SEO Dos and Donts - Alt Tags, Text, Languages, Cloaking...
Pictures Worth 1000 Key Words
Well Maybe not every single image but they can add up. If you are going to have graphic images on your site, make them count.Search engines are unable to view graphics or distinguish text that might be contained within them. For this reason, most engines will read the content of the image ALT tags to determine the purpose of a graphic. By taking the time to craft relevant, yet keyword rich ALT tags for the images on your web site, you increase the keyword density of your site.
Although many search engines read and index the text contained within ALT tags, it's important NOT to go overboard in using ALT Tags as part of your SEO campaign. Most engines will not give this text any more weight than the text within the body of your site.
Hidden Words Fool No Search Engine
Invisible text is content on a web site that is coded in a manner that makes it invisible to human visitors, but readable by search engine spiders. This is done in order to artificially inflate the keyword density of a web site without affecting the visual appearance of it. Hidden text is a recognized spam tactic and nearly all of the major search engines recognize and penalize sites that use this tactic.Size Matters – Bigger Isn’t Always Better
This is the technique of placing text on a page in a small font size. Pages that are predominantly heavy in tiny text may be dismissed as spam. Or, the tiny text may not be indexed. As a general guideline, try to avoid pages where the font size is predominantly smaller than normal. Make sure that you're not spamming the engine by using keyword after keyword in a very small font size. Your tiny text may be a copyright notice at the very bottom of the page, or even your contact information. If so, that's fineGeographic Considerations – No Speek Uh D English?
Almost all Search Engines serve different countries. Search Engines do list content from other countries but most of the content that is listed is either US or UK dominated content.With this in mind, most popular Search Engines have started deploying regional editions that serve only a specific country. For instance, Google has an Indian edition (http://www.google.co.in) that caters to the Indian audience.
Given below are some of the types of Search Engine Regional Editions.
Regional Interface is nothing but a translated version of the main Search Engine. Many Search Engines have interfaces in different languages such as French, German, Spanish, Japanese etc.
However, the only difference between these regional interfaces and the main version of the Search Engine is that the language used on the interface is not English. In other words, if you search using a keyword on both the interfaces, the listings are exactly the same.
Regional Interfaces are aimed at an audience that does not understand English.
Human Categorization, as the name suggests, is categorization of websites by human beings. Search Engine employees categorize different websites into regional listings. Websites that are more relevant to a specific country are listed in that edition of the Search Engine. Hence, for a
French edition a search would mainly list documents from France. This eliminates the problem mentioned above. The only caveat being that the whole process is manual.
Directories such as Yahoo, LookSmart, and Open Directory make use of this process.
It’s A Big World To Search Out There
Domain Filtering automatically segregates websites from different countries into their respective regional editions. This segregation is done on the basis of domain names. For instance a website from Australia would generally have a domain .au. The Domain filtering mechanism looks at the domains of all websites and creates a country specific edition listing.
Some Search Engines also have region specific editions which contain listings from the whole of that region. As an example: A French edition of Google may also return German or Spanish websites in some cases.
Domain Filtering has a drawback though. This mechanism can only filter out websites based on the domain name, and hence .com is always considered to be a United States website. This is obviously not true. Many websites from other countries also have .com domains.
The Best Solution
Domain crawling is probably the best solution for maintaining both a main site and a regional version. With domain crawling the regional listing is far more comprehensive as compared to the other mechanisms explained above. Some pages, although regional may be listed in the main listing as well.
A couple of years ago spamming may have worked wonders for your website. However, with sophisticated algorithms being developed by all popular search engines, spamming can only backfire. Algorithms, these days, can easily detect spam and not only ignore your website but also ban your website.
Besides, instead of spending considerable time and effort on spamming you can always follow other proven strategies and have a higher rank with most search engines. Spamming can also easily irritate readers. Think about it – if your homepage has unnecessary repetitions of a particular keyword, it is bound to frustrate a reader. Consequently your site, instead of being content rich, would be junk rich. This can have nothing but a negative impact on your business.
Search engine cloaking is a technique used by webmasters to enable them to get an advantage over other websites. It works on the idea that one page is delivered to the various search engine spiders and robots, while the real page is delivered to real people. In other words, browsers such as Netscape and MSIE are served one page, and spiders visiting the same address are served a different page.
The page the spider will see is a bare bones HTML page optimized for the search engines. It won't look pretty but it will be configured exactly the way the search engines want it to be for it to be ranked high. These 'ghost pages' are never actually seen by any real person except for the webmasters that created it of course.
When real people visit a site using cloaking, the cloaking technology (which is usually based on Perl/CGI) will send them the real page, that look's good and is just a regular HTML page.
The cloaking technology is able to tell the difference between a human and spider because it knows the spiders IP address, no IP address in the same, so when an IP address visits a site which is using cloaking the script will compare the IP address with the IP addresses in its list of search engine IP's, if there's a match, the script knows that it's a search engine visiting and sends out the bare bones HTML page setup for nothing but high rankings.
There are two types of cloaking. The first is called User Agent Cloaking and the second is called IP Based Cloaking. IP based cloaking is the best method as IP addresses are very hard to fake, so your competition won't be able to pretend to be any of the search engines in order to steal your code.
User Agent Cloaking is similar to IP cloaking, in that the cloaking script compares the User Agent text string which is sent when a page is requested with it's list of search engine names (user agent = name) and then serves the appropriate page.
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To sum up, Search engine cloaking is not as effective as it used to be, this is because the search engines are becoming increasingly aware of the different cloaking techniques being used be webmasters and they are gradually introducing more sophisticated technology to combat them. It may be considered as unethical by Search Engines if not used properly.
- Leon Edward
Learn more about seo search engine optimization from Home Business IT @ http://www.homebusinessit.com/searchengineoptimization.html
Leon Edward helps people to start, build, market and promote internet home business and ways to earn money online at home at http://www.HomeBusinessIT.com Get Your free legitimate internet business kit bonuses and training articles, visit http://www.homebusinessit.com/newsletter/
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