News Highlights

Internet Marketing is growing ever more popular in Ghana, and just as with everything popular- has its good and bad sides. E-mail marketing and SEO are on the rise, as webmasters and E Marketing firms use these tools to achieve greater publicity for either themselves or their clients.

Search Engines (SE's), most notably Google, are becoming more widely used in Ghana, as more and more people recognize their effectiveness in searching the net for useful information. In light of this, many webmasters now practice Search Engine Optimization in a bid to outwit their competition and get good search rankings with the major SE's.

Search Engine Optimization basically involves applying techniques to make your site more appealing to Search Engine, but there are "genuine" and "not-so-genuine" methods involved- some even coming close to illegal.

To fully understand this, one would have to appreciate the way the search engines operate. SE's use complex programs otherwise known as "robots" to spider (or search) the web for pages to add to their index list. Now, these search robots don't see a web page how a human visitor would- they pick up text on pages that may or may not be seen by a site's visitor, placing particular emphasis on pages with rich content.

Let's suppose you type a search phrase into an SE's search bar, say Google Search for instance, Googlebot (which is Google's robot), automatically browses it's huge list of indexed pages, looking for pages with content rich enough to be classified as relevant to the search phrase. During this process, Googlebot scans the entire content of the web pages, picking up all manner of information, including the "unseen" text in the <meta> tags of the HEAD section of the web pages, "alt" or title tags describing Images and Links, and also "Hidden Text".

Notice the emphasis on the latter? Good! because that is
primarily what this article is mainly about.

It is also worth noting that some search robots place emphasis on "Localization"- that is to say the Geographical area involved in the search query.

Most SEO marketers are aware of these, and some result to adopting illegal practices, which include

• Cloaking- an SEO technique which allows a page to be viewed by only people browsing from a certain location- tends to fool the search engine into placing Geograhical importance on that web page
• Sneaky Redirects- a tricky webmaster could adopt this to falsify the information on a web page, creating doorway pages leading to useful information, thus fooling the robot into awarding relevance to the page with the redirect
• Hidden Text- arguably the most common technique used by webmasters the world over.

This brings us back to what i talked about earlier - using hidden text on pages. It may sound funny to some people though: "Hidden Text"- i mean, how do you hide the text on a page.

Simple! For instance, a cunning Webmaster targeting high search rankings for a particular service could easily create a paragraph of "meaningless" keyword-filled phrases relating to that service, and put these in a table at the beginning of his web page, making the text colour similar to the background colour of the particular page in question.

Now, you may be wondering what the rationale behind this would be, but anyone who has been doing SEO marketing for a while would know that Search Engine Robots place a greater amount of relevance to the words found at the "Top" or "Bottom" of a web page, as opposed to those found in-between.

By making the text colour the same as the background colour, the webmaster would successfully have fooled the SE Robot into thinking that his site contains useful information about those keywords, whereas that entire paragraph would be completely invisible to a visitor.

Let me give a typical example- let's say for instance; i have a site which deals in automobiles, and a homepage with a background colour of white (#ffffff), and i wanted to get high rankings for searches on the keyword- "automobiles"- I could just create a paragraph with the following code at the beginning of the body section of my home page;

<p><font color="#ffffff" size="1">Ghana automobiles, nice automobiles, cheap automobiles, i have automobiles in ghana, automobiles are good, ghana has many automobiles, business automobiles, you will stop walking with automobiles</font></p>

Now, this is how the above code would appear on the page;

Example #1 shows how the code would appear if used on the background we currently have on our site. At a first glance, you may not be able to see any text in the table, but look a little closer, maybe tilt your monitor a bit, and you will see a slightly visible text.

In Example #2, using a white background it is completely IMPOSSIBLE to see any text in the table.

But when we put the same code in a table with a coloured background- as in example #3, you see a clear picture of what was hidden.

Though this paragraph makes absolutely no grammatical sense whatsoever, a Search Engine Robot sees this as a "keyword" filled paragraph and would award relevance to this page.

Other ill tactics include creating links to "doorway pages" which link to no nowhere in particular, or using excessive redirects to pages with content relevant to yours.

Such Malicous practices MUST stop! Any webmaster or SEO marketer who knows what he or she is about wouldn't need such, clearly malicous techniques to get top 10 rankings with an SE. If you feel you're confident of your abilities, you don't need to trick anyone into giving you marks.

"Darrel Technologies strongly believes in good old "healthy" competition! We don't cheat cos we know exactly what we are about. We only use legitimate SEO techniques, and still manage to get top 10 Rankings on Google. "

"WE'RE NOT AFRAID OF A LITTLE COMPETITION. ARE YOU ???"