So what is ‘Guerilla SEO’? Let us see what the word ‘guerilla’ means. As per m-w.com (Merriam Webster) the definition goes
‘a person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage‘
Guerilla SEO is a skill whereby SEO’s manipulate the SERPS of websites by using irregular guerilla tactics to boost their site rankings. These are whitehat SEO tactics bordering on the edge of blackhat SEO.
As a professional SEO, I optimize and look at many sites every day, and of late I see a trend of ‘Guerilla SEO’. A lot of people have been manipulating rankings using these seemingly whitehat tactics to get their sites ranked well.
Some examples of Guerilla Search Engine Optimization would be:
1. Social bookmarking: del.icio.us/digg/stumbleupon etc. By manipulating your sites votes on these services, you can get a tremendous boost in the ‘trustrank’ factor of your site, as incoming links from such site are viewed by the SE’s as a strong vote to your site given by actual users (real people).
2. Free Webpage hosting sites: Tripod, Angelfire, Freewebs, Geocities et al. Incoming links from these sites also carry a lot of weight in the SE’s as they are high traffic, high PR sites.
3. Personal profiles/ Personal pages: Yahoo 360, AOL homepages etc. Links to your site from these giants carry a lot of weight because of their ‘Authority link’ factor as these are mostly Alexa Top100 sites with high PR, tons of incoming links and high link poularity.
4. Help / Answer sites: Yahoo Answers, Answers.com etc. - Getting a backlink to your site by helping people (and quoting your site as a helpful resource) is the easiet way to get a Authority site link. For the same reasons above, this link weighs a lot in SE’s.
5. Social Networking sites: Myspace, Xanga, Facebook etc.
6. News sharing / User submitted / Hot stories: Netscape, Fark, Reddit etc.
and many more like Video sharing sites (Youtube), Forums, Classified ad sites (Craigslist), Groups (Yahoo groups, Google groups) etc …
If you use the hubfinder tool (which I had written about last) for your site, you will notice how many of your competitors are using Guerilla SEO tactics. Go ahead - try it out for yourself!
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27.Aug.07 
Off Page SEO 
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I’ve been around the seo block a few times in my now 5 years of dealing with website development and optimization; though I am only really catching on to how successful SEO works in the recent past.
As an ignorant webmaster - I was always religious about proper on page optimization techniques: Proper title, meta content, headings, keyword density, emphasized keywords with bold and italics, etc. I’m by no means discounting the importance of these things. . . as then can, in some cases, play an important role in your search engine positioning.
However, once again I am reminded of the importance of incoming links, the anchor text used and other important factors related to off page optimization. As pointed out in this post titled pagerank wins - if on page factors determined website rankings: we’d have SERPS filled with “keyword spamming trash” as the author rightfully put it. Here’s a little blurb from the page that I feel covers my point adequately:
SEO copywriters, for obviously self serving reasons, would prefer that Google place more weight on on-page elements. They would prefer that anchor text be discounted. They would prefer it if PageRank didn’t play such a large role in determining search engine ranking.
The argument goes likes this:
If my page contains the search terms in the page titles, in the H1 tags, and bolded and italicized in the body copy - then it is obviously more relevant than a page which doesn’t contain the search term in the page titles, H1 tags and body copy.
This idea makes sense until you realize the implications.
Google’s home page only mentions the word Google once in the page title, and once on the page. So if the SEO copywriters got their way, a search for Google would be dominated by any hack who loaded their page with obnoxious repetitions of the word Google.
If Google implemented an SEO copywriter’s algorithm, Google wouldn’t even be included in the search results for “search engine”.
If Google implemented such an algorithm, the search results for Computers would not include www.apple.com, www.dell.com, www.compaq.com or IBM’s home page.
If Google implemented such an algorithm, the SERPs would be dominated by keyword spamming trash.
In the end? Good positioning in search engines is determined by your off page optimization efforts.
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17.Feb.07 Off Page SEO, On Page SEO Comments (0)
