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All’s fair in love and SEO
When you’re trying to launch a website, sleep becomes a precious commodity. So it was with a sort of numb bafflement that we greeted the discovery two days after our launch that one of our competitors had indulged in what we considered to be a deeply unsporting method of boosting their traffic: they had created a Google AdWords campaign for the term Smarta.
We were confused. Wasn’t that some sort of copyright infringement? And even if it wasn’t against the law, wasn’t it, well, just a little bit unfair? Apparently not, actually. An impromptu Twitter survey quickly found out what the entrepreneurial world thinks of the practice – and, according to our followers at least, it’s fine. “C’mon, it’s fair,” berated Veedow.com co-founder Fabio De Bernardi when we expressed our outrage. “They try to get the same audience! Do the same back!”
We got to thinking. If that sort of behaviour is fair game, we pondered, there must be hundreds of other underhand ways to boost your rankings. Heck, this must just be the tip of the iceberg. So we rang up two SEO experts, and asked them to skip basics such as metatags, descriptions and keywords, and get to the nitty-gritty: the industry’s dirtiest tricks.
1. Orphan your landing pages
Not quite as brutal as it sounds, this involves creating ‘orphan’ landing pages dedicated to certain key phrases or search terms. “If I was an online pet store which sold dog food, cat food and bird food, I would create landing pages around each product,” explains Rob Arkell, sales and marketing manager of search engine marketing company Impact Media. Orphan pages are generally related to pay-per-click (PPC) – if you go to Google and type in ‘Henry Ford’, the Amazon advert on the right-hand side of the page will take you to a page dedicated to books by or about Henry Ford – one which won’t be available to users within the Amazon site. “A regular site user wouldn’t necessarily ever see that page unless they find it through pay-per-click,” clarifies Chris Hough, head of search strategy at NaturalRanks.co.uk.
Even if you don’t have pay-per-click campaigns, creating dedicated landing pages will also help you to boost traffic, allowing you to put your key search terms between those golden tags which, as Hough explains, is invaluable. “Search engines will, just like when you read a document, give more emphasis to words between header tags.”
2. De-jazz
Ever wondered why many Flash-based pages give you the option of looking at an HTML version, even though almost every browser available now supports Flash? It’s not because they’re being kind to technophobes – it’s all for SEO. ?”Search engines can’t read JavaScript or Flash yet, so you need to create a plain-text equivalent,” says Hough.It’s bad news for all-singing, all-dancing flash sites, but this also affects sites such as Smarta, which use Ajax menus to navigate. If you can’t bear to be without that jazzy little navigation bar, though, there is a way around it. ?”If you want your SEO to work well for two or three specific phrases, you can put links to those landing pages at the bottom of your site.” Don’t go overboard, though: too much, and Google will think you are pushing your luck. As Hough explains: “Don’t go crazy, don’t go putting 10 or 20 links at the bottom of your page – just keep it to two or three and it should give your site a boost.”
3. Pimp out your footer
Search engines are all about the user experience: they want to retain their market share and they wants to see their users return again and again, which means they need to give their users the most accurate, relevant, reliable search results they possibly can.
One way of gauging the reliability of a website is to look at its footer. Many search engines work on the basis that if a site has a terms and conditions section, it’s probably fairly well thought-out. “Essentially, it ’s becoming more and more important to have things like terms and conditions, privacy policies, and a link to your contact form,” says Hough. ?Google takes it one step further. “Because it has maps, Google likes sites which have their addresses on so it can pick them up and put them on a map. It wants to recognise exactly where your business is based.”
4. Social media
As even the most SEO-illiterate technophobes should be aware, SEO rule number one is the more pages linking to your site, the higher your site will be ranked. Generating those links is difficult, though: unless you have a media-friendly product or you have managed to encourage bloggers to expatiate on the subject of your services, you may find you have to resort to link exchanges with other websites.(Social media, though, is helping to change all that: by creating groups and profiles on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, you can create your own links to your site using key phrases which will help to boost your copy for your chosen search terms.)
5. Misspellings
If you have a pay-per-click campaign, using misspellings may be a cheaper way of boosting your click-through ratio. “If we take a common search term such as ‘mortgages’, how many people spell it without the ‘t’?” asks Arkell. “It’s a way to target traffic that would have been overlooked by competitors and draw more traffic for less cost, because a common misspelling is going to be far cheaper as a phrase than the correct variation of the term.”
6. Negative ad copy
Another pay-per-click technique. While encouraging as many people as possible to click on your ad may improve your traffic figures, those figures won’t necessarily convert to business if your site isn’t what your visitors are looking for. By slimming down the number of visitors to your site, you should be able to enhance your conversion rate. “For example, say a business does home cinema installation,” says Arkell. “They might say ‘we’re not expecting to deal with people who want an LCD screen hung on the wall, we want to deal with people who want to spend at least £30,000 on the full package. So we’ll create one normal ad which says ‘Home cinema from the UK’s leading experts’, but we’ll do another one which says ‘Home cinema installations, minimum spend £30,000. “You’ll see a much lower click-through rate (CTR), fewer people are going to respond to it because some people will be looking for a cheap option, but you’ll find the conversion rate is far, far higher, which means you’ll be spending less on wasted clicks.”
7. Cash in on your competitors.
If all else fails, why not just make like our esteemed peers and buy up the brand names of your competitors? Google made it possible to do so earlier this year – but watch what you put in your ad. “You’re able to bid on any trademark or brand, but what you can’t do is include the brand name in your ad copy. If I decided on Bose, for example, for an audio equipment company, I could bid on their name, but if I run a company called Rob’s Electronics, I can bid on the company name, but I wouldn’t be able to try and pose as Bose as such.”
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About the Author
Smarta.com is a business support and advice network for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Access real business advice from established entrepreneurs and network with other people starting and running their business. Practical business guides, news, features, tools, video interviews with top entrepreneurs, wikis, live Q&A and free professional legal advice make Smarta the one-to-stop-shop for anyone seeking reliable, real-time business advice. Follow us on Twitter: @smartaHQ
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