Put your contracting company phone number in your Pay-per-Click ad. Some people will see your ad, call your number and never bother to click through to your website. There was no click, so you just got a call without having to pay Google.

Turn off the “Content” option on Google Adwords. Google Adwords places ads in two settings. Let’s say a searcher types in “plumber Topeka.” Google will show him thousands of websites about Topeka plumbers plus at the top and right side Adwords ads for Topeka plumbers. So far, so good.

You’ve probably also noticed lots of ads on webpages that you visit. Let’s say you surf over to a weather website for your city. While you’re looking at the forecast, you can also enjoy ads for wrinkle-removal cream, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. These are Google “AdSense” ads. They’re Pay-per-Click ads that Google thinks might interest you. The webpage owner has an AdSense deal with Google where money will flow to both the owner and Google each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Of course, the Pay-per-Click customer pays the bill.

In fact, this very thing happened to me when I first ran Pay-per-Click ads for my electrical company in Los Angeles. I was checking out the weather forecast when up pops a Pay-per-Click ad for my company, The Electric Connection. At first, I was thrilled. There was my company name for all the world to see. Then, I became curious. What was it doing right next to the weather forecast? Someone might click out of idle interest but how likely was it that they would be into hiring an electrician at that very moment? Then, I was furious! How did this happen?!

I found out that Google’s default setting is to put Adwords ads onto any webpage that it deems relevant, in this case the weather for my city. Google calls this the “Content” option. I was paying for those clicks. I immediately turned off the default Content option so that my ads ran only if someone expressed an interest in hiring an electrician by typing something like “electrician Los Angeles” into the Google search box.

You might think, who would click on an ad for an electrician when they were really looking for the weather? Could enough people looking for the weather click on your ad to really make a difference in the cost of Adwords? You’d be amazed.

You can look at the phrases that people have searched on before clicking on your ad. Your Adwords account provides this information for you. It tells you exactly what every searcher typed into Google just before they clicked on your ad. For my electrical contracting company, I’ve found that many searchers were looking for an electrician, but some were looking for an electric razor or a contractor’s license school. Those are clicks that aren’t going to turn into electrical work for my company.

I’ve found that turning off the Content option on Pay-per-Click ads saves me money on wasted clicks without causing a noticeable decline in customer calls from my Adwords campaigns.

Click here to find out more about how you can save money on your Pay-per-Click campaign. Or give us a call at 800-990-5811 Pacific Time 9-5, to discuss your campaign. We look forward to talking with you.

Kim Hopkins

CEO, HappyContractor

What is this problem? NOT ENOUGH CUSTOMERS.

How do I know this? I’ve been a contractor inLos Angelessince 1979, for over 30 years. We’ve been through several recessions where many of my competitors have gone belly up. For me, the saving grace that has allowed me to build a stable 25-person electrical contracting company has been having enough customers.

If you’re a contractor, let me ask you: What would happen if you had two or three times as many customers waiting for bids? Wouldn’t you bid your jobs higher, sell more jobs, and make more profit? For most contractors, the answer is yes. But why is the answer yes? After all, contractors need to do a lot of things right to make a profit, not just find customers.

There are a lot of steps in contracting – and a lot of things that can go wrong. From the moment a customer first calls you to the moment you’re paid in full on a completed job, you must handle each step and many details skillfully. You must bid the job, sell the job, schedule the work, purchase material, organize all the aspects of the work, complete each aspect satisfactorily, and finally, get paid.

Fortunately, most contractors do well enough at these steps that if they could just get enough customers, they could take it from there and make a fine profit. The one thing most contractors agree they have a problem with is not enough customers.

Getting customers is done in two steps. The first is promotion. Promotion is getting the word out so that you get calls or e-mails from customers. Contractors have typically done this with Yellow Pages, flyers, telemarketing, and even radio and TV ads. Today, of course, a lot of promotion is done on the internet. When internet promotion is done properly a contractor can expect a large percentage of qualified customers looking for their specific services to find the contractor’s website and then call or e-mails them.

Once your promotion has gotten the customer to call, the second step is sales — bidding the job and selling the customer on your doing the job.

