SEO Shadow

Fresh from our look at Black Hat affiliate bombing, I thought I’d take things back to basics and focus on some squeaky clean White Hat traffic optimization techniques.

Now when I say White Hat, I cringe a little bit inside. The truth is, these ideas shouldn’t even be classified one way or the other. They should be seen as good business sense.

The more you know about your target market, the better equipped you are to sell to it.

Lets drill that thought in to our heads before we go any further. Making a sale doesn’t have to be rocket science, but you’ll find your chances of converting become infinitely greater when you know just who in the hell you’re targeting.

The problem with selling on the web is that it’s a faceless, all-too-typically linear experience. If I want to sell a dieting package, for example, I have to design with all segments of the market in mind. Not to get too complicated, but there are many differences in the way that I’d promote a dieting product for women (looking good, medical concerns, staying healthy…) and the approach that I’d take when selling to men (chicks love it, optimal performance, good for sports…).

Selling is about appealing to the needs of the customer. We have to cut out the crap and get to the root of what they want. And if they NEED it, well, that makes selling a dream.

So looking at the web, what tools do we have at our disposal?

1. Referring URL

Every time you click on a link, the referring URL gets passed on. This doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own. But when you consider that it’s possible to capture the exact search term somebody used to reach your page, the possibilities are endless. What if we could dynamically adjust our content to match the user’s needs as given away in the search string?

Take this referring URL for example:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheap+dieting+products+for+men

What can we say for sure about our customer with this piece of information?

• It’s a man.
• He wants to diet.
• He doesn’t want to spend a lot of money.

Using some basic logic and PHP knowledge, we serve up the three cheapest dieting products in our database. We then call on the men keyword and dynamically alter our image references to display only pictures of male six packs and world famous athletes. And if it’s a woman searching? Land your pitch with photos of successful businesswomen, slim adored housewives and health conscious imagery.

We can go as far as serving different snippets of copy that are written specifically for one audience over another.

Split testing is fundamental to any successful affiliate campaign. But it doesn’t always reveal the true facts of your marketing success (or failure) – why? It’s because we’re altering the entire shape of a website when we split test. Either this works or that works, but we never think about who it works for. We could potentially be missing out on dozens of sales. The real success lies in handling the variables that matter to each segment of our target market.

2. Geographical IP mapping

Welcome to the next big thing in Internet marketing. I say that, but porn websites have been making a dime on this information for years. It’s only recently that more orthodox websites have started to catch on.

Every time you visit a website, your IP is logged. If you’ve spent any time meddling with analytics software, you’ll be well aware that geographical data for our visitors is stored. This makes it possible to see not just where our traffic is being referred from, but where in the world that user actually is.

If you’ve visited any dating or adult sites recently (hey, it ain’t a crime to look), you’ve probably bared witness to one of the most effective marketing strategies of the last two years. And you probably didn’t even notice it.

Sign up now to chat to Jessica, 18 years old from YOUR TOWN HERE!

When you visit the page, your IP address is mapped to the nearest city and displayed as Jessica’s hometown. Caught between star gazing at the fine young woman and wondering whether she lives just down the street, it’s easy to see how some non-tech savvy users could be persuaded in to signing up under the pretences of getting some action tonight.

Now, this is only one example of how IP mapping can be used to focus a product or service on the consumer’s needs. I can see this technique becoming extremely popular in mainstream Internet marketing although it’s still very much in the primitive stages as far as your average affiliate website is concerned. Conjures some creative possibilities, don’t you think?

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And so begins another blog in the saturated market of SEO tips and tricks!

Before we begin, let me explain a little about myself and what I stand for when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I’m going to assume that most people who read these pages have a fairly strong overview of Google, and how the search engines are manipulated. I’m also going to suggest that those of high moral responsibility on the web steer well clear of the techniques we’re going to practice.

As you can probably work out by the Shadow brand, I am a strong advocate of Grey and Black Hat SEO. But I’m also realistic and if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt, it’s not to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to making money online.

Some of you may be following pure White Hat SEO techniques, in which case, good luck.

I believe that a great White Hat pro must have a good understanding of Black Hat techniques in order to reap success. And vice versa, anybody who wants to get anywhere in the Black Hat world must have a tight grip of the optimization techniques that play by the rule-book. 

If you’re from a White Hat background and wish not to practice what I’m about to preach, you’re within your right to move on in disgust and shake your head at the dubious moral standards. Let’s leave it at that.

Some people have perfectly valid reasons for staying White Hat. It could be a requirement to stay in Google’s good books or simply a project spec from a contractor. Either way, it’s high time we stopped playing in to Google’s hands and understood who really benefits from such strict guidelines. Because it certainly isn’t you, me or Webmaster X.

Google cares about Google. This is an organization that profits from your expertly crafted website - whether you want it to or not. When you appear in Google’s search results, you’re adding value to its brand. Such has been the growth of this web monster that exclusion from the rankings can often sound the death toll of a business. Is that fair? No, it’s not, but business is business.

For many people, Google is the scale tipping margin between success and failure. For those of us who are open to this reality, Black Hat techniques suddenly sound all the more reasonable. Is it wrong to exploit Google’s search engine algorithm when so-called White Hatters are striving to do the very same thing?

What are you doing when you optimize your Title tags? When you set your keyword density? When you swap your links? You’re manually trying to improve your search engine ranking by exploiting the Google algorithm.

Black Hat SEO follows the same principles, except we bend the rules along the way. Let’s not pitch for a Noble prize here. Most Black Hat techniques succeed at the expense of other White Hat webmasters. I’m sure they’re equally hard workers with admirable passion, admirable determination and varying success. But there’s no time for standing and admiring if you’re hyper-focused on making money.

The arguments put forward by Google, and chief relations pup Matt Cutts, are nice and sentimental on the surface. Advocates of usability, favorers of relevant content - yes, it’s easy to see where they’re coming from. But Google also preaches a massive contradiction in its guidelines when it banishes a turnkey website from the rankings - let’s say for cloaking - while an authority site like Amazon rampages on without so much as a slap on the wrist for its identical tactics. 

It all comes down to deception. We could build a White Hat website from the ground up and dedicate a lifetime to user-friendly standards. Chances are, it will still flop.

Alternatively, we can survey the web landscape and pinpoint loopholes where there’s a profit to be made. This is the key difference between a webmaster and a web entrepreneur. One sees Google’s guidelines. The other sees Google’s riches.

So enough of the background. What can you expect to find on these pages?

I will be addressing some of the shadow SEO techniques that divide opinion amongst White Hat and Black Hat peers. I will also be revealing some personal practices which cut under the radar to dramatically improve search engine performance.

Much of the time, you’ll discover that the best SEO campaigns are incredibly personalized and ideally shaped towards a particular project. I won’t be taking you on step by step guides, rather leveraging the mindset and creativity that’s necessary for success.

First up, we’ll be taking a look at how to recycle web content - or even whole websites - which have become derelict over time. All this while staying under the cover of Google’s duplicate content radar.