SEO Black Hat: SEO Blog and Private Forum

Airport magazine stands – What are they good for? Killing time between flights and showcasing the types of headlines that sell magazines.

If the headlines do not draw people in, these impulse magazines do not get purchased. How does this help you? By analyzing and mimicking what works in magazines headlines in your Blog Post titles you will get more clicks, more reads, more links, and more money.

Below you will find a select list of the 54 Headline templates crafted to help jump start your headline writing success:

100% of ______ you need.
How to _________ in ____ easy steps
________ on Demand
______ from anywhere.
______ from your home.
A marriage of _______ and ___________.
_______ for any occasion
Instant _______
The healing power of ________
______ quiz. How do you measure up?
Mind Blowing _______
Are you out of the Loop about ______?
Don’t _____ without reading this!
(#) Secrets for _______
Need a _____?
The ______ Bible.
Todays _____ are tomorrows _____.
Climb Aboard _____________
______ that will knock your socks off.
Break Free with ______
_____ Breakthroughs!
It pays to _____.
Solve all your _____ needs
The hottest _____ anywhere!
Make _____ work for you
Imagine Yourself _____
Create Your very own _____.
________. Here’s How.
A relaxing way to _____.
Put _____ to work for you!
_____ for Lovers.
The perfect alternative to _____.
Experience the Thrill of _____.
A truly Innovative way to _____.
The (#) essentials for/of _____.
Why now is the right time to ____.
Your _____ Adventure Begins Here
The _____ of your dreams.
For the _____ lover.
_____ for Geeks.
How to Make _____ fun!
The best _____ of all worlds.
The Ultimate ______ guide/list/tour.
The next best thing to _____
(#) ______ that really work!
Stress Free _____.
The last _____ you will ever need.
Design Your own ______.
(#) _____ Secrets You Never Knew
The _____ of the future.
Are you ready for _____?
Take the Guesswork out of _____.
The _____ you always wanted.
The easiest way to _____.

Got a few templates that work great? Drop them in the comment section.

Tagged: Design |

Ever notice that whenever you mention that you work with computers, every Tom, Dick and Harry with an AOL account wants to pick your brain as to why their computer doesn’t work? They can’t wait to get you on their 450 MHz Machine running XP so they can Dial into their AOL account and show you “the Problem.”

While the answer is almost always “User Error”, you can use this opportunity to get a better feel for how Newbies think and act on computers.

If you’ve every watched the web surfing habits of people who do not use a computer every day, you know it can be painful. They always seem to click the wrong things and don’t get to where they want to go. Plus they are slow. . . MY GOD ARE THEY SLOW. But what you will notice is that when a site has been designed to generate ad revenue, these newbies will invariably click the ads.

These people don’t know about adsense or affiliate links. They can’t tell the difference between what (to you) is obviously spam and a relevant link. They stumble through the web hoping to somehow land where they want to be. You need to take a step away from the computer, not give any directions, and just watch them read and click.

Most of your observations should bring you back to the basics:

1. Blend Ads with Content
2. Put the things you want clicked most towards the top and left.
3. The first link in a series gets clicked most
4. Certain Color combinations draw in the eye
5. Standard banner sizes in standard banner positions will get ignored
6. A frustrating or confusing navigation or layout will summon the “back” button
7. Habits are very difficult to break.
8. “Professional” looking sties with nice graphics are trusted more.

While that’s the meat of it, you should still take the time to watch Newbs surf. With the right eye, you will learn something you have not thought of before with regards to design and ad placement.

A click from a newb is just as valuable (and often more valuable) than a click from an expert. If you are only targeting expert users like yourself, you may be alienated 80%+ of the marketplace at your own peril.

You have to know your audience. To know them, you must observe them in action. So the next time you’re asked to help out with the computer problem of the day from someone who can’t even spell RSS, don’t just commandeer the computer: Ask them to show you the problem and just sit back and watch what they do: it may just skyrocket your profits.

Tagged: design |

Have you ever had a friend that’s in a bad relationship? You know the skank he’s with is just bringing him down. You know he can do much better. In the beginning, there were all these great hopes about how the relationship was “gonna be”. Now, all you hear is him complaining about how things are just not working out: the broken promises, the failed plans, the betrayals.

We’ve all had friends like that at one point or another. If you’re good friends, you’ll have an intervention and tell your friend how things really are and what he needs to do. You will sit him down and tell him straight up: “Dude, you can do much better than this. It’s time for you to Dump that Bitch.”

Well today that friend is you. The skank you are with is the Google Sitemap. In the beginning, it was all lovey dovey. There was all this hope about the Google Sitemap helping you to get indexed. At first, it even seemed like it was going to work out. But by now you should realize that it was all a lie: that she does nothing but breaks her promises to you. I understand that you’re emotionally involved at this point, but take a step back and take a serious look at the situation. Is this relationship really working out the way you wanted it to?

