X SEO

by Todd Bailey

Running a business is tiring. There’s a lot to
consider.  Compression and expansion are
two points.  We see it in search engine
optimization.  Technology provides the
tools for international expansion; international reach is only an investment in
the necessary implementations away.  But ISEO
does need to address something in-America services do not – cultural
differences.

The idea of expansion needs no advertisement.  Expansion is usually a reflection of a
healthy flow of revenue and forward impetus. 
However, could some businesses counter hopes by crossing seas?  The size, authority, and history of a brand
does not immediately make them ‘kind of a big deal’ in other lands; brands
large and small are susceptible to cultural slipups.  Consider Nike’s
Black and Tan mishap.

 In America, American
businesses and natives don’t have to consider such things as cultural
differences.  Sometimes there’s no way to
avoid them; however, taking longer, slower necessary steps for proper
cross-seas engagement seems like a sound decision.

One particularly interesting dynamic is the recent pondering
of Bank of America.  It will be pretty
ironic to see the brand, also known textually as BofA, practicing keener focus
off American soil.  A recent WSJ
article describes BofA’s aggressive pursuit of international markets.  BofA’s name is striking in this instance;
however, an American bank’s pursuit of international markets is not.

Citigroup, HSBC, and J.P. Morgan Chase also chase consumers
from all countries, operating in more than 100, 80, and 60 countries
respectively, while Bank of America already has presence in over 40
countries.  Along with ISEO
considerations comes people networking. 
Are aging directors with (possibly) little-to-no experience of other
cultures the best choice to man international implementations?

While ISEO directives give brands confidence to expand
overseas, companies cannot dismiss the people aspect of successfully residing
in other lands.   BofA plans to organize
a ‘global advisory board,’ borrowing the idea from another world-renowned bank,
Citigroup.  An advisory board seems like
a great idea, especially for brands which need to satisfy investors who expect
the same dividends regardless of extra factors, such as cultural differences.

Bank of America plans to assemble an advisory board
comprised of individuals ranging from ages 45 to 75, who vary in backgrounds,
politics, and security regulation. 
Perhaps a small brand, selling products overseas does not need a
full-fledged advisory board; however, can any brand considering ISEO services
completely neglect the notion of proper integration?  Perhaps brands should seek some iteration of
‘advisement’ before seeking opportunities in other lands.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Todd Bailey

In 2012, it’s hard to imagine a company without an Internet presence. From the world’s most prominent brand names to small, local businesses; most companies have already made the transition to the Web and many more are expanding their websites, social networking profiles and online storefronts. The Internet serves as a massive, worldwide promotional tool and its scale and reach are simply far too great to be ignored in the digital age. While thousands of companies around the world are fortifying their online identities, some are still struggling to be noticed. Internet marketing companies adamantly insist that visibility take the same precedence as accessibility as it pertains to a business’ online presence.

So, how can a company achieve that visibility? The Internet is a very competitive marketplace and it can be easy to lose traction. In fact, even some major companies have needed a helping hand to improve factors such as organic search rankings, social media enhancement and E-Commerce. It may be difficult to believe that some of the world’s most recognizable brands are lacking sufficient visibility online, but it is a rather common scenario. In the last few years, some of the world’s largest retailers have taken drastic measures to enhance their online presence in order to boost sales during the economic downturn and in doing so, realized the value of Internet marketing.

Online sales have been on the rise, despite economic concerns. Many companies are closing physical retail stores in favor of their more profitable online storefronts. In addition, those companies are also placing a greater focus on marketing those storefronts through the usage of search engine and social media optimization strategies. Some companies view E-Commerce as the future of retail and are planning accordingly. For businesses that are still struggling to be noticed in the Internet marketplace, online marketing is an investment that should definitely not be overlooked.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

It seems to be getting more and more difficult to define what exactly SEO is. Is it on-page optimization? Link building? Conversion optimization? Or is just about rankings, and leave the rest of that stuff to someone else?

