i) It allows them to create a separate optimized page for each search engine and another page which is aesthetically pleasing and designed for their human visitors. When a search engine spider visits a site, the page which has been optimized for that search engine is delivered to it. When a human visits a site, the page which was designed for the human visitors is shown. The primary benefit of doing this is that the human visitors don’t need to be shown the pages which have been optimized for the search engines, because the pages which are meant for the search engines may not be aesthetically pleasing, and may contain an over-repetition of keywords.

ii) It allows them to hide the source code of the optimized pages that they have created, and hence prevents their competitors from being able to copy the source code.

Page cloaking is implemented by using some specialized cloaking scripts. A cloaking script is installed on the server, which detects whether it is a search engine or a human being that is requesting a page. If a search engine is requesting a page, the cloaking script delivers the page which has been optimized for that search engine. If a human being is requesting the page, the cloaking script delivers the page which has been designed for humans.

There are two primary ways by which the cloaking script can detect whether a search engine or a human being is visiting a site:

i) The first and simplest way is by checking the User-Agent variable. Each time anyone (be it a search engine spider or a browser being operated by a human) requests a page from a site, it reports an User-Agent name to the site. Generally, if a search engine spider requests a page, the User-Agent variable contains the name of the search engine. Hence, if the cloaking script detects that the User-Agent variable contains a name of a search engine, it delivers the page which has been optimized for that search engine. If the cloaking script does not detect the name of a search engine in the User-Agent variable, it assumes that the request has been made by a human being and delivers the page which was designed for human beings.

However, while this is the simplest way to implement a cloaking script, it is also the least safe. It is pretty easy to fake the User-Agent variable, and hence, someone who wants to see the optimized pages that are being delivered to different search engines can easily do so.

ii) The second and more complicated way is to use I.P. (Internet Protocol) based cloaking. This involves the use of an I.P. database which contains a list of the I.P. addresses of all known search engine spiders. When a visitor (a search engine or a human) requests a page, the cloaking script checks the I.P. address of the visitor. If the I.P. address is present in the I.P. database, the cloaking script knows that the visitor is a search engine and delivers the page optimized for that search engine. If the I.P. address is not present in the I.P. database, the cloaking script assumes that a human has requested the page, and delivers the page which is meant for human visitors.

Although more complicated than User-Agent based cloaking, I.P. based cloaking is more reliable and safe because it is very difficult to fake I.P. addresses.

Now that you have an idea of what cloaking is all about and how it is implemented, the question arises as to whether you should use page cloaking. The one word answer is “NO”. The reason is simple: the search engines don’t like it, and will probably ban your site from their index if they find out that your site uses cloaking. The reason that the search engines don’t like page cloaking is that it prevents them from being able to spider the same page that their visitors are going to see. And if the search engines are prevented from doing so, they cannot be confident of delivering relevant results to their users. In the past, many people have created optimized pages for some highly popular keywords and then used page cloaking to take people to their real sites which had nothing to do with those keywords. If the search engines allowed this to happen, they would suffer because their users would abandon them and go to another search engine which produced more relevant results.

Of course, a question arises as to how a search engine can detect whether or not a site uses page cloaking. There are three ways by which it can do so:

i) If the site uses User-Agent cloaking, the search engines can simply send a spider to a site which does not report the name of the search engine in the User-Agent variable. If the search engine sees that the page delivered to this spider is different from the page which is delivered to a spider which reports the name of the search engine in the User-Agent variable, it knows that the site has used page cloaking.

ii) If the site uses I.P. based cloaking, the search engines can send a spider from a different I.P. address than any I.P. address which it has used previously. Since this is a new I.P. address, the I.P. database that is used for cloaking will not contain this address. If the search engine detects that the page delivered to the spider with the new I.P. address is different from the page that is delivered to a spider with a known I.P. address, it knows that the site has used page cloaking.

iii) A human representative from a search engine may visit a site to see whether it uses cloaking. If she sees that the page which is delivered to her is different from the one being delivered to the search engine spider, she knows that the site uses cloaking.