No. And that’s why it’s time for you to dump that Google Sitemap. You’ve become overly dependant on her and she has turned into a negative rather than a positive in your life.

Just look at her own words. She’s doing more than giving you signals when you hear this every day:

“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”

(Google Quality guidelines - basic principles #1)

 

If that’s true, why is Google Sitemap asking you to make a page just for her? When was the last time your users ever wanted to look at an XML Formatted Sitemap?

Never!

The Google Sitemap is like Google’s deranged multiple personality. You can’t have a healthy relationship with someone who’s schizo. Google is who you really care about, not that Google Sitemap.

So, instead of wasting time with a Google Sitemap, make one for your users. This way everyone will be happy: you, the REAL Google, and your users.

If you’re using wordpress, you should dump those standard monthly archives while your at it. When’s the last time you were on another blog and thought “What I really want to look at is February 2005 archives – I sure hope this site has THAT page.”?

It’s Crap! What a user might want is a listing of all your posts: either from most recent to first, or sorted by most commented.

If you check out my sitemap above (top nav yellow), you can easily read every post I’ve ever written. The Visited hyperlink is a different color than the non visited. So, if you want to go from post to post just scanning the headlines that interest you, it’s easy to do so. Plus, with this setup, the click distance from any post to any other post is at most 2.

Google Sitemap doesn’t do any of that for you or your users. She just weighs you down and lulls you into a false sense of security. Dump her today!

You too can get a great chick like I have. Here’s how in wordpress: Just make an archives.php template that includes this function:

<?php wp_get_archives('type=postbypost&show_post_count=true'); ?>

The added advantage is that you can go to that sitemap page and do a quick ctr+F to find any headline you have written . . . and so can your users! If users can more easily find your posts, they are more likely to link to them. More links = Higher Rankings in all the Search Engines. When you take on this approach in the Relationship, you’ll see the real Google crawling back to your door and begging for more.

I say you shove Google’s words in the face of her schizo Personality. Stand up for yourself and Say “Sorry, we don’t make pages for search engines, we make them for our users!”

I already have and I’m happier because of it.

Tagged: Design |

As an SEO experiment, a little less than a month ago we:
1. Removed all the categories from the sidebar
2. Listed titles of every post with links every page
3. Got rid of the Google Sitemap.

Because we updated the theme on friday to include a new navigational setup, it’s time for some observations about the experiment.

For the month of September, SEO Black Hat had these search referral numbers:
Google 24889
Yahoo 1047
MSN 503
Ask Jeeves 91
Google Images 82

In August, 2006 with search referrals of
14258 - Google
1603 - MSN
1266- Yahoo
41 - Ask Jeeves
19 - Google Images

and these numbers in July
11995 - Google
1145 - MSN
828 - Yahoo
514 - Google Images
34 - Ask Jeeves

There was a 74% climb in the number of Google search referrals. MSN switched to live – and live hated my old layout because it was ugly (let’s see if that picks up any with the new design).. Yahoo was down slightly and Ask Jeeves up slightly.

Also of interest is that SEO black hat had gone supplemental after 182 results prior to the experiment. Today, SEO Black hat does not go supplemental until 554 results (which is pretty good considering this is only my 334th blog post.)

Of course, all this did not happen in a vacuum. I continued to write posts and people linked to those posts. Also, I took advantage of two internet “trends” with a couple of my posts that contributed to these search referrals:

Keyword Search Referrals
Fortuny 3151
lonelygirl15 715

Those Keywords, which accounted for about a third of the increase, should probably be disregarded.

The private SEO Black Hat forums increased stickyness and number of visits. Therefore, if Google is tracking user behavior, there’s a good chance that SEO Black Hat would be seen as more authoritative site.

My theory is that Google probably does track user behavior and is factoring this into their algorithm. It also seems very likely that Google cares about click distance from the homepage – especially for indexing purposes (as in: what goes supplemental).

What is click distance? Click distance is the minimum number of clicks it would take you to get from one page to another. During the experiment, the click distance from the home page to any post (or from one post to another) was 1.

What does that mean for your site design? Make sure your navigation is set up well. Google sitemaps are not the answer. If a post is 10 clicks from the homepage, it’s going to be a lot harder for that post to rank in the search engines.

I’ll detail what changes were made to SEO Black Hat from an on page SEO and usability perspective throughout this week.

Tagged: Design, Case Studies |

SEO Blackhat is going through a live revamp. We did some staging and are now down to ironing out the bugs. Of course I expect the full gambit of comments on the new theme. So please feel free to fire away in the comment section.

