|
Cloaking
The search engines are pretty good at their jobs. This is especially true of
the larger, more established monster listings such as Altavista and Google.
They have to be good, as they are in a constant state of war with search
engine spammers (webmasters who attempt to artificially increase their
rankings in the search engines by unethical means).
You see, the higher a site ranks in the major search engines, the more hits
it receives. In many cases, hits directly translate into dollars. Thus, a
web site which can, say, double it's hits can often double the amount of
money it makes.
What does this have to do with anything' Well, it's common knowledge that
sites which do not show up on the first three pages of listings in a major
search engine may as well not be listed at all.
In addition, it's important that a site get listed on popular keywords. For
example, far more people search for the word "plumber" than "person who
fixes pipes". while you might get a few visitors with the later term, you
will not get anywhere near as many as the first.
Each of the major search engines has different rules that it uses to rank
web sites. Some engines want metatags, some prefer straight text and others
want a mixture of both. Some search engines may be fine with dozens of
keywords in a metatag, and others want only one. The list goes on and on -
each search engine looks at different things in a page.
Why do they go through all of this trouble' They are attempting to determine
what your page is all about. The theory is the more a particular keyword (or
phrase) is mentioned (and in more ways), the more likely your page is about
a particular subject. Thus, if "plumber" appears in the text a few times
Diversify Or DieDiversify Or Die... Business has been a little slow on the internet lately as you may have noticed, sales have ..... (especially in the H1 and H2 tags), in a metatag, an ALT tag and the title,
then it's likely your page is indeed about plumbers.
On top of that, the search engines must protect against spammers. These are
people who use various tricks to fool the engine into thinking they should
be well ranked. For example, a common technique a few years ago was to
include very small, invisible text containing keywords. The visitors would
not see this text but the search engine would and thus would be fooled (the
search engines figured this one out a long time ago and it no longer works).
When the search engines discover a web site is spamming, their response is
to either (a) drop the site way down in rankings or (b) ban it entirely. If
your site has ever been banned from one of the big engines, then you
completely understand how devastating it can be to be dropped all of a
Promotional AdvertisingA Dynamite New Web-Based Reporting Service May be Just What You Need to Check Your Search Engine Rankings By Robin R. ..... sudden.
But then again, getting to first can be so rewarding. It can mean the
difference between a thousand dollars in sales and a million. Literally.
But how do you get to be first with a particular keyword in as many search
engines as possible' One way is to look at other sites to see what they have
done and, ahem, steal the ideas (or just copy their keywords to your own
pages).
But there is a wildcard in all of this, and that's the simple fact that the
search engines use different rules to determine the ranking of a page. One
engine allows three keywords and will rank higher if it finds three, another
might want those keywords to be near the top of the page, and still another
might want them in a comment. The second engine (the one that wants the
keywords near the top) might actually drop your rankings if it finds three
keywords.
Marketing PlanningAffiliate Marketing: Another Way to Win Copyright 2004 Jude Wright All Rights .....
One of the more common ways to handle the problem of different search
engines is to have different entry pages. Using this method, you might have
a page which is perfect for Google, another which is exactly right for
Altavista and a third which is made for Northern Lights. The problem with
this, of course, is your visitors will be directed by each engine to pages
which are probably not exactly right for human beings. After all, the
engines work even better with all of those fancy tables and lists which make
your pages look so good. And, of course, this does nothing to prevent
someone from stealing, uh borrowing, your keywords.
There is a technique which appears, on the surface, to solve every single
problem that you could dream of having with rankings and different search
engines. This technique will make it header for people to steal your
keywords and it will allow you to have different pages for each search
engine, while still landing your visitors on a page perfectly suited for
human reading.
It's called "cloaking" and it is exactly what it sounds like. The technique
is pretty simple, really. You see, search engines are very nice about
identifying themselves. They do this for a number of reasons, one of which
is to make it easy for a web site to allow or reject their attentions
(believe it or not, sometimes there are good reasons NOT to be listed in a
search engine).
......
Read More ...
|
