Black Hat Practices and SEO

There are certain practices which are quite aggressive in nature and which uses methods to manipulate the search engine rankings. These practices are known as black hat practices.

Black hat practices comes under UNEHICAL search engine practices. The technical background of Black Hat practice is that search engine crawlers are robots. They don’t have brains like human beings hence they can not think beyond a point. Few search engine marketers use this to their advantage, making search engine crawlers to stay more on their website and rank their website higher. This results in higher rank and in turn higher traffic. However search engines in principle advocate to stay away from these practices.

Flip side:

Professional practicing black hat practices see this as a quick money making opportunity as it can get heavy organic traffic on the website in a short span of time.

• Quick money can be made by seo professional
• Heavy organic traffic can be generated to boost sales
• Good short term strategy to generate sales

Downside:

• Not ethical (Again ethical is a relative word)
• Black hat campaign can result in banning your website domain from search engines
• Any black hat campaign can not be a part of long term strategy as once you are identified you will be out of indexing process.
• It is bound to boomerang you, resulting in loss of traffic

To sum up

Its better to avoid these practices as they are not good for a long term strategy planning. Any good online business grows on ethical practices and a good marketing strategy and a black hat practice can not be a part of any good marketing strategy.


Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Smart Tips for Managing PPC Programs

Pay per click programs are highly effective way to get instant traffic on your website. This is a good tool to attract quality and highly targeted traffic. The bids normally start from .05 cents which is quite good as you can get a good number of visitors by spending a little amount. Even if bid is .10 cents, you can get 10 visitors by paying $1

Smart Tips for Managing PPC programs

• Identify the set of keywords which clearly defines the services / products you offer. This clearly means that you need to remove unnecessary keywords which might be related to your category but can not generate quality traffic to your website.
  
• Focus on product/service which you wish to sell. Remember, its selling service and you have to be specific in PPC approach. You can not have your whole catalogue on your single campaign.
  
• Take bottom up approach for bid management. Start with a certain minimum value and the scale up the campaigns on a day to day basis till you arrive at an optimum level where your goals are met. ( an optimal combination of your budget / CPA / Bid / position)
  
• Come up with a precise ad copy. Include text in the campaign which clearly states about the service / product you are promoting in the ad campaign. If possible, try to include pricing in the ad copy if you are selling any product. This will increase the CTR if your pricing is competitive.
  
• Setup the campaign and bid on maximum relevant keywords possible. This will increase the possibility of clicks.
  
• Track you campaign: This is the most important step. You need to place tracking to track the ROI. You need to restrict your CPA (cost per acquisition). Big programs like adwords/overture can generate huge volumes and your money can vanish in a day. So you need to track your returns, and this is the only way by which you can know whether its working out for you or not.
  
• Keep tweaking the campaigns in terms if bids and ad copy by looking at the reports. An attractive ad copy can increase the chances of getting clicks.
  
• Do not rush for position #1. Settle for positions 4/5/6 as bids will be lower and visibility will also be OK. This will lower your CPA and increase ROI.
  

If you try the above points, you can expect improvements in your ROI and in the long run, constant bid management can get you sustained success in managing PPC programs.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp