Cloaking: Part II

In the previous blog, we talked about cloaking and what it means. Though on the whole not a very good practice, the webmasters who do favor cloaking give the following reasons for using it:

They feel that with the help of cloaking different web pages can be tailored and customized according to different search engine spiders and thus can contribute in scoring top positions in more than one search engines as different search engines use different algorithms and a single web page cannot impress or fall in favor of all search engines and their different algorithms.

They also feel that with cloaking a site will be free from the restrictions of having search engine friendly design and layout. This will help in better indexing of all those sites that have a great layout and content still they cannot be indexed by search engines properly.

One of the major reasons given by proponents of cloaking is that it helps hide the HTML code from others, especially your competitors. When your site achieves a high ranking, generally the competitors study and analyze the top ranked web pages and their HTML code. So to avoid that and secure the site's main strategies for achieving high rankings, cloaking is used.

But every coin has the other side also that tells a different story. So does cloaking. In the next blog, we will discuss about the disadvantages and dangers of using cloaking.

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Beware of Cloaking:Part I

How would you feel when you go to see a movie and what you see in the trailers of the movie is totally different from the movie itself? You will be shocked, frustrated, and angry at wasting time and money on something you had not wished or intended to watch. This is what happens in Cloaking where two totally different versions of the same page are shown to the search engines and the users respectively.

In cloaking a web server is scripted in such a way that it looks for search engines that are crawling. This is done so that an index of search results may be created. This fools the search engines into believing that they are selecting the key match to their results based on the meta tags that site adminstrator has input. But in reality, as a result of cloaking, the meta tags does not match the existing content on the page. Hence, the search results are misleading.

Webmasters generally resort to cloaking either to protect their pages from other search engine optimization firms or to increase search engine rankings. Every SEO company spends precious time, resources, and money to optimize websites so that they can rank well in search engines. And they don't want to reveal their strategies or techniques to anybody else. There is a lot of competition amongst different SEO firms in the ratings game. But what we forget is that merely getting a top ranking is not enough. You may get a lot of visitors to your website, but this will not, necessarily, result in increased revenue or sales.If your website displays to the visitors something different from the results returned by the search engines, people will leave your site as soon as they entered it.

So in order to create high ranking web pages, some webmasters pay more attention to how the web pages look to the spiders indexing the pages than what will be seen by the visitors.In other words, the real web page is hidden from the visitors.

Cloaking has it's own advantages and disadvantages which we will discuss in the coming blogs in detail.

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Treat your web site as an Extension of yourself:Make it talk to the visitors

You must be thinking after reading the title of this blog, "How can a web site be treated as a human being? How can one talk to a piece of machine? This is utter rubbish".Wait a minute. Read this blog and you will change your thinking, I bet. Let's take a simple example from our daily lives. How would you feel if you cannot contact a person for sharing some information, or some news, or just to say hello to that person?Or worse yet, you would go mad if you are left alone simply because people cannot contact you or talk to you. Web marketing,to a great extent, depends upon your network and the level of interaction between your web site and the visitors to your site.If visitors don't find a comfortable, easy, and simple way of contacting and connecting with you, they will not get the confidence to trust you or your services and products. You have to involve them and talk to them through your site.

Ways to make your site more interactive

1. Always provide an easy email address link to the people as the first step to start any interaction is to send a message to someone or talk to someone. Providing the visitors with a contact form also helps as it is easy to fill and even people working on others' computers can also fill it.

2. Newsletter related to your web site updating about the new features on your web site and even articles on themes related to products and services provided by you will also involve the readers' interest in your site. The newsletter can be a free sign-up feature that allures readers to sign up for your newsletter. And in the newsletter, you can provid links to your site, products,services or order now page.

3. Bulletin boards act as great discussion forums and people come back to them time and again. It is just like giving importance and weightage to the feelings, views and thoughts of your visitors.

4. Act as a good advisor and provide solutions, answers, and clear confusions of the visitors by having a 'question answer section' or 'expert advice' section where you entertain all the queries, doubts, questions of the visitors. This will increase the interactivity between you and your visitors, and may even your sales in the long run.

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Page Rank: An Innovative Web Page Attribute

We all know what an amazing web page attribute Page Rank is. Thanks to the efforts and innovations taking place in Google that we have got something like Page Rank today. Named after one of the founders of Google search engine, Larry Page, Page Rank is based on the theory that a link from one web page to web page of another website is like a vote for that page. It is quite obvious that webmasters will only link to those websites that they feel are relevant and are of value to their visitors.

Google counted the number of inbound links to a page to judge the importance and relevance of that page and then decided what place should be allocated to that page in the search results page (SERPs). A scale was devised for this measurement. The scale rated from 1 to 10. Next came the creation of a toolbar for the information of webmasters and individuals so that they can see the Page Rank of a particular web page. The
toolbar can be easily deployed in Internet Explorer indicating the Page Rank value of the web page shown, called the PR0 or PR10 values.

This numeric value shows the importance of a web page on web. It is based on the simple premise that when one web page links to another, it is actually voting for that page and the more votes a page gets, more important the page must be. So Google calculates the importance of a page from the sites linking to that particular site or web page.

Though not the only way of deciding a page's rank, Page Rank is one of the most important attributes of Google to give a particular ranking to a page.

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Earning Your Advertising Revenue Fast and Easy: Google AdSense

We all want to earn good revenue from online advertising if we have a website. Well, there is nothing wrong in wishing and wanting so. After all we are out there to do business, and earning some revenue from online advertising is not asking for much. Google's Adsense program comes as a boon for all of us who have a desire to make some bucks through online advertising.

The AdSense program gives you revenue from each page on your website in an easy, fast and least cumbersome way. The only condition for this program to work for you is the presence of relevant and good content on your web pages.

How it Works?

The website publishers are allowed to display relevant, text-based, down-to-earth kind of Google AdWords on their website's content pages and earn money. The benefit here is that due to the relevancy of the ads to what your visitors are looking for specifically in your site, you get a chance to earn monetarily and improve your content pages.

The text and image ads completely relevant to your products and services are fully targeted to your site content. Adding a Google search box to your site makes AdSense deliver relevant text ads that are targeted to the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) activated by the visitors' search request.

Though, when this program was launched in March 2003, only large websites were allowed to employ the Google AdWords program in their sites. But now the program allows even smaller websites with only a few thousand page views per month also to apply for and use the Google AdSense program.

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