Tuesday 26 August 2008

5 Things You Must Not Do On Your Niche Marketing Sites

Over the last few posts we have talked about things to do on your website to generate traffic, increase conversions, improve your opt in email list

Surfing through the forums, I have come across a disturbing trend of trying to trick the search engines to get ranking.

Problem is a lot of the sites teaching these methods do not have a sign up stating 'black hat' or 'this could get you banned'

So for clarification for any affiliate marketing newbies reading this, here are the five top things that are against the TOS of the search engines that you may have previously thought were legit

If you have been doing any of these or are contemplating doing them, the only useful advice is

STOP!

1. Keyword Stuffing: This refers to the practice of including your keywords in your copy an excessive number of times. I know that good SEO says your keywords and variations of it should appear often in your copy. However there is such a thing as too often. This actually does not help your rankings as the search engines can see right through it.

2. Buying Links. You build a website and you come across an ad for 2000 backlinks for $20. Sounds tempting, all those links from other sites pointing back to your website. Again not a good idea. The search engines especially Google, who have the lion's share of the market, frown upon paid for or purchased links and will reduce your ranking in the search engine results pages when they catch up with you

3. Hidden Text: This is the practice of adding your keywords to your webpages using the same colour as your page background, making the text invisible to human visitors but visible to the search engine bots. Again stay away from this. You'll just get burnt

4.Cloaking: Very big with blackhat marketers who are looking to make a quick profit from a website in a short period of time. The timing is crucial to them because they know the search engines will get clued on to what they are up to pretty quickly and shut them down.
Cloaking just means displaying one version of a webpage to human visitors and via software, having another version for the search engine robots. The page shown to the bots are often full of keywords and other SEO components but the content would not make any sense to a human visitor. This results in an artificial increase in ranking of the website but not for long
The search engines will detect your cloaked pages and... yes shut you down

5. Click fraud: Some webmasters monetize their niche sites with adsense. The TOS of Google adsense clearly states that you should not click on your own ads. Click fraud is the practice of clicking on adsense ads on your own websites to try to generate an income. Not good. You will get found out and you will get banned

So just a few things to pay attention to while trying to promote your niche marketing sites

Till next time

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Ami,
I am new to affiliate marketing and I'm in the process of building a website and those 5 things not to do are very good advice. some of them I never even heard of such as buying links to point to your page. I also never heard of the hidden text thingy. That must take a lot of work to do. And the cloaking, that is really so clever. But with all this money out here to be made why would people go to such lenghts? Is it easier to do or greed?
My name is Yvette

ami said...

Yvette It's great that you have got stuck in and are building your own site

The problem with all the methods described is that they can get your sites banned by the search engines

There is no doubt that they are effective in generating traffic and falsely inflating the website's ranking, but they are unethical

In affiliate marketing you want to build a business that lasts the long term so ethical marketing is the way to go

Yes it takes time to build up traffic and a good income with ethical marketing but in the long run it pays off loads

Good luck with your business