Round Tale

One of the biggest debates in the entire search engine optimization industry is whether or not software is better than good old fashioned hard work. The answer to this question cannot be answered the same for all situation, as there are many facets to a successful search engine optimization campaign, and there are also many different types of software available that claim to help your site rank higher in the SERPs. The truth is, some of them work and some of them don’t, however all of them need to be used correctly to produce substantial results. In fact, most people that are looking for a push button solution to search engine optimization usually wind up misusing these tools and receiving penalties from the search engines, thus hurting their search engine ranking. However, this may or may not be attributed to the tool itself, but how the tool was used. The following information should shed more light on the relationship between software and successful SEO.

Could This Realistically Be Done?

That is the first question you need to ask yourself before using any tool to automate your search engine optimization campaign. If what you are about to do could not realistically be done in the amount of time you plan doing it, then chances are it will be regarded as spam by the search engines. Search engines know that people use tools to automate tedious processes, and to prevent abuse they look for unrealistic patterns when indexing pages. For example if you build 10,000 backlinks in one night, then this will obviously look suspicious. Not only is this kind of link building suspicious, but all of these links can’t possibly be indexed in one night, and in many cases the site may be thrown into the sandbox in order for Google to catch up with all of the links posted on the web.

Is this Really Beneficial?

That is the second question you need to ask yourself before using any tool to automate a process. Many of the tools used to build links quickly do so by posting links on sites with low PR. Every site that links back to yours affects the PR of your site, depending upon the PR. So if you build 1000 backlinks from a bunch of PR 0 and PR 1 pages in a week, then you may actually be hurting your page rank! On the other hand, just 20 backlinks from PR 5,6, and 7 sites could bring you pages ahead of your competitors in a very short period of time. The point is, it is not always a number game and this is an important factor to consider when using any tool.

Will it Help Me Learn?

Perhaps the best way to use tools for search engine optimization is to use market research tools which give you insight on your industry and competition. Keyword research/market analysis tools are the best tools to use in search engine optimization, as they will ultimately help you perfect your craft and advance your site to the front page of the search engines.

One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.  There is a dilemma presented when wanting to have potential customers or clients contact you or your company.  Either your email has to be publicly posted or you will need to enable a form to allow quick and easy contact.  When you do implement either choice, spammers will come and they will do as much damage as is possible.

Email link – bad idea

The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.  Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.  Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.  If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only – this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.  Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.

Contact form – can be attacked

If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.  This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.  However, most email forms have a standard “name”, “email”,  “subject”, “content” style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.  Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form – computer to computer.  What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.  This is where Captcha comes in.

Contact form with Captcha – better idea

Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.  The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.  The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.  However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.  Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.

This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.  After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.  You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.

Conclusion

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.  But this is not a feasible option – after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.  So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.