There are a lot of ways to promote your website and, unfortunately, a lot of these methods are mistakes. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes (often referred to as Black Hat SEO) that you should steer well clear of.

1. Bad Neighbourhoods
These sites are also known as free for all (FFA) pages and link farms. They serve no other purpose other than to list tens of thousands of unrelated websites. Not only will these sites not provide your site with any traffic, certain search engines will ban sites who participate.

2. Over Optimization
Optimizing your web pages for a particular search engine can be a good thing. Over-optimizing can defeat the purpose, however. Search engines are catching on quickly to pages that appear ‘over-optimized’. Stuffing keyphrases into your pages is the most common problem. Never use hidden (invisible) text to add keywords. You will get caught, and your site will get banned.

3. Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are orphaned web pages that are typically optimized for a particular keyphrase and a particular search engine. They are promoted to the search engine in an effort to achieve high rankings. They are not linked back to by any other page on the website and, as such, search engines are able to flush them out quite easily and penalize the entire site.

4. Traffic Generation Scams
Services that purport to drive lots and lots of traffic to your website are typically not very useful. The traffic tends to come from seedy places like domain names that have lapsed in payment or commonly misspelled domain entries. Most of the traffic that hits these pages is accidental and is therefore of no value to you. Other traffic may come from other participants in the program who are required to visit other websites to gain ‘credits’ for their own site. Again, this traffic is not targeted and therefore of no value. Some traffic may even be generated by automated software!

5. Shadow Domains
Shadow domains are small, optimized, supplementary websites designed to drive traffic to a different website. The way this works is that an SEO company will design and optimize a website on your behalf. The danger here is that the you do not own this new website; the SEO company does! This means that if the relationship sours, they may choose to redirect this site’s traffic to whomever they choose (see #4 above), or even sell the site to one of your competitors! Be very, very careful of this technique, as some supposed search engine ‘experts’ even use this method (no naming of names here, however).

One final note: Any company that tells you that it can achieve ‘guaranteed’ rankings is either lying to you or using some of these Black Hat techniques. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee a number one result within (unpaid) search results.

When choosing a search engine optimization company to work with, be sure you feel comfortable with them and trust them. And if you decide to promote your website yourself, consider yourself a little better educated against these common mistakes

About the Author
This article was originally written by Robin Eldred, the president of Apis Design, a Web Design and Promotion company located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June 2004, and was slightly updated today June 2008 for current information and links to active services.

One of the hot new website promotion tips du jour is the Google Sitemap. This is a small XML file that sits on a website and provides information for Googlebot when it comes to visit. Is this file useful? What does it do? How do I create one? How do I get Google to find it? Well, let me tell you.

Firstly, the general consensus on whether or not a Google Sitemap is useful is that, well, the jury is still out. The official stance from Google is that this entire program is in Beta so there are no promises or guarantees. Perhaps by understanding what this file is for we can infer its usefulness.

A Google Sitemap is, essentially, an XML file that contains information on all the web pages in your site. You create this file, submit it to Google, and Google will read it. What Google does from there nobody really knows. You can specify certain parameters in the file such as the location (URL) of your web pages, when they were last modified, how often the pages are updated, and what each page’s “priority” is.

Perhaps Google is relegating these Sitemap submitted results to a secondary index where they compare the results to their live index. This might let them know how people use (and abuse) the program. It is my opinion that the vast majority of participants in this program are website designers and marketers who are trying to give their clients a teenie-weenie leg up on the competition within Google. That’s not to say that there isn’t any value, though.

It is possible that by telling Google where all of your web pages are you can improve your web page saturation in their index. This may indirectly improve your rankings by getting an unlinked or deeply linked page into the index that wasn’t previously there. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to know if Google is even using Sitemap information in their live index.

So now that you’ve decided that you want to create and submit a Sitemap of your own, here’s how:

1. Firstly, you need to create your XML file. Don’t bother doing it yourself. There is an excellent free online utility at http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/.