I think it’s some of both and a little of all. SEO has to focus on more than just “getting rankings” and must use the knowledge of the search engines to bring together all the various online marketing elements into a singular web marketing campaign. People seem to be using the term “inbound marketing” more and more to describe this integrated approach.

Businesses today need much more than an SEO agency. They need a web marketing firm that looks beyond rankings to help clients set online growth goals, develop strategies to achieve those goals and measure the success of those strategies along the way. Those goals are achieved through a variety of online marketing channels.

SEOs must use the skills they have to provide needed recommendations to get clients the results they want, regardless of the avenue it takes to get those results. SEOs are there to help you build the most optimized, search- and searcher-friendly site possible; this attracts visitors, builds engagement and, ultimately, converts those visitors into customers.

Why Collaboration is Essential

Successful SEO is not the responsibility of any one person, but is a collaboration between the marketers, the developers and the business managers. If any one group fails to fulfill their part in the process, the success of the online marketing campaign also fails. After all, we don’t rank websites, Google does.

Over the past five years search engines have added an increasing number of signals that factor into the ranking performance of a website. Google boasts there are more than 200 ranking signals being used, and at any time there are anywhere from 50-200 different versions of the algorithm in effect. The weight of each of the search signals vary by industry, website and even the individual as locality, personalization, social networks, relevance, comprehensiveness, freshness and speed all factor in and even change on a daily basis.

It takes much more than an “optimized” website to get good rankings. It takes a great website! That means great design, great usability, great content, great customer service, great architecture, great optimization and time. You can have all the right pieces for a great website but time is still a crucial factor.

For search engines, ranking a website is about trust. The more the site is trusted in all the areas mentioned above, the better it will rank. But as with any relationship, trust takes time to build, and, unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.

Building a Great Website

Much of what Google or other search engines consider a “quality website” deemed worthy of a top ranking falls outside the scope of traditional SEO (i.e. adding keywords to the page). The SEO and web marketing team must help you set the strategy (or work with you to do so), make recommendations, and seek out ways to improve your site based on known algorithm criteria, personal experience and historical testing. These recommendations must then be implemented if you want results.

It’s not about temporarily achieving top rankings because you’ve outsmarted the algorithm, but rather to build a site that deserves top rankings because your website is better than the competition and you’ve established the trust signals to prove it. SEO firms today must be web marketing firms that do SEO (and social media, analytics, link building, etc.). The goal is to help you build a better website. No, not just a better website, a great website!

Call that SEO if you want. Some are now calling it “Inbound Marketing.” I just call it good Web marketing!

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Moran

If you care about how your site is found in organic search, you must spend some of your time thinking about search engine optimization (SEO). In the olden days (2005), certain kinds of content had no shot of showing up in the search index (and thus, could never be found). But in recent years, more and more dynamic content is showing up in Google’s search index, as Google makes its spider smarter and smarter.  So, now there’s nothing to worry about with dynamic content, right? Not quite.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

This guest post is by Alex of Think Traffic.

We all know how important page titles are for SEO and just the general success of our blogs and websites, don’t we? Well we are told often enough, so we certainly should… But how many people actually give page titles the amount of attention they actually deserve?

Most clever bloggers spend a little thought on each page title—they think carefully about how to word it in such a way as to get both the search engines and the potential readers to pay attention. But let’s face it, if this is your method, all you are really doing is typing something that “sounds good.”

Today I am proposing a slightly more scientific approach to page titles.

Step 1: Keywords

Any diligent blogger will already have some vague keywords in mind for their post—if you want to get some nice natural organic traffic, you will need to rank. So decide on your phrase and obviously make sure it is getting some searches.

I would recommend just one phrase per post. By the very nature of blogging you will be writing more posts soon, so there really isn’t any need to cram in more than one key phrase. Also, the extra flexibility will allow you to write a better title.

