Ethical SEO or “White Hat” SEO
What’s the difference? Black Hat, White Hat, Ethical Un-ethical… Well, in the SEO industry there are a range of practices employed to promote websites.  Some are honest, while others just outright deceive users and search engines, filling cyberspace up with useless links and recycled spammy articles that no one wants to read

What is our approach to SEO?

• Content is King. Unique professional effective content is the starting place. We sometimes re-write your content, or suggest additional content. We appreciate that whatever the search engine sees, it is a human that will be buying from your company, not a search engine
• Your website needs the right appeal to the right market. We will make suggestions and alterations improve the appeal of your website to the market
• We measure everything, and make qualitative decisions. We research your business sector to understand what is actually being searched for. This means optimisation will not normally be for a single keyword, but a broad spectrum of keywords which are chosen to represent their profitability and market placement
• Your website usually consists of more than the front page; this is why we optimise every page independently
• On your site we will include the usage of good well thought out metadata
• If needed we will freshen up the html coding and scripts, cleaning out errors and problems
• We will ensure your site has an excellent logical structure which is both easy for a human and search engine to navigate
• If we write and use press releases and articles, they will be unique, and relevant to your company, positioned with relevancy
• We create a sitemap to enable search engines to effectively find all the pages on your site
• Your site will be carefully added by hand to search engines. This process will include verifying your site
• If we acquire back links for your website, we will not spam irrelevant directories; we will position them intelligently, with relevance to your company

Why do we take this approach?

It works! It worked 5 years ago, and it will work in 5 years time. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, to beat the dubious practices employed by un-ethical SEO companies. The constant things search engines have respected and listed sites well for is high quality unique content, and relevance in links

Long term, you do not want to be in a position of constantly playing catch-up, and recovering from failures when one of the bad techniques other SEO companies employ trips up your website. We believe the internet is for humans first, and search engines are a tool to help humans find things relevant to their searches

What is the alternative?
Examples of un-ethical SEO include:

Spamming, by commenting on blogs
Often the un-ethical SEO companies leave a multitude of comments on blogs, all over the place, with no relevance, with the hope it leaves a back link to the target site. They use automatic “Bots” and scripts to do this.  Often tens and thousands of blogs are targeted at once. Not only does this fill the internet up with dross that people just don’t want to read, it causes the blog owners lots of work keeping on top of the spam.

Cloaking redirects
In plain English this means setting up lots of little secondary websites with the sole purpose of gaining page rank, but then having the secondary websites automatically redirect users to the primary, which benefits from a gain in page rank

Keyword spamming and stuffing
This is a bad technique that involves re-using keywords to the point the text is senseless to a real visitor

Hidden text and links
Often hidden text is employed, which is not visible to human, but is visible to search engines, this text is used to add content and keywords to a page that really has different content or no content.  People may do this for example to to widen the pages geographic appeal.  I am a “website designer in Nottingham”, I could hide text saying “website designer in Newark” and “website designer in Retford” etc.  Deceiving Google into thinking that I actually am a website designer in Newark and Retford

Another practice that is totally disapproved by search engines is hidden links.  Essentially hiding content from the user, but not from the search engine

Link farms
Some SEO companies use automated link farms which they place (often without your permission) on your site. The link farms basically are computer generated pages of links, to all of the sites the company wants to promote, along with hundreds of others. The value of the page to a human is zero, and Google disapproves of the method

What to do?

We believe in a straightforward approach. Our approach may seem conservative, and lack the instantaneous impact of the more underhand methods. However, our approach is not myopic, it is focused on the long term benefit you’re your business. If the way we work appeals to you, then simply contact us, and we can get things moving

Ethical SEO sounds like what I want, what next?

