| Marketing an online business is a demanding activity. The competition is intense and the market dynamics are highly volatile. One has to constantly be on toes to stop anyone from outrunning you in the race. Search engine algorithms keep changing from time to time so the approach has to be out and out proactive. All these pressuring factors lead the marketers into using some dubious techniques for marketing an online business. The temptation to get quick and easy results is hard to resist. However, these short cuts to quick and easy result may end you in problem with search engine crawlers who may penalize you to the extent of either burying your URL deep within the search results or banning it altogether. Here we are discussing what are the techniques of marketing an online business that you must avoid.
One of the most debated and most frequently used techniques for marketing online business is IP redirection also known as IP stealthing, page swapping, page redirection, or many other similar names. The process of IP redirection is accomplished by running a ../script on the server. It exploits the fact that the server will look for IP address of a search engine optimized page and consequently return the same as search result. However, in this case the server is tricked and the ultimately visitors see a different page than what server had returned. This is not acceptable to the search engines because it puts a question mark on their result reliability. So, if you really want to practice clean techniques of marketing online business, IP redirection is prohibited for you. You may not only lose your credibility but also may be banned from advertising on the search engines.
Yes, IP direction is good if you think in terms of ease of creating pages that do not show your HTML good work to the competitors and let you worry only of the keywords optimization and other tricks of getting the search engine crawlers instead of making the page aesthetically fit. However, it is not worth taking the risk of getting your website banned. Many people argue in favor of IP redirection for marketing online business, comparing it with doorway pages. Yes, in doorway pages also two different pages are created. One, to appeal the search engine crawlers and the other to appease the website visitors. However, the difference lies in the fact in case of doorway pages both the pages are visible to the visitor. For example, if page with legitimate and accurate content describing website purpose but with not real visible appeal leads to another aesthetically appealing page with all graphics that may not get the page indexed, is quite acceptable. However, even in case of doorway pages people have started using meta refresh tags that makes the doorway page to immediately load a different page as son as the visitor arrives. The search engines have got clever with this trick as well. In this case they either mark as Spam or do not index the page to which you redirect.
In case of IP redirection you show one page to the search engine crawler and another to the consumer. This is unethical and unacceptable to the search engines. The search engine users do a search for a particular keyword/ phrase and get some results but the page that is finally returned is something else. Besides IP redirection, there are many other dubious techniques for marketing online business. For example, using hidden text. The font color and the page background color are kept as same and the page is stuffed with keywords and key phrases on which graphics are embedded. The search engine crawlers will see the keywords and the visitors see the appealing graphics. Hidden text is a big search engine optimization crime and your website may be heavily penalized for it. Good website content and right keyword placement is like back bone of SEO effort of any website for marketing online business. However, simply stuffing the web page with various types and combinations of keywords can annoy the search engine crawlers who may label the page as Spam. The optimum keywords density is only 3 to 4% of the total word count of the page. Besides, over using the keywords, if you use keywords that are unrelated to the web content as well as your website purpose, the spiders may again consider the page as Spam. To not spamdex the search engine indexes by submitting too many pages optimized for same keyword. When you get out to promote your business, it is important to set standards based on ethical grounds for marketing online business.
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