Of the two steps, promotion and sales, promotion is the more important. With a large number of people calling, even if you don’t have a silver sales tongue, you can still land a high enough percentage to make a profit. In addition, if you have enough people calling, you can decide not to bid jobs that you suspect will be less profitable.  You can operate with a higher profit margin that will compensate for those jobs that don’t go perfectly. With enough customers calling, the sales, bidding, and construction skills of most contractors are good enough that they can run profitably.

Until very recently, the biggest source of promotion for contractors has been Yellow Pages. Unfortunately, Yellow Pages aren’t terribly effective — after all when a customer is looking for a contractor, your ad is almost indistinguishable from all the other ads jammed on the page alongside yours. Yet, Yellow Pages are very expensive. Thousands of dollars a year for the larger Yellow Page ads is not unusual.

With more customers each year turning to the Internet to find contractors, the effectiveness of Yellow Pages is sinking ever lower. Your customers are now increasingly looking for your contracting company on the Internet. Here’s the good news. If you start promoting your business on the Internet or improve that promotion, attracting the numbers and types of customers that you want is a lot more effective and will likely be less expensive than Yellow Pages.

Effective promotion, whether on the Internet or off, depends on a specific skill set. Knowing contracting isn’t enough. There are marketing skills involved in developing an attractive website and then driving traffic to it.

As an example from every day life, a boy might watch cars drive by his house every day and think that he’d like to drive a car, too. But if he turned the key in the family sedan and started tootling down the road, he would quickly learn that just because he can watch others drive, doesn’t mean he has the skills for it. I wouldn’t want to be in the car with him until he got the hang of it. Nor would I want the Internet promotion of my contracting company in the hands of an inexperienced marketer.

The skills for Internet promotion for contractors are not learned by doing contracting jobs each day nor even by doing Internet promotion for retail sales companies like vitamin stores. That’s where HappyContractor comes in. We’ve learned to get contractors to the top of page 1 of Google, to dominate their market on the Internet. Take a look at where some of our clients are, starting with my own electrical contracting company in L.A. If you go to Google and type in search terms that Los Angeles customers might type in when searching for an electrician such as “electrician Los Angeles” or  ”Los Angeles electrician,” my website www.TheElectricConnection.com usually comes up #1 on the first page.

We charge a reasonable start-up fee and a monthly fee thereafter. If you’re not on page 1 of Google yet, we can get you there within about six months. If you’re already on page 1, our objective is to get you to the top of page 1. You will start getting the number of customers your need to solve the problem that unlocks profitability.

Call us today at 800-990-5811 between 9-5 Pacific Time. We look forward to talking with you.

Kim Hopkins, CEO

HappyContractor

1. Put your contracting company phone number in your Pay-per-Click ad. Some people will see your ad, call your number and never bother to click through to your website. There was no click, so you just got a call without having to pay Google.

2. Turn off the “Content” option on Google Adwords. Google Adwords places ads in two settings. Let’s say a searcher types in “plumber Topeka.” Google will show him thousands of websites about Topeka plumbers plus at the top and right side Adwords ads for Topeka plumbers. So far, so good.

You’ve probably also noticed lots of ads on webpages that you visit. Let’s say you surf over to a weather website for your city. While you’re looking at the forecast, you can also enjoy ads for wrinkle-removal cream, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. These are Google “AdSense” ads. They’re Pay-per-Click ads that Google thinks might interest you. The webpage owner has an AdSense deal with Google where money will flow to both the owner and Google each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Of course, the Pay-per-Click customer pays the bill.

In fact, this very thing happened to me when I first ran Pay-per-Click ads for my electrical company in Los Angeles. I was checking out the weather forecast when up pops a Pay-per-Click ad for my company, The Electric Connection. At first, I was thrilled. There was my company name for all the world to see. Then, I became curious. What was it doing right next to the weather forecast? Someone might click out of idle interest but how likely was it that they would be into hiring an electrician at that very moment? Then, I was furious! How did this happen?!

I found out that Google’s default setting is to put Adwords ads onto any webpage that it deems relevant, in this case the weather for my city. Google calls this the “Content” option. I was paying for those clicks. I immediately turned off the default Content option so that my ads ran only if someone expressed an interest in hiring an electrician by typing something like “electrician Los Angeles” into the Google search box.