Also, make sure your phrase makes sense for a blog. Don’t bother optimizing your post for “electric showers” because if someone searches for that phrase, they are almost certainly looking for a retailer and not a blog post (try it: search for “electric showers” and see how many of the results are blog posts)> People searching on this phrase want to buy a shower, not read about it. A better phrase might be “how to buy an electric shower”—that’s a much better fit for a blog.

Step 2: Look at competitors’ titles

The great thing about Google is that they will show you what works best before you even start. So the next thing to do is Google the phrase you want to rank for. In 0.003 seconds Google will conjure up a page full of sites which it has found to be relevant for that phrase.

It stands to reason that not only does Google consider these pages to have relevant titles, but these titles have proven to perform well in terms of clickthrough rates (since Google has recently admitted to using user behaviour as part of the ranking algorithm).

Look for words which are bolded and for any obvious phrases which come up more than once—the words in the phrase you searched for will be bolded of course, but so will any other words which Google thinks are closely related. Make a list of the phrases Google likes most and consider using these in your title.

So, going back to our example, if I Google “how to buy an electric shower,” I see keywords like “buying showers, buying a shower, mixer showers.” I also notice the title:

Electric showers: the basics – How to buy an electric shower – Bathroom & personal care – Which? Home & garden

This looks like a reasonable title, but it is way too long. This might be a good basic format to work from though.

Step 3: Look at competitors’ posts

Hopefully at least a few of the results will be blog posts. If you find that all of the results for your phrase are other types of sites you might want to reconsider your target phrase. Is this a sign that Google doesn’t think a blog is the right sort of site for this phrase? Maybe, maybe not. Think carefully.

In this case, I notice that for “how to buy an electric shower” the top two results are how-to style posts and so is one of the lower results, but all of the others are commercial sites. This makes me think that Google wants more blog style posts, but perhaps there aren’t enough good ones—definitely a gap to fill!

Assuming you find some blog posts, read them. Firstly, they will give you some ideas that could make your post even better. Secondly, you are looking to check that these posts are similar to yours (but hopefully not as good).

This stage is all about understanding what Google thinks is relevant for the target phrase; if your article is a lot different than the prevailing content, then consider which of the following is true:

• Your post offers a new insight or angle that hasn’t been covered before (great, keep up the good work).
• Your post isn’t really about the same thing as these posts (again, consider whether you are targeting the right phrase).

After a snoop around the top results I find that the number one post is actually just an intro which leads to a four-part post about buying a shower (the second result is one of these parts, too). There is a lot of good info here, but you could certainly improve upon it.

Additionally though, I suspect by splitting the post into four parts, the author is dividing their link juice. So if I can create one, long definitive post, it could do well here.

I also note that the other three parts of the post are: FAQ, features, and installation tips. These terms might also be helpful for building the title.

Step 4: Build a cracking page title

Okay, so you’re 100% confident that you have picked a highly relevant target phrase for your post, and you have a list of words that Google has told you it thinks are relevant to the chosen phrase…

Start by slotting your words together in the usual, obvious ways—ideally your target phrase should be the first word(s) in the page title, then follow up with some related words which add to the title.

Your page title doesn’t necessarily need to be written in full sentences because that isn’t what search engine users expect—make it concisem but not gibberish. The key is to catch users’ attention and convince them to click.

So let’s see what we get. I will start of course with our key phrase, and throw in a few extra words:

How To Buy An Electric Shower: The Basics, Features & Shower Installation Tips

I have included a few hooks that I liked from other titles and other posts, added the word “shower” for extra relevance, and of course my target phrase is the start of the title. I actually really like this, but unfortunately it is 78 characters long, so now comes the dilemma of which bit to trim. Remember, Google will only show 70 characters.

How To Buy An Electric Shower: Basics, Features & Shower Installation

69 characters! Okay, it’s not as good a title, but I am still pretty happy with that, and I now have some great ideas to go make my actual post even better. You may notice I have left out the word “mixer showers”—that’s because that is actually a different type of shower. However, I will probably at least mention them in the post and perhaps make my next post about them.