Hence, when it comes to page cloaking, my advice is simple: don’t even think about using it.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

List of do follow Social Bookmarking Sites

PR9
http://slashdot.org

PR8
http://digg.com
http://connotea.org

PR7
http://myweb.yahoo.com
http://squidoo.com
http://propeller.com
http://blinklist.com
http://furl.net
http://newsvine.com
http://www.mister-wong.com
http://bibsonomy.org

PR6
http://myjeeves.ask.com
http://spurl.net
http://corank.com
http://backflip.com
http://searchles.com
http://linkagogo.com

PR5
http://delicious.com/
http://bumpzee.com
http://shoutwire.com
http://faves.com
http://rawsugar.com
http://clipclip.org
http://spotback.com
http://buddymarks.com
http://connectedy.com
http://blogmemes.net
http://mylinkvault.com
http://jumptags.com
http://givealink.org

PR4
http://ma.gnolia.com
http://diigo.com
http://blogmarks.net
http://plugim.com
http://oyax.com
http://bmaccess.net
http://a1-webmarks.com
http://bookmarktracker.com
http://myvmarks.com

PR3
http://mixx.com
http://socialogs.com
http://syncone.net
http://mypip.com
http://ez4u.net
http://tedigo.net
http://yattle.com

Cost per action

Cost Per Action or CPA (sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement.

Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.) Google has incorporated this model into their Google AdSense [1] offering while eBay has recently announced a similar pricing called AdContext.

The CPA can be determined by different factors, depending where the online advertising inventory is being purchased.

Cost per mille

Cost per mille (CPM), also called cost ‰ and cost per thousand (CPT), is a commonly used measurement in advertising. In Latin mille means thousand, therefore, CPM means cost per thousand. Radio, television, newspaper, magazine, Out-of-home advertising and online advertising can be purchased on the basis of what it costs to show the ad to one thousand viewers (CPM). It is used in marketing as a benchmark to calculate the relative cost of an advertising campaign or an ad message in a given medium. Rather than an absolute cost, CPM estimates the cost per 1000 views of the ad.

Ad serving

Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.

Although many pay per click providers exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007. Minimum prices per click, often referred to as costs per click (CPC), vary depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular phrase or keyword list — with some CPCs as low as US$0.01. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular search engines. The PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt webmasters.

Keyword-based PPC

Keyword pay per click advertisers bid on search terms — keywords consisting of words or phrases, and possibly product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular keyword, the list of advertiser links appears, where the ordering of those links is based on the amount bid for the given keyword. Keywords are the very heart of PPC advertising, and are guarded as highly-valued trade secrets by the advertisers. Many advertising firms offer software or services to help advertisers develop keyword strategies. Content Match, a service offered by Yahoo!, distributes the keyword ad to the search engine’s partner sites and/or publishers that have distribution agreements with the search engine company.

If a visitor clicks through to a typical doorway page from a search engine results page, in most cases they will be redirected with a fast Meta refresh command to another page. Other forms of redirection include use of Javascript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP.

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give a penalty for using the META refresh command, some doorway pages just trick the visitor into clicking on a link to get them to the desired destination page, or they use Javascript for redirection.

More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance. Visitors are offered standard links as calls to action.

Landing pages are regularly misconstrued to equate to Doorway pages within the literature and should be avoided. The former are content rich pages to which traffic is directed to within the context of pay-per-click campaigns and to maximize SEO campaigns.

Another form of doorway pages are using a method called Cloaking. They show a version of that page to the visitor, but different from the one provided to crawlers, using server side scripts. They know whether it’s a bot or a visitor based on their IP address and/or user-agent.

The term linkbaiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices – all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.

It is actually a difficult term to be definative about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more linkbaiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).

In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years. From my earliest days of blogging four years ago I know I saw people doing lots of things to get links (even though the term was never used).

Is Linkbaiting Good or Bad?

Linkbaiting is often written about in negative terms. I regularly see people writing off a post that others have written or a comment others have left as ‘just being linkbait’.

I personally don’t like the term ‘linkbaiting’ on some levels as it does seem to have negative connotations. ‘Baiting’ has a sense of trying to trick or trap an unsuspecting person or thing into doing something that they don’t really want to do. While this is accurate with some forms of linkbaiting it is not true with others.

There is a lot of debate around both the term ‘linkbaiting’ and some of the practices that people talk about it incorporating. Some argue strongly that it is just a by-product of quality content, others argue that many linkbaiting strategies border on spam, others seem to talk about linkbait as being the answer to all web promotional problems (increasingly SEO companies are offering linkbaiting services).

My own opinion on whether link bait is good or bad is that it depends upon the type of link baiting that you’re talking about. I think some techniques that people use are just good standard blogging techniques – while other things that people do in the pursuit of links are destructive to the blogging community and I’d argue against them.