2. You must now submit the Sitemap to Google. Visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and login with your Google account. Don’t have one? Don’t worry – that’s free, too. Once you’ve logged in you can add as many Sitemaps as you like.

3. Don’t forget – whenever you update your website (by adding, removing or relocating web pages) be sure to repeat this process. You won’t need to resubmit your sitemap to Google, though.

Google is also touting their Mobile Sitemap program. This one, I believe, may be of greater significance. I believe that Google is building an index of mobile-phone friendly websites (Mobile Web Search Beta) and they are using these new Mobile Sitemaps as a way to get the public to help them seed the initial directory. The mobile web is in its infancy right now, so it wouldn’t surprise me if creating a Mobile Sitemap gave mobile sites a significant leg up. But again; no guarantees here – just opinion.

Happy Sitemapping everyone!

About the Author

This article was originally written by Robin Eldred, the president of Apis Design, a Web Design and Promotion company located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, February 2006.

First off, I should mention that before undertaking any of these steps, you need to gather up a list of quality keyphrases that you want to target. Skip the individual words (e.g. design, web, internet) and go for the phrases that people actually search for (e.g. Vancouver web design, web promotion company). Free online tools such as Google’s Keyword Sandbox and Wordtrackers – Keyword suggestion tool can help you find out which keyphrases people are actually searching for.

WordTracker (which is a subscription-based service) can even tell you how often the phrases are searched on and how many websites are competing for those phrases.

1. Proper file and directory structure

The names that you give your web files can be just as important as what’s in them. Certain search engines will pick out keyphrases from the names of your files and directories to use when indexing your pages. As such, naming your web page “/Web-Design/Vancouver-Website-Design.html” is far more valuable than simply calling it ‘services.html’.

2. Proper use of META tags

Most major search engines still make use of META tags when indexing your web pages, so you need to ensure you get them right. Be sure to include both ‘keyword’ and ‘description’ tags. Your keyword tag should have your most important keyphrases at the beginning, separated by commas, and keep the list as short as possible. Stuffing gobs of terms into this tag will only dilute the power of the terms your really want to go after. Stick to 5 to 10 if possible. Most search engines will only go about 50 characters in anyway. As for your description tag, write it in plain English and be sure to include your most important keyphrases. Try to keep it short and be sure to include your company’s name somewhere. And be sure that your content includes your chosen keyphrases. There’s little point to stating 5 keywords in your META tags and then not use them anywhere in your content.

3. Proper accessibility features

This is a step that takes practice and knowledge of HTML (so you may want to pass it along to your web designer). Accessibility and good search engine rankings go hand in hand. You need to ensure that your HTML code is optimized for these features. They include ‘alt’ text in all your images, ‘title’ tags for all your links, proper use of heading tags (H1, H2, etc.), and properly formatted HTML code.

For more information on accessibility, check out the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

4. Inclusion of key pages (Site Map, Links page)

Certain search engines will look for a couple of key pages on your website. These pages include a Links page and a Site Map. A Links page is important as it demonstrates to search engines what you feel are complimentary websites, and it also shows that your site is not a dead end (search engines are big proponents of the democratic nature of the Internet). A Site Map is a great page for search engines (especially Google… wink wink) as it gives the engine a single source from which to index your entire site. The page demonstrates that none of your pages are orphaned, and presents all your pages as ‘second level’ pages, even if they’re buried deep down in your site.

5. Useful, user-centric content.

This one may sound pretty obvious, but it is the most overlooked item of all. If you don’t have quality, useful content, then search engines won’t index your site or your pages favourably. This is a result of the occasional human being visiting your site from a search engine company, as well as visitors who bookmark and spread the word about your site. If you offer good information, word will get out, and other sites will start linking to yours. The more sites linking to yours, the better. So be sure you have something great to say.

By following these 5 simple steps, you should be able to improve your rankings and gather more targeted visitors to your website.

Good luck!

About the Author

This article was originally written by Robin Eldred, the president of Apis Design, a Web Design and Promotion company located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, March 2004, and was slightly updated today June 2008 for current information and links to active services.

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