You might think, who would click on an ad for an electrician when they were really looking for the weather? Could enough people looking for the weather click on your ad to really make a difference in the cost of Adwords? You’d be amazed.

You can look at the phrases that people have searched on before clicking on your ad. Your Adwords account provides this information for you. It tells you exactly what every searcher typed into Google just before they clicked on your ad. For my electrical contracting company, I’ve found that many searchers were looking for an electrician, but some were looking for an electric razor or a contractor’s license school. Those are clicks that aren’t going to turn into electrical work for my company.

I’ve found that turning off the Content option on Pay-per-Click ads saves me money on wasted clicks without causing a noticeable decline in customer calls from my Adwords campaigns.

Click here to find out more about how you can save money on your Pay-per-Click campaign. Or give us a call at 800-990-5811 Pacific Time 9-5, to discuss your campaign. We look forward to talking with you.

Kim Hopkins

CEO, HappyContractor

For contractors who have tried Pay-per-Click, you might already know the catch. Pay-per-Click can be expensive, too expensive to be profitable IF it’s not correctly managed. The source of the hemorrhaging of dollars is that many times people click on your ad who are never going to hire you, no way. Yet, they’ve clicked, Google counts the click, and you need to pay Google at the end of the month.

I learned the hard way with the Pay-per-Click account for my electrical contracting company in Los Angeles. For years, I paid Google for clicks that never had a snowball’s chance in you-know-what of turning into electrical work. Tearing out my hair over how much Google was making off me, I started trying this and trying that to lower the bill while still keeping the customer calls coming.

After a lot of experimentation, I turned my Pay-per-Click campaign into a lean, mean call-generating machine that gave me a good Return on Investment. Here are a couple of things that worked:

• Forget about the top-most position on the page for your ads. Position #2 works just as well for contractors and costs less. Save your money and bid only high enough to get your ads at an average of Position #2, the second from the top of Google.

• Schedule your ads to show only when a live person will answer your office phone, People who click on your ad most often want to hire a contractor immediately. They click, they call, the voice mail comes on — they hang up. Do you leave messages on the phone of a contractor that you’ve never tried before and, then, stop looking for another contractor? Neither do most people.

This was another important step I took to improve my Return on Investment. When I stopped my ads after 5 pm and on weekends, my monthly Google bill went down by 35% — with only a slight decrease in customer calls from Pay-per-Click.

There’s another important lesson in this one. Whether you run a Pay-per-Click campaign or not, be sure a LIVE PERSON ANSWERS YOUR PHONE during business hours. I put it in caps because it belongs in caps. If a live person who can schedule a job is not answering your office phone during business hours and you don’t have enough work, that’s the most important single step you can take.

I’ll cover more cost-saving tips for Pay-Per-Click in later blog posts. But, here’s a big one that I want to leave you with.

• Pay-per-Click gets your website to the top of Google right away, but even with cost-cutting, you’re still paying for every click. Free clicks are always going to be better. That’s what you get with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO won’t take your website to the top of Google anywhere as fast as Pay-per-Click. It may take months with SEO. But in the long run, it will give you a higher Return on Investment as every click is free. Launch an SEO campaign at the same time as you start your Pay-per-Click campaign, and, down-the-road, you may be able to save money by discontinuing your Pay-per-Click campaign altogether.

If you would like help with management of either your Pay-per-Click campaign or SEO, give me a call (800) 990-5811. I look forward to talking with you.

Kim Hopkins

Owner, HappyContractor

If you’re wondering whether to try any of these types of advertising, let your competitors test them for you. For example, if you’re considering an ad in a pack of coupons, see if any of your competitors are in the pack and what they’re offering. If none are and the pack has been around for a while, that’s a tip-off that it hasn’t paid off for others. If a competitor offers a coupon, find out if there are a number of mailings that the advertiser must commit to. Then check later mailings to find out the longevity of your competitor’s coupon.

These types of advertising may pay off in some parts of the country for contractors who specialize certain types of jobs. In Los Angeles, where my bread and butter is service calls, I haven’t found that they pay. Our website is our major source of new customers, bringing in over one quarter of our workload. Click to find out more about contractor websites.