Call us today on Nottingham 0115 845 8953 for a free consultation. We will assess your site, discuss your business, and put together a plan for you

How much will this cost

For a 10 page web site, our SEO fees start at just £350.00

As you would imagine, some sites will require a lot more work than others. This is why we offer a free no-obligation consultation

Problems with your practices

Doorway pages and sites
These are now viewed as blatant SPAM, which will get you banned pronto

Keywords

Keywords are good, but there importance diminished in about 2003, when the SEO companies abused them so much the search engines demoted their input in the search. Nowadays search engines take into account the text “AS SEEN BY THE END USER” to establish rankings. As I mentioned before – the title tag is very important, as end users see this, as is the description tag

Duplicating your content
Duplication is now frowned upon by search engines – so unless you have a valid business reason for doing it don’t. An acceptable reason would be a high contrast version for visually impaired customers for example

Invisible text crammed with keywords
There are 2 variants of this – text that is the same or a close colour to the background colour, or text that is not on the visible page (say 8 pages down from a load of line breaks) for example. If you do either you will get yourself banned. Google has thousands of people in Asia that actually spend all day looking at stuff like this. If you get banned you are stuffed for ages

Miss-understanding page rank and linking
In the old days – it mattered who linked to you, nowadays it matters more who you link to. If you link to other relevant content, your page will be ranked higher

Link exchange
Link exchanges might have worked once, but now are a waste of time if exchanged without relevance – again 5 years ago it worked, now it doesn’t

Buying links
Now Google sell their own links and positioning to you, they will penalise you if you are paying for it. They look for words like sponsors or advertisers associated with the link or unrelated links (to each other) or links unrelated to the search page. Your competitors can report you for doing to this, and if they review your sire you can kiss your ranking goodbye

Cloaking
Cloaking is where your site has different for search engines, compared to what is actually on the site visible to the end browser – this is a good way of getting black listed

Problems with your design

Flash
Flash hides all text in a movie, so from a search engines point of view there isnt a site to rank, as it sees no visible text… If you insist on flash, write a HTML version of the same content too. Photographer’s sites are top heavy on the flash content

Session ID’s
If your site uses Session IDs you could be in trouble, as now the major search engines seem to be basing ranking on its view of your site over a long time frame. This is partially why a ranking takes so long to achieve. Basically a static page is good; a dynamic page is less good. The problem with session ID’s is they dynamically change the actual URL (the page name is in flux), so when the search engine comes back to look for www.sillysite.co.uk/page1.php?hl=en&q=23848489302, it will not be there. Instead use cookies to store the session state. What the search engine then sees are 2 differing pages, and neither gets ranked

Framesets
Framesets cause 2 problems, search engines cant follow them, and then when they do the browser comes in on the left margin, not the whole site

Scripting languages
Using too much scripting language: can confuse some search engines to the point of not being able to find your content on a page. If you use a scripting language – pop it in an include file

Pictures, no text
The photographer fave… no text just pictures… nothing for the search engine to see = no ranking. Search engines like 250-500 words minimum on a page

Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>

This is the page title, must be readable English, and appears in the browser tool bar, and as the website title. On search engines, using the above example “Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page” is displayed as the “bit you click on” in some search engines. Goggle usually reads about 90 characters of this tag, so it is wise to set a character limit of 60, as the displayed part is often shorter. It is worth knowing that the search engines look at the content of this for relevancy (compared to the text on the page is on) and the content in terms of searching

In the example above the relevant keywords were: Beautiful Wedding Photography Richard King, Count = 5 across 1 page

It is completely OK to have different title tags on different pages – Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>
<TITLE CONTENT =”Contact Richard King – Your local Nottingham wedding photographer”>
<TITLE CONTENT =”Stylish wedding picture galleries by bridal photographer Richard King”>

**Search engines will note the differences in the keywords used**
Relevant keywords  were: Beautiful Wedding Photography Richard King Contact local Nottingham bridal photographer Stylish picture galleries
Relevant keyword count: 13 across 3 pages

The phrase relevant keywords will come up a lot… basically, its really good news if those keywords are actually in the body text of the page, and between the <H>Heading</H> tags too

Description Tag

Example:

<META name description CONTENT =”I am a family wedding photographer based in Burton Joyce, on the Newark side of Nottingham. I provide reportage and traditional albums, available with black and white or colour images. Bridal portraiture is a speciality”>

