SEO specialist

These Risky Black-Hat SEO Techniques Are Still Used Today (But Please Don’t Be Tempted)

Posted on by Mario

Risky Black-Hat SEO Techniques that Are Still Used Today

It is not uncommon anymore for business owners to know the importance of having a website for the growth of their business. After all, it is such a waste if you sell good stuff but nobody can find it, right? For that reason, SEO exists. Many business owners hire SEO services, but so many of them are still not aware of the dark side of SEO if you use it the wrong way, like using black-hat SEO techniques for your website. Black-hat SEO techniques are the “quick” methods or the “short-cuts” used for increasing your website visibility in a way that is against search engine rules and guidelines. Basically, you might get fast results with these techniques, but in a negative way that if search engines find out about it (which they usually do), it will cause damage to your business, resulting in getting penalised for what you have done. Therefore, if you are a business owner and wanting to hire an SEO company, make sure you know these black-hat SEO techniques, so that you will avoid these techniques in the future. This article will tell you the risky black-hat SEO techniques that are actually still used even until today. Keep reading to find out!

Paid links

Buying links for SEO may be undeniably advantageous for the buyer, as it is easy. If you pay links for SEO, once a transaction is done, there is no need to bother with the quality of the content. Also, the anchor text, which is a strong Google ranking factor, is also chosen according to customer’s preferences. This method are able to effectively manipulate search engine rankings, and that’s why this SEO technique is classified as a serious black hat.

Spam comments

Spam has been people’s public enemy even since the dawn of time. Yes, it is undeniably but annoyingly true. You may often see spam comments in blogs which might bother the blog’s owner, especially if the comments are not relevant to the blog posts at all. While there are some ways you can do to make the comments more natural than just becoming spam messages, most of the comments we have seen are all spammy and irrelevant, making them really bad for SEO. If your blog also contains spams, make sure you set comment moderation for your blog so that you can filter comments before publishing the comment.

Duplicate content

Oh, yes, another content you might find on Google. Just like the name suggests, duplicate content means as the well-known “copy and paste” content creation practice across domains and means that blocks of copied content from different sources exactly match each other or look very much alike.

Search engines prefer unique and high quality content which is why content purposely duplicated across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques. You might search for something on Google, but you accidentally find the same results in the Google listing. This can be a clear and obvious sign of manipulation of search engine rankings and it may usually result in poor user experience.

That’s the most common parts of black-hat SEO techniques that are surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) still used even until today. With this knowledge in mind, you can avoid doing black-hat SEO techniques. If you need more information about SEO, feel free to contact us and our team will be ready to assist you.

Asymmetrical Design for Your Website: Whimsical Beauty Added in the Trends

Posted on by Mario

Asymmetrical Design for Your Website Whimsical Beauty Added in the Trends

One of the crucial parts in building a website is its web design. A website without its web design is like wearing a fancy dress without putting on some make up; your website could go live, but the website would seem lifeless. If you have a business website without having it designed, this could be a lost cause to your business. Why? That is because with web design, it could also determine how long your web visitors will stay interested in your website. With so many designs out there, business owners compete with each other to impress their visitors with their website, so that they could get more potential customers turned into real paying customers through keeping up with the trends. Are you one of the business owners who feels challenged with the trends? Or do you want to be the trend and want to have a better website look? Then, this article is especially made for you!

As time goes by, there are more and more web design trends coming. One of the popular designs that never seem to be out-dated is asymmetrical design. In asymmetrical design, there are designs containing elements that don’t create a mirror image. Although just like the name “asymmetrical”, these asymmetrical designs are, in fact, balanced, but just not through perfectly similar halves. It may be difficult to design it and to achieve the look, but once finished, the result is whimsically so stunning and beautiful. Not only does this design give you perfect harmony or balance, but it can also represent modern and class. The concepts of asymmetrical design are very influential because it has attention-grabbing techniques and imagination-provoking elements in it.