Search Engines Have Read Everything on Internet Already

It starts with search engines reading every webpage on the Internet long before you ever searched for a plumber. Search engines don’t read the version of the Internet pages that you and I look at. They read another version of each page called the “Source Code.” These pages are written by programmers in a computer-readable language, most often HTML. Here’s how you can see a Source Code version of a webpage. Choose a webpage that has a lot of text on it. Right-click it where there’s no text or image. Then, click on the option “View Source Code” or similar wording.

Search Engine Version of Webpages – Source Code

If you’ve chosen a text-heavy page, you should see blocks of ordinary English text — the same text that appears on the human version, but not as nicely formatted. There will also be symbols and words that you may not recognize. These are HTML or some other computer language. Some of these words and symbols tell the Internet the colors and typefaces to show visitors. Some of these tell search engines more about the content of the page. For example, search engines can’t get an idea of what’s in a photo, so the programmer who wrote the HTML may have labeled a photo “owner of plumbing contracting company.” This gives the search engine more data about what’s on the page.

To return to the usual human view of the page, click the X on the tab at the top of the Source page.

Search Engines Read and Annotate All Webpages

Search engines read every page that’s on the Internet with programs called “robots,” “bots,” or “spiders.” They’re all the same thing. They are considered to “crawl” pages. Bots crawl websites night and day even if they’ve seen it all before. This is because webmasters modify pages, delete pages, and add pages. The search engine will re-read some websites frequently if it’s found that they change often. This might be every few days or, in some cases, every day or even a few times a day. On the other hand, if the search engine has found historically that a website doesn’t change much, it might not get around to re-reading it for weeks.

In addition to reading pages, the search engine makes notes about each page. It notes what words and phrases are on each page. Google has compiled so much information about the words and phrases on pages that it knows the frequency with which every word appears in conjunction with every other word. If I were to do a search on “electrical work,” it might give me electricians’ websites, even ones that don’t include the phrase “electrical work.” The search engine would know that electrician websites are about electrical work simply because the phrase “electrical work” is frequently found on them.

Search engines save every webpage of the Internet plus its annotations in computers that belong to the search engine. These pages are considered to be “indexed” by the search engine. They’re also being stored or “cached.” The reason that the Google search engine can boast about providing searchers with humongous numbers of pages in fractions of a second is that these pages are already in its computers and already indexed. Google already knows what words are on every page and can serve up sites relevant to your search immediately.

Including Keywords on Your Website

It’s clear from this description that if you want a search engine to consider your general contractor website relevant to a search for “general contractor Philadelphia,” it would be desirable to have text featuring the words “general contractor” and “Philadelphia” along with a Philadelphia address. Plus a lot of related words that the search engine already knows should be on a general contractor’s site — like “contracting” “subcontractors” “supervise the job” “construction” “materials” and so on. These words and phrases tell the search engine that it has most likely come across a general contractor’s website in Philadelphia. The most important of these words and phrases, the ones that people most frequently type in when looking for your trade in your city are your main “search terms” or your “keywords.”

It will also be helpful for the contractor’s rankings to have a lot of useful articles for visitors on his website about contracting, home improvement, and related topics. Links to his website are also important. In fact, there are quite a number of factors that determine the rankings of a website on search engines.

These days, most homeowners and businesses look for electricians, plumbers, and other home improvement contractors on the Internet. Gone are the days when most customers rely on the Yellow Pages. This means that if you’re a construction contractor like me, you need an effective website.

An Effective Contractor Website

An effective website provides key information like locations served, services offered, licensing and insurance info, and, if possible, authentic customer testimonials. A good website features professional, well-edited writing as well as friendly and clean design. It also appeals to customers by featuring their go-buttons, that is, words or phrases that in your experience interest customers. For my electrical customers, for example, I’ve found that “coupon” and “lifetime guarantee on all our work” appeal to customers.

Bringing Visitors to Your Website

Once you have a great website, you’ll need to bring visitors to it. This requires being visible at the top of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Per studies of Google search results, over 60% of visits are to websites in the top three ranks of Page 1. If you think about your own experience in searching, this will probably make sense. How often do you click on a website at the bottom of the page versus one at the top?