Step 5: Learn and improve

Writing a good title is more art than science. It is a skill. Hopefully the tips above will stop you from making blunders and point you in the right direction, but to be a real pro, you need to learn from past successes.

Once you have published a few posts and got some rankings, you can start to monitor your traffic. Set up your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already, and each time you publish a new post go and check out your data.

In particular, look for posts which are ranking well and have good click through rates (Google gives you all the data if you make the effort to look). This will give you a great insight into which posts have a) ranked well and b) do a good job of catching users’ attention.

So hypothetically with my bathroom related blog I might have five posts which I know are popular, about baths, showers, tiling, and so on. I would look in my analytics (traffic sources, search engine optimization, and landing pages) and filter results so I just see blog posts (or just ignore the data from other pages).

Here is a hypothetical screenshot:

If this were my blog, I would notice for instance that posts 1 and 5 are both ranking position 5 on average, yet post 5 is getting 50% more clicks per 100 impressions. Post 4 is ranked second and only getting 6% CTR, which suggests the title needs some work, whereas post 3 is in position 9 and getting 5%—that’s not bad, so this post probably has a good title.

By regularly studying this data you can pick out your most successful page titles. You will soon start to get a feel for what is a good CTR and you will notice which posts and titles do best. You can then try to emulate past successes and improve upon poor performers. You will soon be an expert!

This article was written by Alex and the Gang from Think Traffic. The SEO agency who care about ROI and not just rankings for the sake of rankings.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Scientific Approach to Writing Page Titles

by Todd Bailey

This February, Google made 40 changes to their search technology and in doing so, gave SEOs much to anticipate going forward.  Not only has the latest update to Panda made an impact on how content is filtered, but the other 39 updates to Google’s algorithm are also expected to change the search engine optimization landscape.  These updates are actually intended to improve search results and create a better user experience, but as with any updates to Google Search, they can still affect SEO strategies.

While many of the updates listed in Google’s Inside Search blog post are minor, they are all worthy of consideration when designing and maintaining campaigns.  In the post, Google has stated that factors such as link evaluation, local search results on both Google and YouTube and expanded sitelinks have all been at least slightly altered, but it’s possible that some of the changes may have been major overhauls.

Many SEOs know that Google often makes updates to their algorithm, but the search engine has never announced 40 in a single month.  If this is a glimpse into the future, developers will have to keep focused on innovation moving forward.  Refusal or inability to adapt to such a wide array of changes could lead to trouble for developers; conversely, monitoring such changes and creating fresh strategies could lead to much success for Internet marketing companies.

Google does give a brief description of not only the changes made, but also details somewhat specifically what those changes will affect.  Any optimizers using outdated strategies will most likely experience diminished organic rankings and therefore should strive to stay “ahead of the curve” when constructing and maintaining their pages.  The changes certainly look to be positive and as always, encourage developing strong content, high-quality backlinks and relevant keywords.  February was clearly a big month for Google.  Now that they have detailed the changes they’ve made throughout the month; it would appear that March will be just as a big of a month for SEO developers. 

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

SEOs don’t build websites; they build web presence.

SEOs don’t design websites; they make your website more usable.

SEOs don’t build links; they build relationships.

SEOs don’t socialize your content; they communicate your value.

SEOs don’t spam keywords in content to rank; they integrate key words into content to sell.

SEOs don’t sell your products/services; they help you attract buyers for you to sell to.

SEOs don’t drive traffic; they drive customers.

SEOs don’t create conversions; they make your website more conversion friendly.

SEOs don’t create your sales message; they improve it for your audience.

SEOs don’t write your business plan; they help fulfill it.

SEOs don’t manipulate Google’s results; they make Google’s results relevant.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Optimize For Customer Experience

When people learn I’ve recently written a book called Optimize they usually ask what it’s about. I say it’s about optimizing customer discovery and engagement with content. The response I usually get is something like, “Oh, cool. I thought it was about SEO.”

