Phillip Lenssen recently reported two new methods that might be used by some people to get top 10 listings on Google.

Spam trick 1: Get higher rankings in Google’s local results

It seems to help if the address of a business is close to the city center or the main station. If a business gets a post box close to these locations and submits that address to Google Maps, it will be listed higher in the local results on Google.

As the local results are usually displayed above the regular listings in Google, this could be a way to get many clicks.

Spam trick 2: Get higher rankings in Google’s regular results

This trick is somewhat hard to believe. It seems that some webmasters hire cheap Chinese workers to get higher rankings on Google. As strange as it sounds, these webmasters pay couriers on bikes to drive to various Internet cafes, search for their keywords and then click on the listing of the webmaster’s site.

Over time, the listings go up. Actually, Google does have a click tracker in the result URLs. Until now, it had been unclear for what purpose Google uses this tracker. If this story is true, Google might use the number of clicks that a listing gets to determine the ranking of a web page.

Will these methods work for your website?

The local search trick might work but it will probably be difficult for most webmasters to hire an army of Chinese bike couriers. In general, you shouldn’t use spam techniques at all. So far, Google has detected all spam methods sooner or later.

Websites with spam techniques are usually banned from Google’s index. You might get a small advantage for some time with some spam techniques but you’re risking all rankings of your website.

The difference between spammy SEO methods and ethical SEO methods

If you use spammy SEO methods, you will quickly get high rankings on search engines. Unfortunately, Google will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods:
Many people will do anything do get on Google’s first result page. That’s why some webmasters regularly come up with new spam methods to get on Google’s first result page.

Phillip Lenssen recently reported two new methods that might be used by some people to get top 10 listings on Google.

Spam trick 1: Get higher rankings in Google’s local results

It seems to help if the address of a business is close to the city center or the main station. If a business gets a post box close to these locations and submits that address to Google Maps, it will be listed higher in the local results on Google.

As the local results are usually displayed above the regular listings in Google, this could be a way to get many clicks.

Spam trick 2: Get higher rankings in Google’s regular results

This trick is somewhat hard to believe. It seems that some webmasters hire cheap Chinese workers to get higher rankings on Google. As strange as it sounds, these webmasters pay couriers on bikes to drive to various Internet cafes, search for their keywords and then click on the listing of the webmaster’s site.

Over time, the listings go up. Actually, Google does have a click tracker in the result URLs. Until now, it had been unclear for what purpose Google uses this tracker. If this story is true, Google might use the number of clicks that a listing gets to determine the ranking of a web page.

Will these methods work for your website?

The local search trick might work but it will probably be difficult for most webmasters to hire an army of Chinese bike couriers. In general, you shouldn’t use spam techniques at all. So far, Google has detected all spam methods sooner or later.

Websites with spam techniques are usually banned from Google’s index. You might get a small advantage for some time with some spam techniques but you’re risking all rankings of your website.

In order to start right out in integrating social marketing strategies with SEO, a plan must be developed first. Moreover, there should be detailed research regarding the target’s needs, most especially since the approach is customer-oriented. It may also be helpful to consult with firms specializing in Internet Marketing. These firms will provide invaluable information and insights on how different approaches work together in maximizing company results. Once you have a better understanding of the various strategies, you can now employ the ones suitable for your needs.

Social marketing involves creating a community where people with shared interests come together to state opinions and ask questions. This can be done by setting up forums or discussion boards on your website. The key here is to generate interaction among the members of your target audience. A vast majority of consumers do online research before making any purchases; forums are helpful in providing information regarding customer inquiries.
Also consider setting up a blog that contains relevant posts that discuss the services and products that your company offers. The information that you will provide may be very well appreciated by your readers. Place links to other websites and blogs that relate to your blog content. Social networking sites including Facebook, Myspace, Digg, and many others might also have useful and interesting content that you can link to. Feature and subscribe to appropriate RSS feeds, so that your readers have a reason to frequently visit your site.