In rural areas, if you have a terrific website, getting to the top of Page 1 is possible within a matter of months. In urban areas, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is necessary. Without SEO, due to competition from other contractors, your website might languish in the back pages of the search engines indefinitely. It will have a hard time competing with contractors who are doing SEO programs.

Getting Your Contractor Website to the Top of Page 1 in 24 Hours

Whether you’re in a rural area or urban, there’s a way that search engines will deliver customer visits to your website within 24 hours. You can place a paid ad for your business at the top of Page 1 of Google and Yahoo. This kind of advertising is called Pay-Per-Click.

Likely, you’re already familiar with Pay-Per-Click advertising. On Google, these are the ads at the top and right side that are discretely labeled “Ads.” Google calls them “AdWords.” Yahoo calls them “Search Marketing.” Your company is charged a fee by Google (or Yahoo) if a searcher clicks on the ad to see your website.

Launching a Pay-Per-Click Campaign

The search engines make it easy to run paid ads. You’ll need to write some very brief text. To get ideas, take a look at the ads by other contractors in your trade. It doesn’t matter whether they’re within your locality or outside it. Feature your most profitable services and some of the go-buttons that you’ve noticed that customers respond to.

Think about the name of the location you want to include in an ad like “New York plumber.” Are searchers in your service area more likely to type in “Brooklyn plumber” or “Flatbush plumber”? If so, your ad saying “New York plumber” may not display to them. Also, put your phone number in the ad. Many contractors don’t do this, but if you do, some customers will call you without clicking on your ad — saving you the fee charged by the search engine for each click.

The search engine will ask the amount of your monthly budget for Pay-Per-Click. Set it well within the outer limit of what you’re willing to pay each month for their advertising.

Pay-Per-Click May Give Weak Results

If you’ve tried Pay-Per-Click, but it hasn’t given you a good Return on Investment (ROI), you’re not alone. Many contractors have found that Pay-Per-Click can give weak results. The fact is that fewer people click on paid ads than on the free website listings, around 80% or 90% fewer! Searchers have greater trust in the free “natural” listings of websites. This means that if you could get your website to the top of the search engines without paying for ads, you’d get 5-10 times as many customer visits.

You can check on whether your clicks are turning into customer calls by asking customers, when they first call, how they found out about you. Many customers will just say “the Internet” and not remember whether it was a paid ad. Of course, if your website doesn’t come up naturally on Page 1, likely they saw your paid ad. Only 10% of searchers look beyond Page 1. There are also marketing services that can provide you with a program that tracks whether the customer who is calling clicked on a paid ad.

Avoiding Wasted Clicks

Another problem with Pay-Per-Click is that it can quickly run up bills and not always for people looking for your contracting services. I’ll give you an example from my own experience. One day when I was checking on the weather in my town, the Pay-Per-Click ad for my electrical contracting company popped up on the weather page. At first I was thrilled. There was my company! Then, I started thinking about it. This wasn’t the right venue for my ad. Many people idly click on ads even though they’re not really interested in hiring a tradesman right then. Idle clicks by people primarily interested in the weather could cost me plenty.

Over the years with Pay-Per-Click, I’ve found that people searching for “electric razors” “electrician school” and “looking for work as an electrician” have all clicked on ads for my electrical contracting company. These sorts of “off-target” clicks can add up to a large fraction of wasted clicks. With experience, I learned how to design Pay-Per-Click campaigns to eliminate these types of clicks. I also learned the tricks of minimizing the cost of each click.

When Does Pay-Per-Click make sense for a contractor?

Pay-Per-Click can provide a good Return on Investment in these situations:

• Ads focus on your most profitable services
• Ads are designed to attract your type of customer
• Expert design and management of the ad campaign minimizes wasted clicks
• Expert design and management of the ad campaign minimizes the amount you pay for each click

In short, a good Return on Investment requires expert ad design and expert management of your campaign. I recommend that you either make a hobby of becoming an expert at Pay-Per-Click or that you hire an experienced management service. Click here for information about how HappyContractor manages Pay-Per-Click campaigns.  We take on a client only if we can provide the contractor with a good Return on Investment.

