Since Blogger / Blogspot are Google domain properties, the work for a blogger is fairly easy when it comes to getting indexed by Google's search bot. One would think that these sites are already optimized for this purpose. The real task is funneling the appropriate audience for the content that is being hosted or written about.
For this example I am using a recipe that I cross-posted to the LiveJournal Foodporn community site and to my own blog where I host the pictures of various cooking experiments. In my initial research into the recipe, I found that while most of the ingredient ratios were the same across Mexican and Latin American cultures, it was known by different names. Hence, the label tags that I used for identifying this recipe were: desserts:fruit, guava, pasteles de guayaba, pastelitos de guayaba y queso, pastry. In the body of the recipe, I have additional keywords: pastelitos de guayaba y queso, guava and cheese strudel.
The top 10 keyword sets (July 24-Aug 25, 2008) users typed into their search engine of choice (Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, or Dogpile) to get to this recipe page:
(click for larger image)
Now, I'd always thought of creating a recipes to match what people were looking for since there would be at least one user out there who might be looking for that recipe again. But, I'm really not sure how chipotlé and guava flavors really mingle together. They might work out quite well.
The marketing take-away: Know your audience. That's really the best way to market products, services, and informational content to prospective consumers and businesses.
In terms of SEO, all these keywords were the result of organic searches. Can the keyword phrases be purchased or used for AdSense? Certainly. TheFoodening site is as optimized as it's going to get with respect to Google site indexing. So what's next to boost traffic? More recipes based on keyword phrases that resulted in null content? More cross-posting of recipes to food and recipe sites to piggyback on search traffic? I suppose the real next step would be to select another recipe off my recipe experiment queue, do something creative with it, and post the results.
Related words:
guayaba = guava
queso = cheese
pastelitos = tarts, "pastries"
con = with
de = of/from
y = and
Disclaimer: This blog posting is intended to make new and existing SEO users aware of known Black Hat techniques and does not advocate the usage of such search engine optimization strategies.
In an earlier post, I touched briefly upon White Hat SEO basics and alluded to how ethics really doesn't play a part in whatever technique is employed when using search engine optimization. To brand ethics with SEO concepts is just silly. That's like saying everyone else is breaking a moral or legal requirement for the mass acquisition of inbound traffic and prospective customers. When in fact, no US laws are being broken here unless you're using the domain for cybersquatting and you have to prove that you own the website for legitimate purposes; which still might be construed as illegal with regard to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
Black Hat techniques attempt to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. These include link buying, spamdexing, cloaking, keyword stuffing, creating doorway pages, link farming, link baiting, misrepresenting content, using hidden text to manipulate page rankings, etc.
And, there are significant penalties from using Black Hat techniques:
* Your sites get delisted from major search engines
* Your IP address gets blacklisted
* Your page rankings are significantly reduced
* Your urls become eligible for manual review prior to a search engine crawl
I'm not sure why any company with a legitimate product or services offering would consider employing BH methods to gain higher page rankings. Ignorance? Greed? It does happen, albeit infrequently, to large brand-driven companies.
Related Links:
Black Hat vs. White Hat Search Spam Debate
Google Webmaster Guide for SEO
Black Hole SEO: The Real Desert Scraping
Glossary:
Black Hat
Keyword stuffing
For the first time, my other blog has received organic traffic from AOL. This is both interesting and significant because I don't advertise at all through any of AOL's networks. I don't get a whole lot of traffic, but it's steady and worthy of consideration to monetize the blog. I haven't done so in the past because it doesn't cost me anything to keep the site up.
I really don't see why people are so obsessed about keyword ad buys and bidding on short- and long-tails for that 15% or so paid search traffic that will get them placed higher up on the food chain. SEO is a concept, a lot like modern day IT practices, where the concept has to adapt so rapidly to changing technologies that you have to have employ specialists to cope with such trends to stay ahead of competitors. I don't feel that it adds any value to a company's business model and it detracts from the resources necessary to generate positive net income. I can have this opinion because of the 89 visits (83 absolute unique visitors) to the food blog in the last 30 days (May 10 - June 9), 72 visits (80% of total traffic) were Google organic.
