The opening salvo of a sales pitch for a new FTP application that is part of the current MacHeist bundle offer, begins by criticising users for continuing with a tried, tested, trusted product that I have used for many years:

Are you still using Transmit, an app that dates all the way back to MacOS 8? Well, if so, then it’s time to make room for the new kid in town… Flow

That’s right, they open their sales pitch in that way, and continue with snipes at Transmit with reference to Transmit’s very basic text editor:

And we’re not talking about a gimped editor…

Panic’s Transmit is one of those apps that I never hesitate to upgrade. Along with hardened, mature tools like BBEDit, they have remained at the core of my day to day development work (BBEdit is even set to auto boot when my Mac starts).

Am I behind the times in my choice of tool? When I find a new tool that stands the test against those I trust, I’ll make the switch. But strip away the bells and whistles of most new tools and I generally find poor substitutes for those that already enable me to do my job.

Of course, tool choice is a personal one and there are many who would never make the same choices as me. But to go so far as to be critical of a user’s choice is an immature, insecure and ignorant form of marketing. Not the kind of company to which I want to make a professional commitment.

What makes SEO Black-Hat?

The boundaries between “white” or “black” SEO techniques are thoroughly blurred with a range of grey tones. Boiling down to the core principles of Google’s thoughts on the matter, one might consider any technique deliberately and strategically employed with the intent to manipulate a search engine’s results could be considered Black-Hat. Google defines it as techniques which violate their terms of service.

But when do we step into the dark territory? Could it be the moment we simply become aware that adding a few strategic keywords to a piece of text and creating some links to it can enhance (manipulate) that page’s position in the search results?

Is Black-Hat in decline?

Once the stuff of dark alleys and locked away in grubby discussion forums, the secrets of the Black-Hatter are now to be found by anyone capable of performing a search. Try and find an article spinner, content scraper or forum posting bot a few years go and you would need the right connections and the right money. These days, just mention Black-Hat and the options are endless, often even free.

The Black-Hat world is opening up , and it’s the Black-haters themselves that are unlocking the doors.

Unlike hackers – who are motivated by the urge to crack because they can – Black-Hat internet marketers are motivated by profit, and a quick and sizable  profit is the ultimate goal.

As the Black-Hat world opens up, however, the techniques they employ are being exposed for all to see, use, and, most significantly, abused. A credit card in the right places and you can grab a large handful of the tools you need to make a fat pile of cash on the internet selling other people’s products to people who don’t really need them. And that’s the god side of Black-Hat which can stretch from merely deceptive search engine manipulation techniques to all-out financial scams.

The result of all this is two-fold:

• First, the tools are being employed by an ever increasing army of people ho don’t know how to use them and so are exposing themselves and their techniques just as reliably as i they had posted their web address on a billboard over the road from Google HQ.
• Secondly, the saturation swamps the dedicated Black-Hat pro in sheer numbers. They have discovered the need to dig deeper and deeper to uncover the profit opportunities that once lay scattered about their feet.

Switching tactics

With hard profits more difficult to prise out of the internet, Black-Hatters are evolving from exploiting the search engines to exploiting the masses of would-be internet marketers hunting for a quick buck.

More and more closed, limited communities are opening up, where for a monthly fee anyone can learn the real secrets of Black-hat internet marketing. Tools to beat the search engines, cheat the affiliate networks, and spam every bog and forum on the planet. are available with the tempting promise that only 100 people will be permitted access to the treasured secrets.

You have to admire the Black-Hatter’s resourcefulness. But when one’s method of paying the mortgage is based on discovering and exploiting online opportunities, the switch is not surprising.

Google loves Black-Hat

You may be surprised to learn that Google is perfectly happy to permit pay per click advertisers blatantly promoting Black-Hat techniques to beat Google at their on game. But consider that th more information is available in the public domain, the easier it will be to understand and subvert the techniques being employed.

Is there still money in Black-Hat marketing and SEO?

I am sure there is. No matter how the space evolves, so the techniques, opportunities, and secrets also evolve. Spend any amount of time in a Black-Hat discussion forum and you will see ideas, techniques, scams, downright fraud being described for the purposes of making a fast buck. It is a very mucky world.

One factor that never ceases to be consistent is that big bucks are only achievable with big effort. Most apprentice Black-Hats enter the space searching for those tens of thousands for just an hour’s investment. But big, consistent earnings take as much effort – I believe more in the long run because of the additional energy exerted in need to cover one’s tracks – as any more legitimate techniques for online business.

Your page title is everything

The title of your page – the text that appears at the very top of your browser – is treated with some reverence by search engines in determining what a page – or blog post – is about. Your first step is to ensure that your blog post titles are accurate representations of the content and contain the key words and terms that people might be searching for. Before writing a new post, spend a few minutes doing a little research on the terms people are actually searching for and write your title accordingly. Page/article titles which match closely to searched terms will be much more likely to grab the attention of the searcher.

How do you find out what people are searching for?
Never consider your search behaviour as being representative of the rest of the internet, so research is vital to targeting potential new blog readers.

• Wordtracker.com – expensive, but considered as the best for keyword research
• Overture search tool – free, but a little clunky, not as up to date as Wordtracker, and sometimes suffers server overload
• SEO Book keyword tool – additional useful free research tool

Your title terms are being abused by your blog

Have a look at the browser title of one of your blog posts. You will almost certainly see that the main title of your blog comes before your blog post title. Most blog applications arrange the title by default in this way.

Search engines weight the importance of the first words and phrases it finds in the title of a page or blog post. Therefore it is essential that you swap these two elements around, ensuring the blog or page title appears before the main site title. Click on any blog post on this site and you will see just that.

Switching the two may be a matter of installing a plugin (Wordpress users can use SEO Title Tag) to do it automatically, or you must make a small change to your blog theme template, physically putting one before the other.

This is just the first step

There is a lot more to optimising your blog for search engine success, but this is the first and most critical step. This step alone is unlikely to leap you right to the number one spot for a common search term, however. But considering your blog post headlines and ensuring those headlines appear first in the page title, will guarantee you improved placement in search engine results, and therefore more visitors. Try it and do let me know how you get on.