Sep

Whitehat SEO Is A Safe Bet For Long-Term Search Engine Rankings

Bill on September 8th, 2008

Whitehat SEO is generally thought to be the better kind of SEO. We agree in principle. The principle we agree with is that any Search Engine Optimization work that you do, should be done with an eye to protecting your website from search engine company backlash at some future point. (See Google’s Webmaster Guidelines)

If something feels like it would be a bad idea in the future, then we recommend that you should avoid doing such things.

Any technique used that creates short-term gains may be justifiable for most webmasters, but if that technique gets your website banned from Google, two years from now, recovery will be nearly impossible. Most websites that get banned by Google will never get unbanned.

The SEO game we all play as individual webmasters has some serious penalties behind it, if we screw up.

If we know that hidden text is something that draws Google’s ire, then why would we even consider hidden text on any of our web pages? Back in 1998, when I was just getting involved in the challenges of getting good rankings in search engines, even I had been guilty of keyword stuffing in image tags and meta tags. Fortunately, I saw the light and stopped that practice well before Google began to penalize sites for that kind of conduct.

I own nearly 20 websites that are live and operational. None of my websites are banned and they never have been banned by Google or any other search engine. I have top ten listings in Google for most of my websites, and I intend to keep my top rankings in as many of my websites as I can muster. In fact, none of my websites are dropping in the Google Sphere, but all are finding better rankings as we move forward.

One of my websites is a free dating site, and if you are not aware, this is a very competitive market. So far, I have moved about ten keywords into page one rankings at Google. For many of those keywords, my website sits at #2, outranked only by Penthouse’s dating website! Although it is still a small dating website, it sees a lot of traffic from the search engines, primarily Google, and the website’s member base is growing at a fairly nice clip.

We drive great search engine rankings using a three-prong approach:

Build web pages with a focus on making sure our web pages are “topic-oriented” rather than “keyword-oriented”. By focusing on a range of similar keywords, rather than focusing on a single or a few keywords, we believe the search engines see our pages as more honest and more on-topic.
We build inbound links to our web pages (not just the home page, but a variety of pages within a website), using article marketing, social bookmarks, and forum posts.
We add value to the pages that link to us, by linking to them, using article marketing, social bookmarks, and forum posts. Frequently, we build backwards two or three levels to ensure that the pages pointing at our web pages have real Link Popularity value with the search engines.

Everything we do is based on creating value for our web pages in the eyes of the search engines and the humans visiting our web pages. We provide value content on our web pages. We provide value content on the pages that link to us. And we provide value to the web pages that point to us.

In the end, this is a long-term strategy that employs strictly Whitehat SEO principles.

We did not just think of this search ranking strategy yesterday. We have used this philosophy going back several years, but we did not put a definition to it until late 2006. We registered this website (KarmaSEO.com) in 2007, so that we could help people learn the techniques we have used to be successful in the search engine ranking game.

Maybe I should not call it a “game”, because for you and I, this can be a extremely serious business marketing strategy. But in a lot of ways, this is like a football game, where we get to play against some of the best footballers in the country, to see how good we really are as a Search Engine Optimization company.

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