Moreover, it is necessary to keep the forum and blog posts updated and fascinating for people to read. Also remember to use optimized keywords or phrases naturally in your content and titles. Do not let your online community become sedentary; encourage readers to engage in discussions and exchange of fresh ideas and opinions. This way, search engines are more likely to index your site’s content, thus, increasing traffic.
With an effective plan and strategies in place, integrating SEO and social marketing is not a difficult task.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can’t go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In ‘Introduction to Sitemaps’, Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.

Although optimizing for MSN is different from optimizing for Google and Yahoo!, there are still common rules that will help you to rank high in any search engine. As a rule, if you rank well in Google, chances are that you will rank well in Yahoo! (if you are interested in the tips and tricks for optimizing for Yahoo!, you want to have a look at the Optimizing for Yahoo! Article) and MSN as well. The opposite is not true, however. If you rank well in MSN, there is no guarantee that you’ll do the same in Google. So, when you optimize for MSN, keep an eye on your Google ranking as well. It’s no good to top MSN and be nowhere in Google (the opposite is more acceptable, if you need to make the choice).

But why is this so? The answer is simple - the MSN algorithm is different and that is why, even if the same pages were indexed, the search results will vary.
The MSN Algorithm

As already mentioned, it is the different MSN algorithm that leads to such drastic results in ranking. Otherwise, MSN, like all search engines, first spiders the pages on the Web, then indexes them in its database and after that applies the algorithm to generate the pages with the search results. So, the first step in optimizing for MSN is the same as for the other search engines – to have a spiderable site. (Have a look at Search Engine Spider Simulator to see how spiders see your site). If your site is not spiderable, then you don’t have even a hypothetical chance to top the search results.

There is quite a lot of speculation about the MSN algorithm. Looking at the search results MSN delivers, it is obvious that its search algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s, or even Yahoo!’s and many SEO experts agree that the MSN search algorithm is years behind its competitors. So, what can you do in this case? Optimize as you did for Google a couple of years ago? You are not far from the truth, though actually is is not that simple.

One of the most important differences is that MSN still relies heavily on metatags, as explained below. None of the other major search engines uses metatags that heavily anymore. It is obvious that metatags give SEO experts a great opportunity for manipulating search results. Maybe metatags are the main reason for the inaccurate search results that MSN often produces.

The second most important difference between MSN and the other major search engines is their approach to keywords. Well, for MSN keywords are very, very important, too, but unlike Google, for MSN onpage factors are dominating, while offpage factors (like backlinks for example), are still of minor importance. Well, it is a safe bet that the importance of backlinks will be changed in the future but for now they are not a primary factor for high rankings.

It is hardly surprising that keywords are the most important item for MSN. What is surprising is that MSN relies too much on them. It is very easy to fool MSN – just artificially inflate your keyword density, put a couple of keywords in file names (and even better – in domain names) and around the top of the page and you are almost done for MSN. But if you do the above-mentioned black hat practices, your joy of topping MSN will not last long because, unless you provide separate pages that are optimized for Google, your stuffed pages might pretty well get you banned from Google. If you decide to have separate pages for Google and MSN, first, it it hardly worth the trouble, and second, the risk of duplicate content penalty can’t be ignored.

So, what is the catch? The catch is that if you try to polish your site for MSN and stuff it with keywords, this might get you into trouble with Google, which certainly is worse than not ranking well in MSN. But if you optimize wisely, it is more likely than not that you will rank decently in Google and perform well in Yahoo! and MSN as well.

Having meaningful metatags never hurts but with MSN this is even more important because its algorithm still uses them as a primary factor in calculating search results. Having well-written (not stuffed) metatags will help you with MSN and some other minor search engines, while at the same time well-written metatags will not get you banned from Google.

The Description metatag is very important:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Place your description here” />

MSNBot reads its content and based on that (in addition to keywords found on page) judges how to classify your site. So if you leave this tag empty (i.e. CONTENT=””), you have missed a vital chance to be noticed by MSN. There is no evidence that MSN uses the other metatags in its algorithm that is why leaving the Description metatag empty is even more unforgivable.