I won’t list all the domain variations, but available as of today are: golfshorts.com.au, rugbyshorts.net.au, sportsshorts.com.au, filmshorts.com.au, movieshorts.com.au, musicshorts.com.au, gigshorts.com.au and quickshorts.com.au.

There’s also: hotshorts.com.au, sexyshorts.com.au, yourshorts.com.au, myshorts.com.au, shortshorts.net.au and who could forget…noshorts.com.au!

I subscribe to TPP Internet’s purged domain service and their daily emailed list of previously held, now available domains has been growing steadily for the last couple of months. Throughout last year each list was typically quite short (!) at maybe 10 domains. Today’s list including all the ’shorts’ was definitely of the long trouser variety, at 90 or so.

PS. If anyone’s interested (and who wouldn’t be) unlimitedorgasms.com.au is now also up for grabs! Ideal if you have a shorts fetish, I suppose. Better leave it at that…

Whether it’s laziness or oversight, there must be millions (if not billions) of websites that are a year - or even more - out-of-date. Or at least appear to be. Is your site among them? Have you checked?

I’m of course referring to your copyright statement, which usually appears in your webpage footer. Have you updated it yet? Have you ever updated it? If not, there’s every chance your potential customers will notice and maybe not get that positive feeling about you that you had in mind.

You can easily update your copyright statement yourself, or get your web designer to do it. In fact, why not ask them (or us) to install a simple script to automatically take care of this important detail for you?

Watch the video to find out more:

Why was I pleased? Because small makes us agile, responsive and attentive.

“When I need to have even the simplest change made to our website, the job has to be booked-in and scheduled and often takes three or four days to get done,” my prospect had said, referring to her current web designers.

Being small allows us to hire-in task-specific specialists - to assemble the optimum team for each unique job. Bigger agencies tend to rely on a rank of salaried generalists, who often sit expensively twiddling their thumbs between projects.

Being small means we have lower overheads, savings we pass on to clients. Being small means we spend less time on admin, arcane procedures and management, freeing up more time to focus on clients.

Being small cuts out chinese whispers: client briefs account executive; executive briefs account manager; manager briefs studio manager; studio manager briefs creative. If but one word changes at each stage the outcome is invariably different to the client’s original brief. And the process starts over.

And being small avoids the ‘Everybody’s Job Story’ in which there are four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody…

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody asked Anybody.

Having worked in senior roles at some of Europe’s and London’s biggest marketing and communications firms, I’ve been there, seen it, done it. If nothing else (in fact I learned a lot) big agencies taught me just how not to do things…

PS to Everybody: If Anybody needs Somebody to do Anything for the next two weeks, Nobody’ll be here. But Anybody, actually Everybody, can still make contact by email. Life’s a beach, just once in a while.

By staying within search engine guidelines, ethical SEO is designed to deliver long-term, lasting results. But it’s not a quick-fix. Sure there are things your SEO expert can do to quickly bring more traffic to your site but the process of lifting your search rankings - which will improve not only the quantity but also the quality of your traffic – is a carefully-considered effort that can take months to bear fruit.

And it shouldn’t stop there. Regularly adding new engaging content to your site and building valuable in-bound links, are just two examples of SEO activities that should be on-going in order to improve and consolidate your website’s relevancy and search rankings.

Tick that off the list and leave it

Unfortunately, many businesses seem to take the view that once their website is up and running that’s it. “We’ve got a website. We get reasonable search results. Tick that off the list and leave it.”

Well it’s not just them that’ll leave it. Eventually the search engines will notice your website has become stagnant and irrelevant compared to your competitors who are regularly updating their sites, engaging with their visitors and gaining more authority.

Without on-going SEO your traffic will dwindle. Your website will slowly, inexorably, slip down the rankings into what Google this week, rather eyebrow-liftingly, referred to as the “cesspool” of the internet.

Paraphrasing what CEO Eric Schmidt went on to say:

“Google’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results … not the sites that best game the system (a reference to black-hat / grey-hat SEO?).

“The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevancy,” he added.

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So just as you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, you shouldn’t believe everything you get in search results.

We only do white-hat SEO OK? White as the driven-snow (even if it hasn’t snowed in Perth for a while). White as a sheet then. Whiter than the whitest white ghost. So bright white, we’re practically glowing.

That’s not to say we SEOs are angels or anything. Our job in designing websites and optimizing them for search does involve a degree of artistic and scientific manipulation. Tweaking content and code, for example, to make pages more relevant and search engine friendly. And as a result, achieve higher search rankings, more traffic, more sales.

But unlike some web design / SEO firms we draw the line at unethical black-hat tactics. Practices such as keyword-stuffing and hidden text, which Google, Yahoo etc clearly state are beyond their quality guidelines.

Of course it was my recent posts about these agencies that gained us top billing for ‘black-hat SEO’ - a significant spike in traffic and an on-going stream of visitors from Google (using that and similar search terms).

If nothing else, it proves the principle of ethical SEO works. Even if in this case it’s a bit like discovering it’s your footprints that have left dog poo throughout the house.

So dear Google, dear ‘black-hat SEO’ searcher, dear reader … we only do white-hat SEO. OK?

The three agencies involved (all of which offer search engine optimization services) are essentially hiding keyword-stuffed elements on their homepages - headlines, semantic links and blocks of text that are deliberately made invisible to all but search engines.

One of the them even uses the same hidden text “trick” on several of their clients’ websites.

According to Google’s quality guidelines:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

Yahoo! says:

“Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called “spam.” Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index.”

Intentional or accidental?

There is of course the question of intent. My personal take is that I’d find it hard to justify as accidental, or innocent, writing specific css that sets the display of keyword-stuffed elements to ‘none’.

Or, as in the case of one of the three, writing inline styles that sets the visibility of two lengthy headlines to ‘hidden’ and that specifies a font-color that’s exactly the same as the page background.

Does this kind of shady SEO work?

With on-site SEO these days playing a less significant role in search ranking (versus inbound link-building) it is virtually impossible to tell. All I can point out is that the three websites I refer to all rank high on page 1 results at Google - for very generic, highly searched phrases. Search terms that are, seemingly purposely, hidden on their homepages.

So what do you think? Should black-hat SEO generally be reported?

Both Google and Yahoo! encourage reporting on the basis it will ultimately help them improve search results. But what’s your opinion?

Among other things, the process of optimizing a website for search involves examining your competitors’ sites so we started at Google; punched in one or two of our target key phrases and then we took a look at the top 10 results.

As expected there are some very attractive, professional and engaging sites in the leading pack of web design companies, most of which offer SEO as one of their key services. Not expected is that at least three of the top 10 appear to be using somewhat shady tactics (let’s say a very dark shade of grey) to enhance their rankings…

In SEO parlance, this kind of practice is referred to as black-hat SEO - with white-hat, at the other end of the scale, referring to the ethical methods adopted by the vast majority of search engine optimization professionals.

So who are these black-hatters and what are they doing?

Well we’d never name them, of course. They know who they are and they know their homepages contain intentionally hidden elements stuffed with keywords - blocks of text inserted solely for the purpose of being picked up by search engines.

Website #1

It’s perfectly reasonable to have a heading at the very top of your page like this (and notice the use of <h1> and <strong> tags which are important in SEO):

<h1 id="title">
Welcome to XXXX Web Design Perth, Australia. XXXX
provides services in <strong>Web Design</strong>
and Website Development, Graphic Design, <strong>
Search Engine Optimisation</strong> (SEO) in
Australia and the World.</h1>

So why make it invisible?

#title {
display: none;
}

Of course have a logo high up - with relevant keywords in the <alt> text:

<div id="header">
<img src="images/XXXX.jpg" width="400" height="65"
alt="XXXX - Web Design Perth (SEO Perth)" />
</div>

But why hide it?