“And of course, with the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth - the critic.” - History of the World Part 1

Tagged: Wordpress, Design |

In the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Live.com. My observations have led me to the theory that “Live” is a very human editorial intensive project. As such, how aesthetically pleasing a site is will dramatically effect how well that site ranks. Understanding this shift will be crucial to you if you want to rank well search engines in the years to come.

Here’s why . . .

Let’s say that you are in charge of Search at Microsoft. You have a virtually unlimited budget and your job is to do what Microsoft has done in every market they have entered: your job is to win.

Step 1.
The first thing you should ask yourself is “Who is my target audience?” Who do you want to adopt your product? Is it the technically savvy? The very intelligent? The techie crowd? The power user?

No!

If you are at Microsoft and your goal is to win, your target audience must be the median 80% of searchers.

Step 2
What does your target audience want to see as a result when they are searching? Do they want to see authoritative sites? Sites that have been online for 5 years? Sites with a lot of links pointed at them? The sites that are the most popular in a given niche?

No!

For your target market, when they click a result they want to see a professional looking site: a pretty site - something that is aesthetically pleasing. They want a nice layout with pretty graphics. They want simple navigation. They do not want plain Jane text or a site that looks like 95% of blogs do.

They want to feel like what they landed on is not spam, not old, not geeky and might just have the answer to what they were searching for. They want to think that there is a legitimate company behind the site they landed on.

This part may be the toughest part for you to swallow. But you are not in the median 80% of users. You are a power user and you are a geek. Don’t believe me? Try going to your average football game or night club and using terms like “SEO”, “Blog”, or “Tag Cloud” with everyone you meet.

Most people don’t even know what the term “Search Engine” means. Once you get your head around that we can move on to . . .

Step 3
How can we deliver what that median 80% searcher wants? Well, there are about 6.5 million sites tracked by Alexa. We can safely say that any site without an Alexa ranking does not need to be indexed. Is there an algorithm that can tell you if a site will be pleasing to the human eye? Probably not. “Art” and “Style” would be very difficult to teach to a computer.

But since you only have a set of ~6.5 million sites to worry about, why not just hire people to review all the sites manually? The top 500,000 sites would represent more than 90% of web traffic. So lets say you hire 500 people to review those sites and 1,500 people to review the other 6 million.

For the High priority sites that’s just 1000 sites per person. That’s Hardly a difficult task for 1 person to monitor. For the lower priority sites, it’s about 4000 per person. That’s more difficult, but still doable.

I’m not saying you throw out the algorithms, I’m saying you use them as a starting point and then pick the best looking ones from there.

This method would satisfy the greatest number of users and it would be a drop in the bucket relative to the value of the market.

2,000 people, even if you hired them in the US (although I don’t know why you would) would only cost you about $50k per person per year or $100 million per year. Considering that Microsoft made $12 Billion in profits in the past year, they can easily swing that.

In fact, they could spend even more on human review. They could hire people from overseas for much less. They could easily hire 10 times that number of editors for less than $600 million per year (just 5% of company profits). Considering that revenue related to search advertising brought Google $2 billion in profits in the past year, I’d say that investing $600 million to deliver the best results is a no brainer.

Now will these people all be experts in every field? No. But they don’t have to be. There job is deliver the results that the median user will like most. Those results will be professional looking sites that answer the searchers queries. The blend of human editorial review with algorithmic analysis will be the wave of the future. Simply changing algorythms will not be able to best what an army of human reviews armed with similar algorythms can produce.

What does that mean for sites that are ugly looking? Sites that look like, say, SEO Black Hat does today? It means that we will either have to redesign to “Look” pretty, or we will not survive in the rankings long term.

Look for an SEO Black Hat redesign in the very near future . . .

Tagged: Future of Search, Design |

Some of the factors for spotting splogs according to wired:

“If we see 10,000 pings within 60 seconds, and all the blogs point to the same Web site, it’s really easy to recognize that as a link farm,” Sifry says.

 

1. Ping Frequency: Not too often nor too regularly.

Like most blogs, Some Title consists of a number of 50- to 100-word posts (incoherent ones, in this case), all with hyperlinks to other Web sites. In real blogs, the hyperlinks’ anchor text – the word or phrase users click on – is generally something innocuous like “previous post” or “interesting discussion.”

 

2. Sure, Real blogs don’t usually link to “buy viagra online”. . .

The links in ordinary blogs usually take users to well-known sites like Flickr and YouTube or prominent blogs like Talking Points Memo and Boing Boing. By contrast, each link in Some Title takes the user to a spam Web page or another splog.