Like almost anything online, people use linkbaiting strategies for good and healthy purposes but also for dubious and ‘evil’. I guess in part we each need to think about our priorities, values and even ethics as we go about our blogging and explore this topic.

Some website owners, in order to save a few dollars, have taken it upon themselves to perform these link building strategies without the help of the knowledgeable experts; thinking to themselves:

“Why should I pay for a directory submission service when I can do it myself for free?”

In all honesty, you can perform your own link building services, and you don’t have to hire a directory submission service for your website’s link building. However, do you really know what you’re getting yourself into?
Even though directory submission services are typically low-cost and comparatively affordable when considering other website promotion and optimization strategies; there’s good reasoning behind hiring a professional directory submitter over performing this link building service yourself.

Directory Submissions are time consuming

The biggest downfall of performing your own directory submissions is that they are excessively time consuming for the novice directory submitter. Whilst a professional directory submitter can perform this link building service quickly because they have done it thousands of time before and have the proper tools to perform directory submissions quickly; the average Joe or Jane website owner will eat up three minutes or more per submission, easily. A professional directory submission service may be able to submit to 100 directories in just over an hour while somebody who is not familiar with the directory submission process will take, with a conservative estimate, over four hours to perform the same 100 directory submissions.

In order to be effective, directory submissions need to be submitted correctly

Novice directory submitters often times fail to adhere to the written and even unwritten guidelines of website directory submissions; which can lead to a wasted effort on your part because if you don’t submit your website to directories in a way that is generally viewed as acceptable by directory owners, regardless of whether or not there are any submission guidelines posted, you will inevitably suffer from a low acceptance rate from the directories.

For instance, a directory submission service understands how to properly form the website’s title and how many words are generally acceptable, how to word the description for better acceptance and which categories to submit to in order to receive the highest acceptance rate while working to get the client the best placement for SEO purposes. A novice directory submitter does not understand these subtle guidelines and will ultimately suffer because of it if they try to submit to directories on their own.

Other pitfalls of ‘self-submission’ to online directories

If you choose to perform directory submissions yourself to save the minimal amounts required by a directory submission service, there are other things that you will need to be aware of.

For instance, do you have the ability to determine whether a directory is “SEO friendly” and will help your website’s rankings in the search engines? A professional directory submitter can usually pinpoint a worthless directory right away. In fact, many directory submission services have pre-compiled lists of search engine friendly directories that they use on a daily basis so that their clients can rest assured that each and every submission takes place to a directory that will provide SEO benefit.

Do you have the ability to use multiple proxy servers to “mask” your identity during directory submissions? If you’re doing a large number of submissions, any professional directory submitter will tell you that using a proxy server during the submission process is absolutely necessary. There are many directories online that are run by the same company, and during the submission process, your IP address is tracked; if you happen to get flagged because of too many submissions, you’ll end up with a time-consuming hardship on your hands trying to weed out the directories that are prohibiting you from submitting to them.

Now this is not, by any means, an exhaustive list of reasons why you should use a directory submission service for your website’s promotion instead of doing it yourself. While initially it might seem like a good idea to perform directory submissions on your own, after you’ve spent a few hours on it and have done only a handful of submissions; you’ll better understand how much of a bargain you are getting when you hire a directory submission service for this website link building strategy.

What it all boils down to is this: a directory submission service is offered by professionals who understand how to perform this link building method efficiently and effectively. Unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, this link building strategy is much better when left to the professionals.

You can use two methods: optimizing your website for a small number of very popular keywords, or very many less popular keywords. You will see that in practice these methods are very well combined many times. There is a downside to using keywords as a main visitor’s attraction method: all sites uses it and it is harder for a newly developed webpage to get even close to the rankings of large, old sites that use similar keywords. One of the best ways to increase traffic to your site is to attract targeted visitors when thinking your search engine optimization methods. Remember, targeted visitors are those people that come to your site and who are searching for the products you are selling and are willing to buy those products or services. It is the number of targeted visitors that come to your site that should interest you and not the total amount of traffic. From the list of keywords, that you have gathered you must choose the core keywords for which you will optimize your web page. You will not be the only one using those keywords on your site, thus the competition for the selected keywords is very high. In order to see you site fits in once launched, you must have an idea about exactly how competitive your web page is. You can do this by reviewing a set of data for the first ten results displayed by the search engine when using the selected keywords. Among the data you should look at is the average Page Rank of each of the displayed results, the average number of links that guides people to these web pages. Other elements you should look at are the approximate number of pages on the Internet that contain the selected keywords (the total number of results displayed by the search engine) and the number of pages on the Internet that contain exact matches to the keyword phrase. By having all these numbers in mind, you can make an idea about your competition on those keywords and how easy or how hard it will be for you to get a top ranking for your web page.

