Black & White Hat SEO and Why They Both Suck

A black hat is the villain or bad guy in an old western movie. He is the character wearing a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. The phrase is often used figuratively, especially in SEO slang, where it refers to a technique that breaks search engine rules. Google says that white hat SEO is someone that would write copy, give advice on site architecture and help in finding relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. Anything else would be black hat.

While copy is very important, without links going to that copy, no one will ever find it or read it. And no matter how good the site architecture is, without some outside influences it want make any difference. And I am all for submitting sites to directories but the truth of the matter is, they have very little affect on getting a site to rank.

Here’s my two cents on white hat and black hat.
White Hat SEO

A white hat SEO charges you money and gives you very little in return. At best you get a website where they have optimized your copy and then submitted to the online directories as well as set up a good internal linking structure. All of this is important but it is not going to over flow your pockets with cash.
Black Hat SEO

Depending on how black they get, it can get very dark. They can build you a list of 50,000 keywords, put a bot together that grabs text from different sites, mixes it up, making it unique and then builds a page for each of those keywords, optimized for the search engines, over night. They have blogs and other cloaked sites as well as a site set up on every free hosting site online in place for linking to these sites. They can have you tons of good traffic coming to your site over night. You can be making money in a week’s time, if you have a good site that will convert the traffic. However, you stand a chance of your site getting band from the search engines a week later. All the traffic stops and no one wants to touch you.
My Thoughts on SEO

I build my sites for the site visitors and market them for the traffic. It’s Google’s job to make their search engines work, not mine. I’ve got no desire to build sites and cloak pages, not because it is wrong or want work but because I do NOT want to get a site banned. However, I agree with building a list of keywords and creating a page for each of those keywords with unique content one each page. I also agree with setting up an internal link structure that will let you pass the highest amount of pr to your best pages with your keywords for those pages being used as anchor text.

A site with 10,000 or more pages can even allow you to rotate your keywords for the internal pages.

But it’s all a waste of time if your site does not convert the traffic.

I’ve spent a couple minutes today playing around on some forums and I’ve found that there are two types of SEO’s.

There are the ones that call themselves experts because they’ve read every single patent, email, article and have hung out at or spoken at SEO conferences. These people have studied the search engine papers and understand how they feel the search engines should work. They have their understanding of what is to come and spend a lot of time on forums and blogs debating how they feel the future will play out.

They are good to have around because they keep the rest of us from having to do what they are doing. However the more I’ve gotten to know these people the more I’ve learned that most of them get their clients from the forums or conferences. They rank their sites for obscured terms and point, yell and jump up and down at their rankings.

Then there is the other group. The doers. They’re not much interested in doing SEO work on your site because they’ve already built their own site that is ranked in the search engines and bringing in affiliate money. They’ve got sites making them $50 to $100.00 per day. No client to deal with, no deadlines to meet, no employees to hire and no phones to answer. They hang out on the forums and blogs but are not seen as the experts. They have their network of sites that they would rather not talk about.

I decided to try my hand at affiliate marketing. I signed up for an affiliate program and did a little keyword research. I did not have a domain name related to the topic so decided to use an old name to work around any age filters.

I figured anything lost in a keyword rich domain name would be made up in the age of the name. I took a list of about 1,500 keywords as a base to start with and sprinkled them out between 2 sub domain names and the main site. Now the site is still being set up so it has a long ways to go. I have to set up and write original text for 1,500 pages.

But I had a friend and SEO expert tell me that if I changed the topic of the website it would go into a filter and take months to rank.

The old back links want help for ranking on the anchor text but they should still pass pr onto the site and help ranking for the current text and information being put on the site. They should also help with internal linking.

The site is here rubber wristbands and the content and pages are being added now. The spiders want be able to spider the left menu. It has some pretty neat mouse over affects but got broken when I was adding pages and needs to be fixed.

At the bottom of the page or near the bottom are five links. These five links link from page to page throughout the site and throughout the sub domains names that are also being added.

I am adding text as well as adding internal links to each page from outside sources. If the sub domain names start ranking and the main site does not then it would indicate some type of filter in place that keeps a site content from changing.

And if this is the case I have to wonder how much of a change would set off the filter. But I'll need at least a month to see if there is such a thing.

If there is I will lose a lot of time on this site. Which brings up a thought about rather or not redirecting the current site to a new domain name would let me bypass the age filter.

I’m not saying that there is no need for on page optimization because it is important but I’m saying that it want get you traffic. It is important that you use SEO friendly url’s and it is good to use title tags, meta tags, alt tags, H1 tags, URL structure, internal linking, Content, site maps and the site is be usable.

But none of these things will get traffic to your site and are easy enough to add to a site. There is no reason to hire an outside firm to do what your web designer or CMS (content management system) can do at little or no charge. People hire an on site SEO firm thinking that they are going to see traffic to their site and many times this is not the case. The increase that can be seen with an on site SEO firm is very little in most cases and none at all in others.