This means that people got to my site through natural means. Either because they saw a recipe I posted to a large recipe swapping/journalling community, or they had typed in keywords that match the keyword tagging that I use on my food site. I might have mentioned in a previous post that I dislike tags; it is only because people mistag articles, blogs, and RSS feeds all the time to redirect traffic to a misrepresentation of a tag's keywords.
For all the sites that I manage (2 blogs, 1 personal site, 1 game info site), I use Google Analytics, but I also have Stat Counter and ClusterMap on the ones where I know I will have international traffic. ClusterMap provides a wonderful display of frequency by location, representing website hit population by a visitor's IP address but at a bird's eye view.
This is where my international visitors came from (June '07 - May '08):
My two largest visitor populations are located in Florida and California. I have two recipes that generate consistent monthly traffic. Can you guess which ones? I'll give you a hint. One is a Cuban dessert recipe (majority of hits) that I was inspired to make from scratch after tasting it from Portos Bakery; the other is a Chinese appetizer (2nd most frequently visited posting) that is probably one of the priciest items you could order at a restaurant that has it. Both of these are made from basic (to that food culture) ingredients.
So, why do you suppose I have so much traffic from these two US states for that one Cuban recipe?
Let's say that you already have a website because if you didn't, I'd have to write a series of blog posts explaining how to do it or refer you to one of several tutorial sites that can help you build one from scratch. At some point you'll be pitched by an SEO vendor to improve your website's rankings with various search engines. WhiteHatSEO.org offers some guidance for "ethical" SEO practices in its member codex. Here are a few of their tips.
- Don't use shadow domains.
- Don't use doorway pages.
- Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase clients site's ranking or page rank.
- Don't use hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects, which is used to deceive users or present different content to search engines than it display to users.
- Don't send automated queries to search engines.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant words and phrases.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
This all good, but if you're a sole proprietor or a company looking at SEO for the first time, how would you know who was legit and who wasn't? And, given how diverse SEO methods are these days, which ones are the right ones to use? Is this a task that can be handled in-house or does it need to be outsourced?
Key SEO goals are intended to make sure that:
* Pages are indexed and a good site map exists
* Pages are well-structured with headers and subheaders, content-appropriate meta tags, etc.
* Descriptive page titles are used
* Keyword-rich inbound links are used
It looks a lot like a new spin on basic webmaster duties.
The easier you make it for a user who knows almost nothing about your business to find your website in the myriad of millions of sites, the better. Unlike the big yellow book from the telecom company that shows up every year to unreceptive household doorsteps, SEO allows you, the web domain owner, to be in control of advertising, product or service positioning relative to next best complements, and manage who visits and how. In that respect, SEO is more cost-effective than print advertisements. Opting for paid SEO is entirely up to your company's customer acquisition strategy.
At some point I'll follow-up with a post about black hat SEO and why ethics has nothing to do with whatever technique is used but how it is used that can get sites delisted from search engine indexes.
Remember: The only good SPAM is when its fried up with rice.
Related links:
White Hat SEO tips for bloggers
Questions to Ask a Paid Search Vendor
Questions to Ask SEO Consultants
Glossary:
White Hat
Shadow domains
Doorway pages
Link Farms
Have you been approached by an SEO expert pitching this: Hello, we have a great offer today for exclusive ad positioning with our partner sites. You get to pay for dots!
Fortunately, I have not.
I read an absurd article in DM News about pixel advertising; then I did a search on it and found PPC sites selling pixel ad space from $0.05 to $1.00 per pixel. How dumb do advertisers think people are? For those of you unfamiliar with computers or pixels for that matter, pixels are the smallest unit in a graphical image, typically a single dot by most definitions.
Let's say that the average webpage has the dimensions to fit a 1024 x 768 screen, without requiring its users to use the arrow keys to scroll off the page to view more content. Theoretically you can make your webpages as long as you want, provided that you paid for enough bandwidth for that information to be sent from your web server to a user's screen. Unfortunately, the more traffic your site receives, the more you'll have to pay for bandwidth usage unless you host your own web server.
A problem with this new fad is that many of these new pixel ad websites have a graph paper display of squares with the bought pixels displayed as text advertising. Bloody useless. No content. Why bother putting up ad space if there is no content? It's another outcropping of link farming, only worse, people are paying for it. You might as well put up a sign in the desert saying "Eat Here" when there're no restaurants around for hundreds of miles.
