All's fair in love and SEO

Smarta looks at the dirtiest tricks used by those at the top of the cut-throat world of SEO.

When you're trying to launch a website, sleep becomes a precious commodity. So it was with a sort of numb bafflement that the Smarta team greeted the discovery two days after our launch that one of our competitors had indulged in what we considered to be a deeply unsporting method of boosting their traffic: they had created a Google AdWords campaign for the term 'Smarta'.

We were confused. Wasn't that some sort of copyright infringement? And even if it wasn't against the law, wasn't it, well, just a little bit unfair?

"C'mon, it's fair," berated one entrepreneur. "They try to get the same audience! Do the same back!"

Apparently not, actually. An impromptu Twitter survey quickly found out what the entrepreneurial world thinks of the practice - and, according to our followers at least, it's fine. "C'mon, it's fair," berated Veedow.com co-founder Fabio De Bernardi when we expressed our outrage. "They try to get the same audience! Do the same back!"

We got to thinking. If that sort of behaviour is fair game, we pondered, there must be hundreds of other underhand ways to boost your rankings. Heck, this must just be the tip of the iceberg. So we rang up two SEO experts, and asked them to skip basics such as metatags, descriptions and keywords, and get to the nitty-gritty: the industry's dirtiest tricks.

1. Orphan your landing pages

Not quite as brutal as it sounds, this involves creating 'orphan' landing pages dedicated to certain key phrases or search terms. "If I was an online pet store which sold dog food, cat food and bird food, I would create landing pages around each product," explains Rob Arkell, sales and marketing manager of search engine marketing company Impact Media.       

Orphan pages are generally related to pay-per-click (PPC) - if you go to Google and type in ' Henry Ford', the Amazon advert on the right-hand side of the page will take you to a page dedicated to books by or about Henry Ford - one which won't be available to users within the Amazon site. "A regular site user wouldn't necessarily ever see that page unless they find it through pay-per-click," clarifies Chris Hough, head of search strategy at NaturalRanks.co.uk.

Even if you don't have pay-per-click campaigns, creating dedicated landing pages will also help you to boost traffic, allowing you to put your key search terms between those golden tags which, as Hough explains, is invaluable. "Search engines will, just like when you read a document, give more emphasis to words between header tags."

2. De-jazz

Ever wondered why many Flash-based pages give you the option of looking at an HTML version, even though almost every browser available now supports Flash? It's not because they're being kind to technophobes - it's all for SEO.

"Search engines can't read JavaScript or Flash yet, so you need to create a plain-text equivalent," says Hough.It's bad news for all-singing, all-dancing flash sites, but this also affects sites such as Smarta, which use Ajax menus to navigate. If you can't bear to be without that jazzy little navigation bar, though, there is a way around it.

"If you want your SEO to work well for two or three specific phrases, you can put links to those landing pages at the bottom of your site." Don't go overboard, though: too much, and Google will think you are pushing your luck. As Hough explains: "Don't go crazy, don't go putting 10 or 20 links at the bottom of your page - just keep it to two or three and it should give your site a boost."

3. Pimp out your footer

Search engines are all about the user experience: they want to retain their market share and they wants to see their users return again and again, which means they need to give their users the most accurate, relevant, reliable search results they possibly can.

One way of gauging the reliability of a website is to look at its footer. Many search engines work on the basis that if a site has a terms and conditions section, it's probably fairly well thought-out. "Essentially, it 's becoming more and more important to have things like terms and conditions, privacy policies, and a link to your contact form," says Hough.

Google takes it one step further. "Because it has maps, Google likes sites which have their addresses on so it can pick them up and put them on a map. It wants to recognise exactly where your business is based."