts believe that search engines downplay reciprocal links in their results calculations. While reciprocal links can still be valuable, they don’t count as much as one-way links to your site. Article directories give you a one-way link.

Links are guaranteed. If you’ve never asked a webmaster for a link before, it can feel a bit intimidating. But when you submit articles to directories, you know you won’t get turned down. Seeing those backlinks show up in the SERPs is a nice confidence booster, especially if your site is brand new. As long as your articles are of good quality, they will also send you targeted visitors for a long time to come.

Links per page are fewer. This is a little known, but valuable benefit. Some SEO experts believe that the higher the number of links per page, the less SEO value each link will have. But the link back to your site in an article directory is usually only one of only a few links on the page.

Backlinks soon multiply. Article sites exist for a reason – to provide other webmasters with access to free, quality content. So just one article, in just one directory, can actually turn into hundreds of links, as webmaster after webmaster finds your article and uses it.

If you’d like to read more about article marketing, I recommend you check out Josh Spaulding’s Article Marketing Domination eBook.

Ultimate Collection of SEO Tools?

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under SEO

Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two things that will always go well together, so I’ve always made it a point to stay current on the latest SEO techniques and strategies. I recently noticed a new post over at Search Engine Journal that really caught my attention. They’ve called the post the Ultimate Collection of Internet SEO Tools, and I have to say that after reviewing the post, I’m going to have to agree.

Though it isn’t a complete SEO collection (as it only includes web-based tools), it is a great resource that I think people will love. It is almost overwhelming just how many SEO tools there are out there!

What are your favorite web-based SEO tools?

Traffic Secrets Revealed 2.0 Now Available!

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under SEO

Have you ever heard of John Reese before? Unless you’re new to the world of internet marketing, chances are this guy is a household name to you. For those unfamiliar with the name, John is the author of the incredibly popular Traffic Secrets home study course that has propelled the careers of most full time internet marketers today.

As we all know, getting traffic (especially search engine traffic) is the key to drive any affiliate campaign, but doing so is much easier said than done. This is especially true without purchasing your traffic via PPC or other methods. Did you know that there are SEO techniques and other methods you could be using to get natural (and free) search engine traffic? John has covered all of this in his home study course.

If you would like to check it out, or purchased the original course, I wanted to give you the heads up that as of 1:00 p.m. EST today, the Traffic Secrets 2.0 home study course has been released.

Check out Traffic Secrets 2.0!

Google Now Manually Monitoring Search Results?

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Blogging, SEO

With the size of the world wide web, it seems impossible to think that Google could manually monitor their search results, but a recent post over at SEOBook.com titled Mom and Pop Websites? Is Your Brand Big Enough? really got me thinking about whether this is possible or not, and how this will effect small sites designed to snipe certain keywords.

In Aaron’s post, he mentions that someone he knows was banned from Google because his blog used the default WordPress template. This got my attention. Even though I’ve never used the Kubrick theme or a variation of it on any of my sites, I think the fact that Google looks at things like this makes me wonder what else they would look at if they are human editing their search results.

Apparently human editing will be more common in 2008 and here are the signs that Aaron recommends you make sure your site does NOT exhibit to help it look authentic:

has a default WordPress design
has multiple hyphens in the domain name
exclusively monetizes via Google AdSense, placed top and to the left in the content area of the page
does not have a clear way to contact you
lacks an about us section
is registered with fake whois

For keyword snipers, this is something to pay attention to. Where are your ads positioned? Do you have an About/Contact page?

What is Keyword Sniping?

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Blogging, Make Money Online, SEO

About a month ago I reviewed a tool called Micro Niche Finder, which is an SEO tool designed to help bloggers find out how much traffic and competition there are for smaller keywords. The idea is that you can easily rank highly in these keywords with only a minimal amount of work. So, once you’ve found your niche, how do you go about actually attacking that keyword?

Well, keyword sniping of course. This is a method I’ve used, and I know several others that have also found a great deal of success by taking over low traffic keywords. There are a few different ways to go about, but most people in the know keep fairly quiet about their techniques. For people interested, I was able to dig up a post written a little while ago by Courtney Tuttle giving a very well written introduction to keyword sniping. His post covers the general idea behind keyword sniping and explains how anyone can make money online doing this.

The nice thing about this method is that it requires very minimal maintenance. Set up your blog and a few posts, then sit back and let your site mature with age. One thing I would recommend that Courtney didn’t cover is to make a very AdSense friendly WordPress theme and use it as a template. That way each time you launch a new site, you can use that same theme and just plug in the specific information for the niche you are attacking.

Have any good keyword sniping stories to share?