#header {
display: none;
}

Most web pages have a few links at bottom. Fair enough - and relevant in SEO (again notice the use of <h3> and <strong> tags:

<h3 class="bottomlinks">Our <a href="web-design-
perth.*****"><strong>Web Design</strong></a> Services
Include: Internet - Intranet - Java, CSS, Standards
Based Design, ASP, PHP, HTML and <strong>Flash
Design</strong></h3>

But what’s the point if the link/text is concealed?

.bottomlinks {
display: none;
}

Website #2

A bit more obvious what’s going on here. A couple of weighty blocks of text tagged as headlines tucked into the source code. As you can see visibility is set to hidden. And just to be doubly-sure (perhaps artistic) the font colour specified so perfectly matches the background colour of the page as to render it invisible (…to all but search engines, of course).

<h1 style="visibility:hidden"><font color="#3F6681">
Website Designers & Web Developers Perth WA, Websites,
Multimedia, Flash HTML web site Western Australia,
graphic design company javascript business scripts
internet Perth WA artwork database development desktop
publishing html dhtml cd software website hosting<
/font></h1>

<h2 style="visibility:hidden"><font color="#3F6681">
<strong>XXXX </strong>provides a highly technical, full
service website Internet production business, offering
a wide range of services, from website production,
hosting, database construction and consultancy, to
site re-engineering, electronic commerce and software
development and sales.<br><br>Founded in ...., the
business has enjoyed strong growth due to quality
products and customer service satisfaction. A team of
skilled web technicians and website consultants,
ranging from website graphic designers to database
developers provide a thorough and efficient service
for any website project.</font></h2>

Website #3

My personal favourite (!) because this web agency has even gone to the trouble of creating a special style to conceal a keyword-rich headline at the very top of their homepage.

And what’s the name of their cleverly-created style? “hide” of course. Makes sense.

<div class="hide"><h1>XXXX Web Design, Perth Western
Australia - providers of Website Design and
Development, Website Hosting and Search Engine
Optimisation to clients in Perth and throughout
the world.</h1>....</div>

And the code that makes the headline invisible:

.hide {
display: none;
}

In truth, the fact that these companies appear so prominently in Google search results isn’t solely because of their, some might say, dodgy tactics. There are many other SEO factors at play.

But it would be interesting to see what would happen if they swapped hats and either dispensed with these intentionally hidden elements or made them visible.

I doubt they’ll do the latter - it would ruin the visual appearance of their homepages and make their SEO artistry (or lack of it) rather obvious (bearing in mind that they all promote SEO as an expertise).

As for the former, time will tell. They may eventually get penalized by search engines and if they already have been, simply removing their hidden content might result in even higher rankings (and a more level playing field for the rest us).

Where’s my hat? You know, the white one I always wear?

The purpose of this article, more than anything else, is to demonstrate the most common SEO pitfalls many website owners fall into. If website developers are doing it for themselves, and possibly for their clients, then that may go some way to explaining why your competitors rank higher than you in search results. Upshot: If you can’t beat them. Don’t join them. Put on your white hat and keep trying.

Want to learn more about white-hat SEO? Google’s own best-practices guide is a good place to start.

If you do, chances are your potential customers will back-out of your site and go elsewhere. Probably to a competitor. Possibly lost forever.

Please Don’t Force. Please Don’t Forget.

If you want or need your website visitors to download a pdf then always tell them in advance that that’s what they’re about to do. Tell them it’s a pdf and indicate the filesize:

…for a closer look at our logo, download the artwork (pdf 216KB)

If you use an ordinary-looking link your visitors will assume it points to another page. And if it doesn’t - if a pdf is downloaded instead, that’s when they’ll begin to think twice about your manners.

…for a closer look at our logo click here.

Sorry for this minor rant but my downloads folder is again bursting with unwanted pdfs - info that I only wanted to glance at online, not to be forced (possibly tricked) into downloading.