Search Engine Karma Optimization Article

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:22:00 -0800

The Good, the Bad, and the Questionable
What creates search engine karma?

by Shane Gibson
Managing Partner
traffickarma Inc.

With our company devoted to creating positive traffic karma I thought that defining what marketing activities online create and destroy good traffic karma would be a good idea.

I’ve broken this down into several specific marketing related activities and list (in my opinion) what we can do to build good, questionable or bad karma when engaging in these online acts.

Please accept my apology for the excessive use of jargon. We are presently building a glossary of web marketing terms that will be published later this month in an effort to further explain terms like “link farm” and “RSS feed.” Until then it is my hope that you will grasp the overall principles of building good traffic karma.

Following is an outline of the various ways we can build our traffic karma:

Activity	Good Karma	Questionable Karma	Bad Karma
Writing	Professionally written copy Short, easy-to-read paragraphs Bulleted lists Written for humans (your target audience) Original content Frequently updated (weekly)	Occasional spelling mistakes and poor grammar Use of jargon Long paragraphs and run-on sentences Use of non-relevant keywords to increase ranking (done for search engines, not humans) Syndicated or duplicated content Scant text per page Using GIF or JPEG images instead of text Occasionally updated	Large, uninterrupted blocks of unedited, poorly written text Written for search engines (who cares about people anyway?) Over-use and repetition of keywords in copy Large lists of keywords, many irrelevant to the site or page Never updated
Site structure	Designed for easy use by humans Designed intuitively for navigation Void of scripts that confuse or repel crawlers Search engines can get entire site without crawling too deep Html pages	Heavy use of Java script All Flash (not easily crawled by search engines)	Designed for search engines, hard for humans to understand
Page titles	Concise, focused title describing what the page is actually about	Generic title, not related to keywords	Title is too long Title is missing or has nothing to do with content
Outbound links	To sites related to your site topic To highly ranked sites	To generic sites To low-ranking sites To poorly designed or amateur sites	To unrelated sites or link farms (Google hates these guys) To unrelated sites with a different audience than yours To illegal or adult type content sites
Your domains	Cherished Part of your branding Seen as an asset Easy to remember Unique	Generic Name is an afterthought Very long or too short to be relevant to search engines	Seen as disposable Misleading name
Submitting your site	Manual submission to all major search engines Careful thought about submission to directories to protect your brand karma (wording, spelling etc. Reasonable submission frequency (every few weeks) that is consistent	Minimal, manual submission to the handful of top search engines Automated submission to several minor or lower-ranked directories Infrequent or inconsistent submission	Fully automated third-party submission (along with another 300 of their clients) High frequency submission of site; more than twice a month (how do you like me now?)
Blogs	Well-written, relevant content Use of RSS feed, which allows others to easily pull your content to their site Automatically notify blog search engines when you add an entry Close monitoring to ensure that posters don't fill your directory with spam or off-topic comments Updated regularly Exchange of links with relevant, good-karma blogs	Generic content Cut and paste or recycling of tired, old content Un-moderated posting from visitors No RSS feed!	Content that is irrelevant to readers and designed only for search engines Loaded with spam postings poar spellin and grammur Site stuffed with repetitive content and overused keywords Exchange of links with irrelevant or bad-karma blogs
In-bound links	Relevant, high ranking, good karma sites	Non-related sites	Link farms “Doorway” pages built solely for search engines Cloned sites Bad-karma sites
Success focus	Long-term focus	No real focus (it's just a site)	Short term focus
Legal?	Original content All claims are legitimate Proper disclosures Promises to affiliates and customers met	Content and design concepts poached from other sites Use of competitors’ meta tags Mention of competitors in the hope of stealing traffic	Stolen content (cut and paste) Stolen graphics Unsubstantiated claims

For more information on building positive traffic karma please contact shane@traffickarma.net

Traffic Karma Inc. - Online Communications and Marketing

Search Engine Karma Optimization Article