Your return on investment would be better seen using PPC or going with a marketing firm that will work on getting links and traffic to the site as well as taking care of on site SEO needs. If I had a choice of hiring someone to handle SMO vs SEO, I would go with the SMO.

SMO (Social Media Optimization) will get both links and traffic to your site while on site SEO will not get either to your site.

I woke up this morning and had gotten an email from John asking me to take a look at a post over in another forum, that I’m a member of. The thread is talking about search engine optimization being dead and while I believe it is dead and will get into that in just a moment I want to address a point John made in the thread about using W3C.

W3C does not have anything to do with SEO and validating your site is not going to help you get traffic. You chances are better showing up at the Indy 500 with a 3 hp go kart than to make a living with traffic you get from validating your site.

Now on to the death of SEO.

I think SEO has been dying for a long time but the personalization is not what is killing it. About the only people that know what personalization is, is the SEO’s. The average Joe is going to go to Google and type in what they are searching for and that will be that. They do not spend enough time online to worry about personalizing their search results. I spend about 15 hours a day online and have not personalized mine, until about 5 minutes ago just to see what all the fuse is about. I do not see this becoming something that is used very much.

But I do believe SEO is dead

1.I’ve seen more than my fair share of people that are asking questions about SEO one day and the next day they have started an SEO business.

It has to be one of if not the easiest business to start. All you need is a website and to spend an hour on a couple forums and you have enough information to fake it tell you make it.

2.The guy that has just started his SEO business feels that he can charge $100.00 a month and get 100 customers and live happily ever after. This is not the case, in most cases SEO is a full time job and to get one site to rank can take you 60 hours a week for the next 8 months.

3.Most people want to promise the ranking for 10 keywords but to get the traffic needed to run an online business you need more in the range of 10,000.

4.The average Joe does not have the dedication to run his own business much less spend the needed time on your site to make it rank and get the traffic needed to run a real business.

5. The average customer is not going to wait for more than about 3 months without seeing the needed results before wanting out of the game.

6.The client agrees on getting so many keywords ranked in the top ten but when he finds those keywords do not bring in enough traffic to sustain his/her site they become upset and want more for the same price.

7.There are no guarantees, no matter how much you know or how many sites you have ranked in the past there are no guarantees that you will be able to rank the next one.

8.Doing it correctly means trying to rank the client for enough keywords that it will have an impact on his/her business. In most cases this means thousands of keywords. After making a list of the keywords you now need to build thousands of pages of unique text. After that you need to optimize those pages and start link building for each page.

I no longer do SEO, but have done it on and off in the past and have worked with customers who make in excess of $100,000.00 per month. I’ve also seen more than my fair share of so called SEO’s asking for help in finding clients and a lot of them do cold calling.

If the SEO’s are able to make you so much money than why do so many of them go to forums and cold calling to get clients.
Because their services do not work for themselves, yet they want to sell the services that they already can not make work to you.

Most of the SEO’s that have figured out how to make it work only do consulting or sell ebooks. They know it is both a pain in the ass and a huge responsibility to take on a client. By selling an ebook or only telling the client what to do they place a spacer between themselves and the responsibility.

I guess what I’m saying is that SEO is dead because

1.Most SEO’s do not know how to rank a site
2.The SEO does not charge enough money for the service and is unable to complete the task
3.The SEO is only trying to rank the site for a couple keywords

In most cases once a customer gets burned by a service he goes looking for other ways to make money and is no longer willing to spend more money for the SEO service.

Silicone Bracelets

I’ve been working with a silicone bracelet site for the last two months and I’ve had quite a time with it. The biggest problem is that none of the search terms will bring in enough traffic to amount to a whole lot. I’ve thought about this a good bit and decided to create sub-domain names and try and come up with a couple search terms for each of the sub-domain names.

A couple of the sub-domain names are a lot closer to being finished but I decided to start marketing the bracelet sub-domain name first because I felt it would be able to bring in more traffic then the others. Some of the search terms we came up with should be fairly easy to rank for like Buy Bracelets, Basics Bracelets, Attractive Bracelets, Create a Bracelet and many others.

I want to see if I can get the search terms showing up in the search engines in the next 7 days as well as get the sub-domain name to get 2,000 unique visitors per day in the next 7 days.

I was originally not going to post about this but I think I will now. When I first heard about PPP (PayPerPost) I thought what a neat idea. But the more I looked at it the more I decided I just didn’t like it.

1. Not enough money. It takes me around $6,000 a month just to break even, $10.00 a post with a limit on 1 or 2 post per day just want make the kind of money I need.

2. It looks to much like selling links, I’ve never been banned or gotten a site banned and I’m not about to start on something like this.

3. It ugly ups your blog with ads about companies I could careless about.

But let’s face it, finding good links are getting harder and harder to find and if you can pay someone to make some blog post for you I’m sure it’s worth the one time fee of $10.00.

I don’t fault John Scott for the idea. And he had a good idea on how to get some cheap links and told the people they could not tell anyone that it was paid advertising.

And John got some attention, as a matter of fact he got the attention of Google.