A Final Benefit of Pay-Per-Click

One of the biggest benefits of Pay-Per-Click is that it can work itself out of a job. If you have a Pay-Per-Click campaign, the search engines tell you the exact words and phrases that searchers typed to find your ads. This is a treasure trove of data from which you can learn more about your contracting customers. How exactly do they search for you? You can use this information to re-write your website so that it’s more appealing to customers.

You can also use this data for designing a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. Ideally, your website should rank high in the free natural listings when customers type in words and phrases to find a local contractor like you. A good SEO program will achieve this. Once your website comes up naturally at the top of the search engines, you’ll receive many more visits than paid ads will yield and they’ll be free to you. At that point, it will make sense to end off your Pay-Per-Click ads except possibly for your very most profitable services.

If you’re a contractor who has had an experience, good or bad, with Pay-Per-Click, please let me know how it went for you. 

If a website is called “San Francisco’s Plumber” and has text about plumbing, pipes, drains, rooting as well as an address in San Franciscoand a number of other mentions of this city name, it will be considered much more relevant to the search term plumber San Francisco than to the search term kittens in Chicago.

On the other hand, a website called “Cat Adoptions in Chicago” that has text and photos of kittens, cats, tabbies, and calicos and lists an address in Chicago won’t be considered relevant to the search term plumber San Francisco. It will likely rank high if someone types in kittens in Chicago.   

How On-Site SEO Is Done

Proper on-site SEO requires:

1. Knowledge of the search terms (such as plumber San Francisco) that potential customers are most likely to type when looking for a business like yours,
2. Text and images that the search engine will consider relevant to those search terms and at the same time will invite customers to call you,
3. Programming techniques that make these website text and images readily visible to spiders, and
4. Programming techniques which communicate the relevance of the website directly to spiders beyond the text and images visible to visitors.

Ideally, much on-site SEO would be done as a website is built. However, the SEO of existing websites can be improved at any time to raise the site’s rankings in search engines. Click here for more about an SEO program which includes on-site and off-site techniques designed to let the search engines know about this content so that they will rank the website high on Page 1.

How Google Ranks Contractor Websites

Search engine rankings are based on computer formulas (algorithms) which calculate the relevance of a website to a particular search term. A key factor in these formulas is the “popularity” of the website among those interested in a particular subject.

For example, how many home improvement websites think that a website called “Comfort  HVAC Contractor” is relevant to the interests of their home improvement fan base? The main way that Google figures this out is by counting the number of home improvement websites that have bothered to link to Comfort HVAC. From the viewpoint of the Comfort HVAC Contractor, each is a “backlink.” If the website has 500 backlinks, Google considers this 500 “votes” for the website. If this is more votes than other websites on the topic, the website will be ranked high when a searcher looks for an HVAC contractor.

Quality of Backlinks to Contractor Websites

Google not only counts the backlinks but also notes their “quality.” A backlink from a site called “Energy Efficient Heating” that has hundreds of visitors a day would be a high quality link for the Comfort HVAC Contractor website. A backlink from a baseball card website which  has one visitor a day would not be considered high quality by Google because the site really isn’t relevant or authoritative on the subject of HVAC contracting and isn’t very popular either. Its vote doesn’t count for much.

As a note, analyzing backlinks is the innovation that shot Google to the top among search engines. Google is able to determine the relevance of websites to searchers by learning how popular these websites are among authoritative, popular websites on the same subject. Other search engines soon adopted this innovation and are working on catching up with Google.

Increasing the number of your backlinks, particularly relevant backlinks from popular sites, is the heart of off-site SEO. The good news is that off-site SEO isn’t magic. It’s mostly a matter of knowing what to do and doing it month after month and monitoring progress up the search engine rankings. Click here for more about an SEO program which includes on-site and off-site techniques designed to boost your contractor website to the top of Page 1 of Google.

First, a short review of SEO techniques:

On-Site SEO Techniques

Some SEO techniques are on-site – the website itself is modified. For example, an electrical website can be beefed up with articles on how to change a circuit breaker, prevent electrical fires, and other information useful to someone looking for help with their electrical.

