by Florin Costache, 8/17/2007

Are your SEO efforts at a standstill while everyone else seems to be getting results? Maybe it's time to take some tips from the guys that know the limits of optimization and the benefits of playing in the grey area. So let's see what black hats do to get traffic:

1. Go for the long tail - black hats do this because it's easier to rank for a 4,5 or even 6 keyword search that has no direct competition than it is to rank for a search phrase that has hundreds of thousands or millions of results.

Of course, spam sites have the advantage of massive numbers of pages, so even if that page only brings one visitor per month it's still enough - spam sites are created in only a couple of hours and usually have from 30 000 pages and up.

But if you keep writing daily (or even more than once a day), it will add up. This brings us to the next point:

2. The money's in the archives - although some visitors will first see the main page of your site, many more will first see one of the inside pages as these will be the ones that come up for specific, long tail searches.

With each page you publish you increase your chances that at least one more visitor will find your site and more importantly, if it's a good resource, it will more than pay for itself by getting backlinks from many different sites that will diversify your inbound links profile.

3. Small degrees of separation - this is one of the best methods for writing new content: if you have a page on a certain subject just write another that has some differences.

For example: you've just written an article on how to promote a site on Digg - now write another on how to promote on Del.icio.us, and yet another on how to promote your site on Slashdot (of course, don't just change the names and URLs, you actually have to change the article a little bit).

Please understand this: if you have a 30 page site don't put up 10 pages that resemble each other very much. By doing this you'll surely trip a duplicate content filter.