You can ask your designer to mix and match symmetrical and asymmetrical concepts within a design project. If they divide the design into smaller sections there will be parts that contain different types of balance. (Think of panels in parallax scrolling sites or the design of an image within the canvas).

Using space

The concept of minimalism design trend that is good for this design is using so much space for an easier balance of a simple object or image against a larger white or dark background. If there is a balance between white, or negative space, and elements in the design, it should create contrast. This will direct the eye’s movement across the design.

Emphasize motion

Imagine you see a wedding ring falling to the ground. You can already sense the motion. This also applies to the motion you can “feel” in an asymmetrical design. Your eyes will move from the larger, heavier part of the screen to the lighter part, naturally. Overall, this design brings more imagination for you.

You can add focus with colour

Good asymmetrical colour patterns are usually the ones that are high in contrast and colour combinations. You can add bright hues against black or a toned photograph that has bold white typography on top. High colour contrast will be the focus and visual weight to specific parts of the design.

You can create asymmetrical colour combinations by using the colour wheel. Choose the colour combinations that fall outside traditional colour rules for a sense of asymmetry. You can use colour to highlight and emphasize other elements in the asymmetrical outline. Colour “gets along” well with elements such as geometric shapes, typography or even in the background to get the balance.

Creating asymmetrical design may be tough for your designer at first, but if it is done properly with well-planned strategy, the result will be much more beautiful than you can imagine. Your visitors might not even leave your website! If you are interested in using asymmetrical design for your website but haven’t found the designer yet, you can contact us and our team will be ready to help you.

These Are Why Using Flash Might Not Work for Your SEO

Posted on by Mario

These Are Why Using Flash Might Not Work for Your SEO

When it comes to business, people in the business world are aware that having a website is now more important than it looks. Not only will it drive more new potential customers, but also real paying customers as well. With a website, a business can be more recognised and easily found by the target market. In order to reach to the target market, many business owners are now aware of SEO’s influence in the world of business, because a business cannot be separated from SEO. Therefore, business people are inclined to use SEO services to reach to their target market and get more real paying customers. However, there are some websites that cannot work well with SEO because of its design and components. The most common one that cannot “get along well” with SEO is the use of flash in a website.

A website that uses flash might be the one that looks beautiful and once you find that kind of website, you will find yourself attached to it, because, who doesn’t love animation? After all, almost all of us prefer visuals, right? However, some of us might not know that flash doesn’t really work well with SEO. Why? Well, if you are a business owner who has a website that uses flash, this article will make you think twice. Keep reading to find out why!

Search engines don’t get along with flash

Websites that use flash are difficult to be crawled and indexed by search engines, because a website fully implemented in Flash is seen as a single file. Search engines just wouldn’t be able to direct visitors to the proper page within that file.

Flash doesn’t care about users’ needs

While the ground rules of marketing focus on users’ needs, Flash websites ignore the basic principle of that. For example, a website using automatic sound that appears without users’ consent will make them uncomfortable, especially if they are in a work environment when browsing the internet.

Flash doesn’t work on mobiles

Flash will be useless when you use a mobile phone. This would cause confusion to users, especially the important part of your website’s information requires them to work on flash in order to see that. Well, you should reconsider the fact that over 3.5 billion people use mobile phone for the internet use.

Poor usability

Even though your website’s appearance might be appealing and attractive to some people, in terms of usability, it simply won’t help users. They can’t identify links that they can click, it can’t be searched, so it’s difficult for them to hit a back button within Flash content, and it’s hard for them to bookmark anything beyond the home screen; moreover, it’s impossible to navigate on a touch screen.

That’s why Flash is not good for your website, especially for your SEO. If your website is not SEO friendly, not only is it hard for Google to read your website, it is also hard for users to stay on your website for long. This will hinder you from gaining more traffic and more real customers in the future. Do you have a website that needs to be polished beautifully without any bad impact to your website? Feel free to contact us now.