Off-Site SEO Techniques

Other techniques are off-site. These techniques involve telling the search engines that a site is so useful to searchers that many other websites link to it. For example, a plumber’s website which has a lot of plumbing tips might be linked to by a home improvement website. Or the plumber might have written an article for an on-line magazine website that links back to his plumbing company’s site for more information. In each case, these are “backlinks” to his plumber website.

Each backlink is considered a vote of confidence. Search engines rank websites with many votes higher than websites with few. The original source of Google’s immense popularity as a search engine is that it was the first to rank websites according to their votes. Google’s innovation is that it depends on websites all over the world to tell it which are the most useful among themselves.

White Hat SEO Techniques

SEO techniques that are helpful to searchers are considered “White Hat” or ethical. Including a lot of useful content on a website and being linked to by other websites that consider your site’s content helpful are both White Hat SEO techniques. They enhance the value of the Internet by providing useful content and making it accessible to searchers.

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques

However, other techniques are designed to deceive search engines into ranking a site higher than its usefulness warrants. These are considered “Black Hat,” meaning unethical. If Google detects Black Hat techniques, it may lower the rankings of a website or even ban the website from the results it shows searchers. Here’s a list of SEO techniques considered by Google to be Black Hat. It’s safest to avoid them.

Throw-Away Directories.– A directory is a website that operates like Yellow Pages, listing businesses that customers can search through. For example, a customer looking for a painter might go to a home improvement directory, select the category “painter,” and look for the name of a particular painting contractor to call.

“Throw-away” directories are a type of directory set up entirely for the purpose of giving links to websites rather than allowing visitors to find a company within a particular trade.  The throw-away directory invites businesses to list themselves within the directory and requests payment or a link from the business website (a reciprocal link). Throw-away directories also profit by selling ad space on their website, so their pages are loaded with ads. They are poorly organized with many types of businesses jumbled together as they aren’t trying to be helpful to customers who are searching for a particular type of company.

However, there’s no clear-cut line between throw-away directories and legitimate directories. Throw-away directories are junkier and less inviting to searches by customers who are looking for businesses. The general rule that Google wants you to follow is not to pay for a link nor give a reciprocal link.

You may be solicited by services which offer to get you into “hundreds of directories.” Many of these are likely throw-away directories. It’s not worth paying to get into these directories and, if reciprocal links are given or money paid for the link, your rankings could be lowered.

Reciprocal Links – Owners of websites may offer to link to your website if you’ll link to theirs. That would be giving a reciprocal link, a practice generally frowned on by Google.

In some situations, reciprocal links are legitimate, however. You might want to provide your visitors with a link to your wholesale house. Your wholesale house might want to support you by providing a link to your contractor website. Here, the reciprocal links reflect a legitimate, relevant business relationship.

Avoid large-scale and indiscriminate reciprocal linking with unrelated websites.

Paid Links – Don’t pay directories to list your business so that they will link to your website. There’s one exception to this rule, Yahoo Business Directory. Search engines consider this directory to be legitimate despite the payment it requires.

Google has always said that they don’t allow the practice of buying links, but now they’re getting better at figuring out who is doing the buying. They’ve warned recently that they will be penalizing this Black Hat SEO technique more consistently.

Link Farms – Link Farms are websites that offer to give you links from many other websites provided that you create a page in your site that links to many other websites. Link Farms set up a network of inter-linking websites, each one of which includes a page full of links to other websites. It’s simply a bogus way to make it appear that your website is extremely popular with other websites. Creating a page of links to other websites involved in a Link Farm doesn’t work and can easily get you into trouble with Google.

Hiring a Black Hat SEOer – You may be approached by an SEO expert who promises to quickly move your site up the Google rankings. It’s important to know if you can trust that the SEO expert will avoid Black Hat techniques. Black Hat techniques for accumulating backlinks can work spectacularly at first. However, once the search engine checks for SEO tricks, your rankings can plummet and your site’s reputation with search engines can be damaged.

Google’s sophistication at picking up on Black Hat SEO is increasing all the time. So, a technique that paid off months or years ago may now simply cause you trouble.

No Need to Resort to Black Hat Techniques

There are many White Hat SEO techniques for accumulating backlinks to your website. The first step is to make your website easy to use and full of useful content so that other websites will want to link to it. Click here for more about an SEO program  which will boost your contractor website to the top of Page 1 of Google.