 

3. Link to authority sites.

These sites, moreover, often have odd-looking, superlong URLs that are packed with keywords, because search engines tend to award high ranks to Web sites with keywords in their title, and sploggers are constantly looking for ways to increase their visibility in search engines. One LiveJournal splog that mentioned me, for example, was called New-york-agency-direct-mail-insurance-marketing. The grave-robbing Web site had the absurd address www.1michaelgraves7.info/conducting-from-the-grave/
grave-robbing-in-ventura-california-1985.html. “If it’s a Blogspot blog with more than two dashes, it’s spam,” Mullenweg says. Simply checking for dashes and search terms in links, in other words, will eliminate many splogs.

 

4. Too many keywords in URL

Another giveaway: Both Some Title and the grave-robbing page it links to had Web addresses in the .info domain. Spammers flock to .info, which was created as an alternative to the crowded .com, because its domain names are cheaper – registrars often let people use them gratis for the first year – which is helpful for those, like sploggers, who buy Internet addresses in bulk. Splogs so commonly have .info addresses that many experts simply assume all blogs from that domain are fake.

 

5. Is anyone still buying dot info domains? If I were a search engine I would simply not index any content from that TLD. Problem solved.

By looking for multiple dashes, .info domains, and other trip wires, says Technorati software architect Ian Kallen, his company can deconstruct the links and content in every new blog post, as well as all the other elements of the page. In essence, he says, “you’re going after the money – what they have to do to get money. And you can use this to spot the abusers.”

 

Ask yourself, if “I wanted to eliminate spam from My search engine, what would I look for?” Then make sure you’re not setting off any of those red flags.

Tagged: splogs, design |

In August, 2006 SEO Black Hat had these Search Numbers:

14258 - Google
1603 - MSN
1266- Yahoo
41 - Ask Jeeves
19 - Google Images

Up from these numbers in July, 2006:

11995 - Google
1145 - MSN
828 - Yahoo
514 - Google Images
34 - Ask Jeeves

As an experiment in both SEO and usability, I deleted all the Category links from the sidebar and put a link to every post ever written from most recent to “Hello World.” It should be too many links on each page. Really, I just wanted to see what happens if I make it easy for people to browse every post at a glance from every page - the SEO part is just an interesting side note.

Also, I deleted the sitemap.txt and sitemap.xml from the server and deleted the sitemap from Google Webmaster Tools. Let’s see what the next 30 days brings . . .

Tagged: Design |

The art of blog is of vital importance to the Web. It is a matter of links and bait, a road either to prosperity or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

1. Regard your readers as your students and they will link to your from the deepest valleys of the Net.

2. He who wishes to blog must first count the cost. When you engage in blogging, if good posts are long in coming, then reader’s attention will grow dull and their fervor will be dampened. If you blog 5 times a day in the beginning, you will exhaust your strength. Regarding post frequency, think quality over quantity. Again, as blogging is a marathon, the resources of the Blogger may not be equal to the strain. For if your mind is dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted and your mental treasure spent, other bloggers will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. . . In blogging, then, let your great objectives be links and readers, not post frequency or lengthy post.

3. If your target is interesting at all points, link to him. If he is in superior traffic, bait him. If he is unaware of you, seek to add value in his comment section. If seeking his links, select the best page. When giving feedback, do it correctly. Attack him where he is unprepared, add value where you are not expected.

4. The Blogger who wins the readers makes many calculations about his headlines before the post is written. The Blogger who loses Readers makes but few calculations beforehand and speaks constantly of himself. Thus do many calculations lead to success, and few calculations to failure: how much more so for no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that one can foresee who is likely to win or lose Readers.

5. If you make a mistake out of haste or misjudgment, Apologize quickly and publicly. Do not simply delete the offending post. Do not entrench yourself in a losing position. Better to admit you were wrong quickly and make amends, than to dig the hole of your own grave.

6. To link and bait in all your posts is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in both winning new readers and retaining existing ones.

7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of SEO that can thoroughly understand the profitable ways of carrying it on.

8. The great bloggers of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat by consistantly writing great and informative posts, and then prepares for the opportunity to gain search traffic with SEO.

9. Bestow links without regard to page rank, direct readers without regard to previous value but on the value of the post you are referencing. Send readers away to other great posts liberally and they will return more fervently and more frequently than if you try to hoard them. In blogging, the tightest grasp is with an open fist.

10. Send your troops to Digg Great Posts, To Vote on Netscape, to Comment on Reddit and to bookmark on Delicious that they may recruit more readers to your following. Ask that they link to your posts of value so that you may return the favor when the opportunity arises.

Tagged: Best Posts, Design, Link Bait, blogging |

There is some debate as to whether or not having keywords in your URLs confers any benefits in the SERPs. In Jamies post, Keywords in URLs Revisited he lists 4 other compelling reasons that even if they are completely irrelevant to your rankings, that you should still have them in your URLs.

Couple that with the myriad of hints that Matt Cutts has dropped about user experience and SEFURLs and it’s pretty clear what you should be doing.

Tagged: Design |