Everything mentioned about the TITLE tag is relevant here, except the length should be more than 55 characters and less than 250 characters

Alt tags

Example:

<img src=”couplet’s” alt=”Newly wed bride and groom having confetti thrown all over them”>

These are the “alternative” tags offered by designers for browsers that do not display images. The text in these tags is read by search engines, and the actual words mused make a difference, and ought to reflect the content of the page. When you move your mouse over one of these tags, the text is often displayed, so it must be readable English length must be under 125 characters long

“longdesc” is a tag that ought to be used (instead of alt) if the length of descriptive text is over 125 characters (i.e. For long descriptive technical illustrations) the “longdesc” tag isn’t noticed by search engines

Keyword Tag

Example:

<META name keywords CONTENT =”photographer, wedding, Nottingham, picture, wedding photographer, etc…”>

Again – the keyword list is important, and it is also useful to include typo’s and miss-spellings (something I do naturally). It is quite a good idea to vary your keywords on all the different pages on the site. Again, the relevancy of the keywords chosen applies in the same way as in the title and description tags – The important keywords should be in the body text on the main page, and in the headlines too. It is quite acceptable to pop phrases in the keyword content too

The length of the content must be between 200 and 1055 characters

The best advice is go ask 10 people” what would you type into Goggle to find xxxxx” and use whatever they say as your keywords

Summary
Search engines read text, and without it you will not get a decent ranking, the text used in all the meta information, must reflect the text on the web page. Unfortunately photographers have sites with little text, and it will be noted that the websites that do well have lots of text on them

If you keep your META information within the limits allowed, search engines will love your site and give you a fighting chance of a ranking. If you add the META information in a logical and smart way, thinking about the content – this will improve the ranking further

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot
Search engines penalise:

• Posting your address on thier ADD URL web page to many times
• Lists of keywords in the text
• Blatant spamming of keywords (over use of 1 or 2 words)
• Hidden text (black or dark grey text on a black background for example)

A robots.txt file is a file that tells search engine spiders what not
to index. Search engines “spider your website”, and follow instructions
left in this file

Scenario – you have a website, but you do not want the search engine to
list your customers directories (wedding images for example)

Scenario – you have a series of pictures that make up 1 picture as
a whole – you don’t want the individual pictures being indexed – as it
will look silly on goggle picture search

This is achievable using the ROBOT META tabs (on all pages), or just by editing one file, called robots.txt

You might also have a page, that has a whopping great big list on it
(genuine one), that might be considered as SPAM by a search engine The
robots.txt file is a good way to prevent this page from getting
spidered by a search engine. in this way – you can keep the list, but
not get blacklisted

You can only have one robots.txt file per domain (this means you can only use it if you own the domain e.g. you cant use it for www.mywebpage.aol.net/robots.txt, but you can use it for www.dizzyblonde.co.uk/robots.txt). The file needs to be placed in the root HTML folder at your server (usually public_html)

The actual file:

is called robots.txt, and is a simple text file (make it with notepad)

To stop all search engine spiders from indexing your website: insert this into robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The * in the user agent line means “all” search engines

The / in the disallow line means “my whole site”

To stop all spiders from indexing a specific directory(s) in your site include:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /webstats1/

Disallow: /usergallery/gallery1

The * in the user agent line means “all” search engines

Disallow: /webstats1/ – specifies the directory “www.yourdomain/webstats1″

Disallow: /usergallery/gallery1 – specifies that the folders at www.yourdomain/usergallery/gallery1 will not be searched, but the folder www.yourdomain/usergallery would have been spidered

Or to stop a specific file being spidered:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /usergallery/pic1.jpg

Disallow: /private/my_document.htm

If you want to be search engine specific..

