SEO SEM for new Blackhats

New webmasters frequently get lost in the semantics of the two acronyms SEO and SEM. OK, some not-so-new webmasters get all tied up there too.

Too many times new blackhat marketers get all hot for automagic tools like content generators, markov mixers, blog spammers, etc, before they grasp the basics of SEO/SEM.

To save your pages from the evil Salurians and prevent your website from being cursed by the blackdeathbyproxybot, I’ll give you my take on SEO and SEM.

Warning: Taking everything you read on the internet as dead sure gospel may result in bleeding from the ears, nose, eyes, and other orifices. Your results may vary.

The Gospel by Dink

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That’s almost all there is to it. You are optimizing a webpage (not a site) for certain things you wish a search engine to give importance to.

If a search engine finds important things on your page (and if you’ve done your job it will) it will index the page and the things you placed there.

“What things?”, you asked. “All of your content.”, says I.

Note: Not all black hat marketers rely solely on scraped, markoved, spun, synonymized , content. Some of the top spammers either write their own copy or pay others to write it for them. Remember when we talked about what a blackhat site looks like? A great many blackhat sites are as white seeming as real (?) whitehat sites.

Content includes not only the words you write, but also the links, images, alt tags, title tags, etc. How you structure your page to include the importance of these items is SEO.

Most webmasters want the words (content) to be served up in the serps. They want the engines to take what the webmaster wants the page to be recognized for, and list it at the very top of the serps.

The process of structuring your page for your intended content has been discussed to death. It’s often wrong, but nevertheless it has been over-done. You can find the basic concepts of SEO just about anywhere. I needn’t go into the specifics of using the header tags, bold, italics, lists, citations, and so on. You’ll know all that already. Right?

What you may not know is that some of the advice out there is dead wrong. You may see this advice often: “Never try to optimize your page for more than two or three keywords. It just won’t work and the engines will not be able to place the page correctly”.

To which I reply: BS. Now, BS is related to MS which most will recognize as meaning ‘More of the Same’, and to PhD which means ‘Piled higher and Deeper’. Nope, my use of BS does not refer to Baloney Skins.

To demonstrate my concept of multiple keywords (or phrases if you prefer) , consider this idea. Let’s just say that I have a page about Physicians Insurance (I don’t). My title might be: Physicians Insurance Information. The description might read: The ultimate Physicians Insurance Information resource. Your guide to Physicians Insurance carriers, providers and solutions. (Or put your drivel in place of my drivel.)

My h1 tag would include the ‘Physicians Insurance’ words. The first paragraph would be the main pitch.

Next would be an h2 tag with the words ‘Carriers of Physicians Insurance’. The paragraph for that would include several alternatives to the carriers theme.

Now a list, ordered or unordered doesn’t matter, of links (with a good title tag) related to Physicians Insurance that point to your site or to other resources.

An h3 tag with the words ‘Insurance for Physicians explained’. Paragraph content to match.

H4…Well you’ve got the idea. No need for me to beat a dead horse.

I guarantee you that real search engines will read and sort the text content you have so thoughtfully provided. When it comes time to produce results of your page the engine can (and will) index your text content with many different combinations of words it found.

The number of keyword/content combinations could be calculated, but not by me. It is enough to realize that you can have dozens, (perhaps hundreds) of phrases that you want listing for, on one page. The emphasis you place on those phrases will help ensure placement in the serps.

If (when) a visitor to the engine types in a search that includes some or all of the words and phrases that you placed on your page, your page will be returned in the serps. Just where it will be located is a guess, but you’ll be in the serps for many, many, different phrases.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, go to your favorite SE and type in some sort of made up query, and hit search. I did some of the hard work for you. Here is one result of the query -red indian paintbrush blusher-

Heirloom Seeds, 2006, 60 days, long red root, tender and sweet, smooth skin, … indian paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa Engelm.) horse herb (Calyptocarpus vialis) …

Did you notice the separation between the words red and indian? It’s because the engine tried to find all of the words you searched for, in whatever order they occurred. That’s precisely how your page can have lots and lots of keyword optimization.

Your keywords do not have to be placed adjacent to each other to show up in the serps. For example, if you had a key phrase like …best surgeon insurance… you could put text like this on your page: ….sometimes not the best. But, for Surgeon Insurance, I’d suggest…… You get your keywords in the text and they will show up in the results.

If you use this method, you may reduce the number of pages required to cover a whole bunch of keywords. So instead of having to put up 10k pages, you may only need 1k. Full indexing of your kw at 10% of the risk. Not too shabby.

The effort to write your pages with a view to obtaining high serp listings should focus more on the long tail phrase combinations. The short tail, one or two word, phrases will take care of themselves.

Now then, you wrote a fantastic page full of content. You did the SEO things above, right? Well congrats. You’re now an official spammer. According to Google’s guidelines, if you do anything to enhance your chances for higher placement in the serps, then you are a violator. Spammer. Serves you right too.

You want the engines to grab that data and place you first in the listings. Right? Don’t we all. Well, no surprise here, this is where SEM comes into play.

SEM means Search Engine Marketing. It includes many techniques and methods which, if included, would make this post very much longer than it is. ‘Too long’ is one of my trademarks. LOL . Let’s tackle SEM in the next post.

~dink