Recently, a master’s candidate asked if I could provide examples as to why black hat tactics may be beneficial to SEO methods in the short term, but may ultimately negatively affect a site in the long-term. Given some experiences over the past year, my first response was to smirk. Yes, smirk. You see, it used to be difficult to “sell” clients on the idea that white hat tactics were the best way to go when implementing SEO methods and recommendations. However, after several events that occurred in 2011, things have changed. For instance, dare I mention jcpenney? Or PANDA?

Although black hat tactics may garner great results initially, utilizing these methods is similar to not paying your taxes and hoping the IRS won’t catch you. Of course, the argument can be made that not many sites get penalized for using black hat SEO methods. But do you really want to chance it? I don’t know of any site that can afford penalization for violating search engine guidelines, especially on the monster known as Google!

Additionally, on that same note, your black hat SEO methods could be in danger of being “outed” by credible, well-known sites and news sources, such as the New York Times, for not following search engine guidelines to uphold quality. The New York Times wrote a piece exposing jcpenney’s link building black hat tactics after discovering that thousands of low-quality links pointed to their website, jcpenney.com. Soon after, similar articles began popping up – just do a search for the keyphrases “overstock” and “paid links” for evidence.

Now, you may think you are in the clear if you have conducted black hat tactics and have not yet been “caught.” However, your competitors, who may be jealous of your rankings, could potentially examine your site to determine which SEO methods you used to achieve these results. There are free and paid tools available to determine which tactic is used – on or off of a site. If your competitors used these tools on your site, and found that you are in violation of search engine guidelines, they could potentially report you to those credible news sources, like the New York Times.

Our SEM firm, Medium Blue, has told our clients for years to avoid having duplicate content on websites. No matter how much time it takes or how much money it costs to write content, website copy should be uniquely-written (and hopefully, optimized) content that is unique from page-to-page on your site as well as from other sites. Our white hat SEO methods used to get so much pushback from clients and other SEO companies regarding our approach to copy; however, we continued to promote this recommendation because a website containing duplicate content is similar to paying for links – both black hat tactics are against many search engines’ guidelines.

Thankfully, “sticking to our guns” and continuing to promote SEO methods that utilized only unique content ended up paying off.  Earlier this year it hit. Google rolled out PANDA 1.0 in February 2011, which penalized sites for having duplicate content. Since the original PANDA algorithm, several more versions were rolled out to continue to “clean up” Google from sites that used black hat tactics, such as duplicate content.

The bottom line is, search engine guidelines have been around for a long time and are easily available on each respective search engines’ site. If you want to gamble your site’s success and engage in black hat tactics in order to receive a boost in rankings, your site may ultimately suffer in the long run. I doubt link building schemes and duplicate content penalizations are the end of Google’s (and other search engine’s) attempts to “clean up” the web. Do you really want to jeopardize the future of your site? Is it really worth it? No — especially when you can achieve the same results with white hat SEO methods!

On the flip side, if you are in the market for an SEO firm and/or are implementing internet marketing recommendations to your site, be sure to ask questions, such as “Are these recommendations aligned with the search engine guidelines?” If not, you may want to reevaluate the recommendations… or even your SEO firm.

Never edit PPC ad copy? This title may shock some of you, but let me explain. I am not implying that you should never edit your copy in order to test new ad copy. Testing new ad copy, at least two per ad group, should be done as much as possible in both Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter, depending on how fast you accrue impressions and clicks. When editing PPC ad copy, you should always pause the existing ad and create a new ad instead. This sounds like extra work, and it is, but here are two paragraphs quoted directly from Google Adwords Help as to why this recommendation is worth following:

Signs of Growing Future Opportunities in Mobile Search Marketing

1. Rising mobile search usage leads to growing visibility opportunities in local/map search.
2. Major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! collectively agree to support the www.schema.org webpage markup language for structured data.
3. Despite alliances, all three major search engines still compete for your data.

Put together the puzzle pieces of an expanding online market, new standards in search engine technology, and a clear division between how each search engine will pursue this mobile market to reveal a mobile SEO strategy for your website.  This article provides the data and rationale behind mobile search marketing. The goal is to provide optimally structured data to search engines — data that search engines compete to obtain and provide to an expanding mobile internet market.

Yes, you read the title right.  My company recently performed extensive search engine optimization on a client website, and the results were staggering.  Within a month, organic search traffic had dropped by over 60%.  Inbound leads from organic search had dropped by over 50%.  And the client was absolutely thrilled with the results.

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Every day, well-funded think-tanks and scientific research firms conduct tests of hypotheses that are no more than educated guesses. There is little skepticism about this process, and for good reason: Our modern society benefits in countless ways from our culture of testing. So why is it that the same faith in this process is not readily applied to internet marketing and website usability?

For most of the history of this new and critical marketing channel, web designers and creative agencies have put forth a vision of what a company’s web presence should be, based largely on hubris. Because of this, businesses have paid dearly — not just for the price tag of the new website, but for the lack of performance that follows the launch of the site. A business cannot benefit from a website that does not effectively transform visitors into customers. We live in a time of a great and emerging wisdom concerning the unique challenges of website usability and online marketing.

As many of you may have heard or seen on your Google searches, Google recently introduced the “+1” feature. According to Google, the “plus one” button that you now see alongside your organic and paid search results is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.’” If you are logged into your Google account and conduct a search, each search result will include a line that shows who in your social circle +1’d that result, and more recently, will also show how many people in general have +1’d that result.

I consider myself a heavy user of social media.  I am pretty well connected to the brands that I choose to give my money to, and I find that an effective social media campaign influences me to become more loyal because of the relationships that are built as a result of Twitter and Facebook.  Blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking (to name a few) are all great ways to build brand ambassadors and stay in touch with your customers.  But on the flip side, companies are often in such a hurry to climb on the social media bandwagon, they forget about the negative effects that their newfound social channels can have on customer satisfaction.

We are pleased to announce that we are now working with CFO Leasing, one of the leading government contract consulting firms in the country, to enhance the online presence of the firm’s sites geared toward facilitating the government contracts process for businesses.

We will work with CFO Leasing to promote its range of international services through search engine marketing geared toward businesses including those in the United States, Iraq, Germany, Dubai, and Afghanistan. CFO Leasing has helped clients secure over $500 million dollars in federal contracts and grants, and has helped numerous clients across multiple sectors shorten the application process in doing business with the federal government, making companies more marketable to federal purchasing agents.

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As part of a comprehensive search engine optimization campaign, gaining inbound links to your website is critical. But what exactly does this entail, and how should you most effectively go about gaining these types of valuable links? When an arduous task presents itself, it is human nature to try to find a shortcut.  Sometimes, these shortcuts work, and the quality of the end result is not sacrificed.  But often, the shortcut either turns out to be a short-term fix or worse, it backfires, leaving you worse off than you were before.  And, in my experience, such is the case in regard to building quality inbound links to your website as part of your search engine optimization campaign.

Click to read the full article on PromotionWorld.

Last week, hundreds of thousands of URLs were hit by a large-scale SQL injection attack that seemed to target sites at random. The attack works when HTML code is inserted into the database, which renders on the site’s pages and executes JavaScript code located on a remote server. This code then redirects the user to a fake anti-virus site that then attempts to further compromise the user’s browser. The methodology of this assault actually is much closer in behavior to a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack, although it has been widely reported as a SQL injection attack. Another notable element is that the sites affected used a range of the most common server technologies (ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, JSP), so the exploit was not limited to a single coding language or server technology.