Now Scott claims that the links are undetectable

Contextual Links @ V7N are undetectable to search engines. Whether it be by human or algorithmic filtering, our links are impossible to detect. Additionally, an enforced non-disclosure agreement prevents both publishers and advertisers from revealing participating publishers and advertisers.

But he’s told everyone that wants to post these ads to let him know by signing up and posting that they have a blog and want to make some post for $10.00 a pop. They are signing up on his forum. Matt Cutts is watching this and some are even posting the blog address that are going to be using.

Hey John, it’s not undetectable anymore.

I’ve got a client that does around $100,000.00 every month, all from the Internet. This got me to thinking about my own business and trying to get it to do $100,000.00 a month.

The web design business I can do around $25,000.00 per month.

SEO, I can do around $10,000.00 a month.

I can start running the ads on my site again and can do around $10,000.00 a month with those.

At the most I can do around $45,000.00 per month. Now keep in mind that this is running wide open and there is a lot of over head included in this. We have employees but training people takes time and finding people that are trainable takes more time. I’ve hired many graphic designers that know how to use the programs but their designs were not up to the standards I’d like to have. SEO is the same way, if you’re truly going to take on a site and get it ranked then you need someone on it everyday and this someone needs to know what they are doing.

A lot of people only do one or the other, SEO or website designs and very few people have made $10,000.00 a month with ads. This means that there is by far more money in running a real business then in doing SEO or website designing. I have to wonder why there are so many people getting into these fields when they could use their talents on their own sites and make a lot more money?

I’m going to keep my SEO and Website Designing business and will be adding the ads back to some of my sites. But I’m also about to start some real businesses. I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to make the kind of money I would like to make it’s going to take a real business and I don’t feel that an SEO or website design business can make that kind of money.

I see people all over the Internet wanting to get your business ranked in the top of the search engines for $100.00. I’m wondering why they don’t take the time to start their own business and make all that money that they claim they can make for you themselves.

I’m working on a customers site. The idea is to build pages like this one for wristbands. From here I’ll write text for pages using keywords that have to do with wristbands like Advanced Wristbands and Affordable Wristbands

My thinking is that if I have 50,000 pages about wristbands set up for customers it is a lot better then only having one page about wristbands. But it is a lot of work.

I’ve seen a lot of people posting on different forums that either PPC does not work or that it does not work as well as organic results. I have to wonder how much these people know about setting up a page for PPC.

Paid Per Click works as well or better than organic results if it is done correctly but then there are very few people that understand how to do them correctly and this is the reason so many people say organic is better.

With Google AdWords I’m able to build a site for my visitors. If I want to use pictures, graphics or anything else to help convert that visitor into a customer, it does not matter. The site is 100% for the visitor and has nothing to so with the search engines.

Everything I do is about improving conversion rates and this starts with the keywords I choose. If I’m selling 18kt gold earrings then I do not want to bid on keywords like; jewelery, gold, earrings, rings, neck lesses or anything else that does not describe my product perfectly. The idea is to convert every single person that lands on that page. My keywords could be things like;

18kt gold earrings
Custom 18kt gold earrings
earring 18kt gold

and the list can go on and on describing my earrings to the point that any visitor that lands on that page will get exactly what he wants. Also the more exact my keywords the less the competition and the less I have to pay for each click.

Once I get my list of keywords together I need to create a page for each of the keywords and create those pages for converting visitors.

If my keyword is going to be 18kt gold rabbit earrings then the page they land on should have pictures of the 18kt gold rabbit earrings, the first line of text should say 18kt gold rabbit earrings, we should have text that tells them what’s in it for them and a call to action that guides them in the direction we want them to go.

The conversion is effected by the navigation, motivation, and trustworthiness of the landing page.

Now that we have the pages set up we need to add our keywords into AdWords.

AdWords comes with  broad match set as it’s default setting. This means that if my keywords are 18kt gold earrings my keywords will show for anything with 18kt gold earrings. Examples; 18kt earrings gold, Zales gold earrings and 18kt rings, Colombian 18kt gold and silver earrings. While you may rank for keywords you did not think of you will also rank for a lot of keywords you did not want to.

The AdWords also come with the default setting that allows you to rank for things you’ve never thought of. Let’s say my keyword is 18kt Colombian Gold Earrings, this default setting allows me to rank for 14kt Colombian Gold, Colombian Jewelery, Colombian silver and many others. The advantages are that I rank for keywords I never thought of the disadvantage is that I rank for keywords I never wanted to.

By Placing square brackets around my keywords I change this setting. [Colombian 18kt gold earrings] now I will only rank for that keyword when it is typed in exactly that way.

There is a lot more to the AdWords then this but I only wanted to make a point that the AdWords do work better or as well as the organic searches, if they are set up correctly and that there is a lot more to setting them up then just throwing some keywords together and starting to bid on Google. When someone says that they have tested and tried them and that the organic searches did better I have to wonder if they set them up correctly.

I’m not saying not to do SEO but don’t leave out the PPC.