User-agent: googlebot

Disallow: /

Here is a typical robots file

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Disallow: /cgi-perl

Disallow: /cgi-store

Disallow: /images

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /print/

Disallow: /606/

Disallow: /messageboards/

Disallow: /apps/

What it does:

This robot.txt file basically stops search engines indexing all of
the “code bits” and “dynamic bits” of a site, whilst stopping the
images in the images folder from being listed on their own

This one is more useful for most sites with a normal file structure

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Disallow: /images

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /user_galleries/

In summary

The robots.txt file is a text file placed in the root file of your
web space, and is used to prevent certain folders or files being
indexed by a search engine (or all search engines). Usually this is
used to prevent search engines trawling through content that is
partial, or unsuitable for direct linking from a search engine. If you
are subject to high volume of spidering from a particular problem
search engine (which can slow your site down)

Here is an example of using META tags
Feel free to cut copy paste these, but refer to the explanation below of what each tag means before altering anything. You can use all of these META tags at once. There are tricks for getting NetObjects, Dreamweaver and Front page to insert these into each page automatically. If anyone wants to know how to do this, let me know. Smart people alter the description, title and keywords tags between each page of their websites – in that way – you are not spamming the search engine, but you are maximising your exposure to any search phrase. Search engines usually rate your site PAGE BY PAGE. Some of the tags below you shouldn’t use… so read the write up before inserting the whole block

Example of a META TAG block:

<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html” l gen false comment “RSACi North America Server” for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” on “2006.11.06T23:37-0800″ r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))’>
<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 “http://www.classify.org/safesurf/” L gen true for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” r (SS~~000 1))’>
<META name rating CONTENT =” Safe for kids”>
<META name expires CONTENT =”Mon, 01 Aug 2000 09:00:00 GMT”>
<META http-equiv pragma CONTENT =”no-cache”>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”5000;URL=http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk/”>
<META name keywords CONTENT =”photographer, wedding, Nottingham, picture, wedding photographer, etc…”>
<META name MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=”TRUE”>
<META name owner CONTENT =”Richard King”>
<META name reply-to CONTENT =”richardking@bwp-by-rk.co.uk (Richard King)”>
<META name resource-type CONTENT =”document”>
<META http-equiv content-language CONTENT =”content=”en-uk”>
<META name abstract CONTENT =”Burton Joyce’s local wedding photographer – Richard King”>
<META name author CONTENT =”Richard King, Nott’s PC Services”>
<META name classification CONTENT =”Photography”>
<META name copyright CONTENT =”2006 (c) Richard King”>
<META name description CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King. Based in Nottingham I take images of your wedding to keep for years”>
<TITLE CONTENT =” Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – “>
<META name distribution CONTENT =”Global”>
<META name doc-class CONTENT =”Completed”>
<META http-equiv expires CONTENT =”Wed, 09 Aug 2010 09:00:00 GMT”>
<META name googlebot CONTENT =”Index, follow”>
<META name robots CONTENT =”index, follow”>
<META name revisit-after CONTENT =”30 days”>

So what does it all mean? Here is a blow by blow definition of each line of code:

Safety / rating info META TAGS

These tags define how your site will be rated by both search engines and content filters. Important…Visit the following websites for more info. The sites below generate the correct code for your site on the fly

General information: http://www.w3.org/pics
RSAC: http://www.RSAC.org
Safe Surfing: http://www.safesurf.com
WEBURBIA: http://www.weburbia.com/safe
Example tags:

<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html” l gen false comment “RSACi North America Server” for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” on “2006.11.06T23:37-0800″ r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))’> Options: see note above – visit the site

<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 “http://www.classify.org/safesurf/” L gen true for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” r (SS~~000 1))’> Options: see note above – visit the site
<META name rating CONTENT =” Safe for kids”> Options: 14 Years / General / Mature / Restricted / Safe for Kids

Alter the end users browser behaviour
<META name expires CONTENT =”Mon, 01 Aug 2000 08:21:53 GMT”> This will cause a document to be reloaded from the website after the date (even if it is stored in the user’s cache). Put a date in the past to disable caching of the document.

