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

Pay Per Click (PPC) Programs

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Management

Search engine positioning and placement is critical for increasing your website traffic. Just a few good positions can drive traffic in thousands to your website, day after day. While search engine optimization is an essential long-term strategy to boost ‘organic’ search engine rankings, it takes time and there are no guarantees. That’s why paid search advertising is a necessary supplement to organic search engine optimization. With pay-per-click advertising, you can get any amount of traffic and first page search engine exposure if you are prepared to pay for it.

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising is a feature that is now being offered by the major search engines. Through a competitive bidding process, you can buy a favorable position on the search engine results for specific keyword search phrases that you choose. You pay for results only on a “per click” basis, hence the name Pay per Click Advertising. The twin advantages of PPC advertising are immediate visibility and strategic placement. When you opt for PPC advertising the listing process can be done within just a couple of days. Which means that you can feature ‘right up there’ almost immediately. Of equal importance is the fact that you can determine your ad placement within the search results, depending on your budget. This method of advertising is highly valued by advertisers, because it gives them complete control over their ad spends and also due to the fact that they can monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns and take rapid corrective action. This results in minimal wastage of vital ad budget allocations. Right now, Pay-per-Click is the fastest, cheapest, easiest and most effective method of advertising on the Internet. While almost all major search engines offer Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising opportunities, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Overture represent the two best Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising programs on the Internet today.

The most popular PPC provider on the internet today is Google. It is commonly known as Google Cost-per-Click Program.There is no monthly minimum spending requirement and bids start at $.05. Himshilp professionals have the unique qualification of having worked with Google Adwords right from its inception. This has provided us with deep insights on how the system works and how to work around its limitations. Our vast experience helps us in structuring your ads intelligently and in getting maximum mileage for every dollar you spend.

Yahoo-Overture is the other major PPC provider. We know what works and how to generate low-cost traffic to make your PPC adds attract clients starting the very first day. We setup your online PPC advertising program, making it easy and trouble free to attract new clients. Our experience and expertise will ensure a highly cost effective PPC program optimized to meet your marketing goals. Across a wide spectrum of clients, we have over the years, developed highly effective PPC campaigns resulting in maximum click through rates (CTR). Our PPC Experts constantly monitor your PPC bids for the different keywords, the click through rate for those keywords, the ROI and other minute details. We observe conversion rates over time and edit campaigns resulting in maximization of ROI.

We periodically provide you with comprehensive reports regarding the amount of clicks per keyword, individual and average click through rate, the individual and average cost per click and other reports. Monthly management services are also available to ensure you get optimum results month after month.

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

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization services

Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site. Many web sites are expensive to build and are technologically advanced but they cannot be ranked by the search engines because they were never optimized.

The objective of search engine optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and do submission of your site to the available search engine indexes and directories.

The initial step is to build a great content-rich website. The last step is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory.

There are no search engine optimization secrets - just ranking and promotion methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords

What I suggest is to carefully , by using your instincts and Internet experience, do the following

• Identify your competition
• locate potential back links to your URL
• Identify the relevant keywords (its far better to have ranks for more than one keyword or phrase than to be at the top for only one keyword)

Avoid these

• Repetition of keywords
• Use of irrelevant keywords
• Use of colored text on same-color background
• Duplication of pages with different URLs
• Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL

After keywords identification, follow these

• Add keywords in content
• Submission of website to major search engines
• Recheck search engine registration (it will take few weeks to get your site listed in engines and directories)
• Check the search engine placement (please keep on checking the results as you have to feed this input to your further optimization process)

Repeat all the steps mentioned above periodically to keep your listing improving

Search engine optimization has become a necessity for companies that are serious about increasing Internet business and achieving prominent rankings in the major search engines.

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