Internet Marketing Journal UK

I have a great respect for the tried and tested SEO techniques that everyone uses to make sites rank more effectively. We’ll always use them as they’re are useful at achieving relevance. However rankings aren’t the be all and end all of SEO. Natural search is a marketing channel - it is not for just generating traffic its about making sales. Duly all SEO needs to be put in this context. I’ve had a quick look at some systems that sites use to achieve rankings which are just plain ‘old hat’ they get rankings but don’t always do much more to help the website.

When Accessible becomes Unacceptable

Showing/hiding text can be useful and can even be accessible in some circumstances. It can get your site killed by Google if you don’t play by the rules. Think of rotating textual sections: one content unit shows whilst four others site nicely in the code and these keyword rich units rotate. From an accessibility standpoint nothing is hidden - its all available for users to see. It is however sometimes when used excessively it hides text from users and is solely for the benefit of search engines. For a nice wee example have a look at Matt Cutts post about banning BMW.

Hiding Internal Links

An old SEO favourite: using show/hide code on a website purely to try and get some links that’ll help you get pages spidered and linked (from every page of a website). Its not really Darth Vader style SEO but more like Luke Skywalker being tempted and falling a little bit short in the Empire Strikes Back. You know when you mouse over an image and get a huge section of hidden links appear. Have a look at budget.co.uk and mouse over the random bit of text labelled ‘Popular Car Hire Locations’ at the bottom of the page. Silly me expected there to be more content and kept scrolling but I’m a user and not a search engine and that list wasn’t there for my benefit.

Spamming up your Header Tags

Well go no further than the source code of easycar.com. The whole textual section on the homepage is full of spammed up header tags. Don’t know whats going in the car hrie industry but there you go.

I could be over thinking this - am already dreaming of partying Halloween away, but SEO is about making clients money. Not about positions - though they are part of it. Not about traffic - though that is part of it. It about the utility you make of the positions you achieve, and the utility of the traffic you generate. Creating crap on page purely to get people through the door is outdated SEO in action. No doubt someone will shoot me down about this.

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