Now that you have gathered enough information to make a thorough examination of the competition rate for all of your keyword phrases, you can go on to include a series of key phrases with moderate popularity but having an acceptable competition rate, which you can use to further promote and optimize your site.

Because the services provided by search engines about keywords and keywords statistics, do not be surprised if at first you will not be able to obtain the most efficient list of keywords from the beginning. After you have launched your web page, you can further analyze traffic and keywords statistics to finely tune your site. Only after launching your site you will be able to see the search engine’s rating of your site for particular phrases and you will also have the number of visits to your site for these phrases. Now you can see what key phrases are attracting people that use search engines to your site and what keywords do not work as efficient. If you notice that certain key phrases are not efficient in attracting traffic to your page, you can take measure in that direction: you can edit them, or you can take then out altogether. You may also discover that a keyword that you did not take into consideration very much at the beginning is bringing you more targeted visitors than one that you considered important and you can optimize your web site accordingly. If you know that keywords are efficient in bringing you targeted traffic, you can increase their frequency throughout your web page or even create new pages around those keywords and phrases. The techniques of search engine optimization are changing all the time and what had proven highly efficient some time ago may not be appropriate in the future. Therefore, that is why you will need to changes the keywords in time if you see that the traffic numbers are not satisfactory anymore. Nothing is built forever and you will constantly need to update both your web page and your SEO methods to been in touch with the current developments.

Also, remember that your main page attracts up to 50% of all the search traffic, and because it has the highest visibility in search engines, optimizing it for search engines and for the most popular queries related to your business field should be a top priority.

There are also a lot of tools out there that can help you to research your keywords. Typing “SEO Tools” in any search engine will return huge amount of useful SEO tools. There are also tools for link building, page research, marketing effectiveness, etc

The longer your domain has been in existence, and regularly spidered by search engines, the better your search engine ranking will be. Obviously, this is not easily changeable; however, if you envision creating multiple sites, it may be beneficial to register and set them all up and work toward content development all at once, even if each site takes longer to reach fully developed. This tip is particularly relevant for individuals creating sites to generate online advertising revenues, since they may well own and manage multiple sites. If nothing else, it can be helpful to realize that this factor in SE rankings simply takes time, and given time, if all else is in place, your SE rankings will improve.

Backlinking is another important factor in SE rankings. Backlinks are other sites that link to your sites. The more sites that the search engines see linking to yours, the better your SE rankings are apt to be. How can you go about getting backlinks to your sites? In the simplest terms you can trade links with relevant sites, submit your site to online site directories, and use your site in signature files on message boards. All of these will help improve your site rankings. Reviewing search engine optimization resources and message boards will reveal that there are services available to submit your site to a large number of directories, thus providing you with immediate backlinks for an affordable charge.

Keywords are one of the most essential and most common search engine optimization tools. Using keywords in your content is important, but using them in headers and anchor text is especially important. Anchor text is the highlighted text that is clickable, linking to another page on your site or another site entirely. Good use of anchor text will help with your SE rankings. Be certain that your anchor text varies, but is relevant to your keywords and site themes. While good use of anchor text for external links is important, it can be even more helpful when you use internal linking among individual pages on your own site. Limiting your external links to those that are actually useful and relevant is a practical tip when looking at ways to increase your SE rankings.

Overall on-site optimization for modern SE rankings is critical for a good overall ranking in major search engines. SE rankings can change easily, and the algorithms for determining them often change as well. Staying on top of current on-site optimization strategies, including using keywords, backlinking, heading and anchor text, is critical for good SE rankings. Your site will be much more successful if you achieve a first page site ranking, and even more so if you are in the top five listings on a major search engine, such as Google. Good SE rankings will bring traffic to your site. If you are running an ecommerce site, traffic will mean customers. If you rely upon advertising on your blog or informational site to bring in needed revenues, SE rankings are also critical for your overall online success. Taking advantage of practical, modern on-site optimization strategies can help your site rankings improve within just a few months, with minimal work or effort.