<META http-equiv pragma CONTENT =”no-cache”> Stops the local browsers to not locally cache the web page

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”5000;URL=http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk/”> Tells the local browser how many seconds to cache the local web page, after that time, the user will reload the page from your site, rather than use the local cached version)

Information about the web page
Some of these: the website owner (for example) seem unnecessary, but are used to populate fields on some directory search engines (like YELL, Thompson)

<META name keywords CONTENT =”your, keywords, separated, by, commas, goes, here”> Further info about this will be in my next post

<META name MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=”TRUE”> If you don’t want Microsoft products to automatically generate smart tags on your web pages, include this tag. It must be included on each page of your site for which you do not desire this feature. It has no effect on smart tags, which you insert yourself.

<META name owner CONTENT =”Richard King”> The website owner

<META name reply-to CONTENT =”richardking@bwp-by-rk.co.uk (Richard King)”> Gives a contact email, and name for reply for the web page (could open you up to SPAM

<META name resource-type CONTENT =”document”> Explains what type of resource the page is (redundant now)

<META http-equiv content-language CONTENT =”content=”en-uk”> Defines the language of the page

<META name abstract CONTENT =”your text here”> Replace “your text here” with a description of your site. This description is often used as an alternate description on search engines

<META name author CONTENT =”Richard King, Place of design”> Details who wrote the site

<META name classification CONTENT =”Photography, Wedding”> defines the classification (on a search engine) as “photographer” and “wedding”

<META name copyright CONTENT =”2006 (c) Richard King”> Copyright statement

<META name description CONTENT =”A brief description of your site goes here”> This description is used as the main description on some search engines (what the punters read. You need to be clever here with the words you use, but it must be readable

<TITLE CONTENT =”Title of your page goes here”> I will discuss the content In my next post

<META name distribution CONTENT =”Global”> “Global” Appropriate for web access. “Local” Web servers will not pass a “Local” document to the web. “IU” Internal use – Intranets.

<META name doc-class CONTENT =”Completed”> Completed/Draft/Living Document/Published describes the current state of the document

How / when a page is indexed
<META http-equiv expires CONTENT =”Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:21:17 GMT”> – tells the search engine when a page is no longer to be listed (useful for a promotional page)

<META name googlebot CONTENT =”Index”>Defines how the Googlebot spider indexes your site. By default, Google will attempt to spider every page you have on your site. Sometimes you will not want this to happen – you might have a series of pages that must be viewed from page 1, then 2, and 3 – in sequence. Using this tag can prevent the engine listing page 2 separately (stopping customers jumping in at page 2). You can use the ROBOTS metatag to control how all spiders index your site. The GOOGLEBOT Metatag controls exactly which pages Google indexes.

Options: all / index, follow / noindex, follow / index,nofollow / nosnippet /noarchive /none

all: Same as index,follow.
index,follow: The default, meaning index the page and follow all links from the page.
noindex,follow Don’t index the page but do follow all links from the page.
index,nofollow Index the page, but do not proceed to the links from the page.
noindex,nofollow Do not index the page and do not proceed to links from the page.
none Same as noindex,nofollow.

nosnippet From Google help:
“A snippet is a text excerpt from the returned result page that has all query terms bolded. The excerpt allows users to see the context in which search terms appear on a web page, before clicking on the result. Users are more likely to click on a search result if it has a corresponding snippet.” This value of NOSNIPPET removes the text snippet.

noarchive From Google help:
“Google keeps the text of the many documents it crawls available in a cache. This allows an archived, or “cached”, version of a web page to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page’s web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it. The cached page also includes a message (at the top of the page) to indicate that it’s a cached version of the page.”
“If you want to prevent all robots from archiving content on your site, use the NOARCHIVE meta tag.”

<META name robots CONTENT =”index, follow”> same as the googlebot tag above, with 1 exception… noimageindex (Altavista only) Prevents the images on the page from being indexed, but the text on the page can still be indexed

<META name revisit-after CONTENT =”30 days”> Tells the search engine to visit back after Xdays, and re-spider the site