Yes, you read that correctly. There are benefits of “black hat” techniques used to manipulate rankings in the search engines.

If you work within the search engine optimization industry, or you are a webmaster, you have most likely already encountered some black hat techniques in play. As someone who does SEO for a living, it’s in my best interests to know what the techniques are in order to combat them.

Problem is, to a black hat, it’s all worth it. While the majority of us sweat and labor and obsess on getting top rankings in Google and other search engines, the black hatters sit back and laugh at our efforts.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about how Press Releases can help your marketing campaigns on the Internet. But besides from people telling you, do you have any quantitative evidence that it’s worth the time to craft a newsworthy release?

From a search marketing perspective, this is one of the best ways of killing two birds with one stone. Besides getting exposure for your site, you are also creating web saturation. By having the possibility of your release getting picked up by multiple media outlets, you quickly and cheaply get eyeballs looking at your product or service, and ultimately, traffic to your site.

There are many discussions about acquiring links from the Internet. While all links matter, some have much more value than others.

Earned links are thought to have much more viral value, as they are links that people place on their sites linking to yours by their own accord. Often, your site provided some value, whether it was in entertainment, information or an offering of a great product or service.

Depending on where the link is placed, the search engines will place a certain amount of value or “weight” on the link found on the site. While this same technique can be falsely accomplished, over time, these earned links will continue to accumulate, with little effort on the web owner.

Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google’e Blog, Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.

There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)

First, create a file named sitemap.xml

Use the following code in any HTML editor:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://www.sitename.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-30T14:12:14+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

SEO or search engine optimization, Every webmaster knows about this and struggles to make his website as search engine friendly as possible. But how many actually know what seo is all about? And how many follow this correctly?

THE BASICS

As we all know at least 70% of a website’s visitors are from search engine like GOOGLE, YAHOO! etc. So it is understood that your website must be search engine friendly enough to actually make Google understand what is there in your site. This is Search engine optimization.