Well, in a way optimizing content and customer experiences is SEO. That’s because what most of the better SEOs practice today is really more about the promise of marketing: attracting, engaging and inspiring customers to buy.

Whether it’s Google, Social Networks, Online News Media, Digital Assets or any other channel/format for content – best practices optimization is in effect for smart companies that want an advantage.

2005 Called, It Wants Its SEO Back. If your SEO is still overwhelmingly focused on massive keyword lists, ranking reports and directory/social bookmarking style link building then you’re stuck in 2005. It’s time to evolve with an optimized state of mind.

Optimize Throughout the Customer Life Cycle. To “optimize” in the search world may have traditionally focused on keywords and links but has changed to focus holistically on the journey from prospect to customer to advocate. At least in my view it does. When companies look at the entire customer life cycle, it will reveal a tremendous opportunity for optimization, not just for the top of the sales funnel.

Modern Optimization is Adaptable. When Google, Bing and Ask implemented various media and data sources into common search results (Universal Search) SEOs adjusted with digital asset optimization. When Google evolved their place pages, SEOs adjusted with local, mobile and geo-specific optimization. Panda? Better quality and less duplicate content. Personalization? Better title tag and meta description writing to inspire greater CTR. Social? Say hello to a tirade of G+ SEO. Conversions? Check. Pigeon Rank? If was real, check.

Helping Search Engines Helps Our Optimization. Technical SEO will have it’s place as long as there is an opportunity to create advantage by doing so. Search engines are imperfect in their attempt to crawl, index and rank all of the digital content that exists online. Making that process easier, more efficient, more useful and meaningful for search engines is something website owners must pay attention to regardless of how the search experience evolves ala universal, personal and social.

Optimization is Art and Science. Process, continual data analysis and tools are also persistent characteristics within the world of SEO because they enable some science into the art of optimization so it can scale.

Holistic Optimization for the Win. At the same time, the notion of optimization with a holistic view extends to all aspects of the customer experience with brand content. Whatever can be discovered, consumed or shared can be optimized for better performance – both for customers and for achieving brand business objectives. That means marketing, public relations, customer service, investor relations, human resources/recruiting and any other content a businesses publishes online.

Optimization Follows Search Engine Innovation. The best practices of optimization mirror many marketing best practices and in the end, the best way to view business investment in modern SEO is as an investment in marketing and all that marketing tactics can achieve. Optimizing the search experience works concomitantly with changes in search technology and how search engines work. There is no death to SEO, just a shift in what to optimize in order to improve performance.

Continuous Optimization Is Forever and Profitable. Just because Google masks keyword referrers for logged in users, emphasized Google+ content and signals, elevated content quality standards and changed how links are evaluated doesn’t mean opportunities to optimize have gone away. For companies that employ optimization as a process of continuous implementation, assessment and improvement, there’s nothing closer to effective online marketing than the practice of optimization.

Don’t Tread on SEO, Elevate It. For those who think SEO is dead. It’s just your limited understanding of SEO that’s dead. For web developers that treat SEO as a one-time task during web design and only focus on marketing content (vs. ALL of the website content), and no ongoing content promotion, you’re only touching the surface and may be causing your clients to lose revenue in the long run. For bottom feeding SEOs that continue to over-promise and under-deliver with sensationalized accounts of traffic boosts, rankings and links, you’re short sightedness is hurting companies and our industry.

SEO is really just marketing, so deal with it. The evolution of customer centric content marketing and it’s intersection with social media and optimization represents the kind of online marketing that companies are really sinking their teeth into in 2012 and beyond. To be a great SEO, be a great marketer because that’s what SEO is.

Learn More at Search Congress, Barcelona. I am very much looking forward to presenting on this very topic at Search Congress in Barcelona this week. I may not speak a lick of Spanish or Catalan, but hopefully my enthusiasm for the topic will make up for my Midwestern accented English.

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by Mike Moran

I’ve talked before about how Google might have cracked the code on qualified sales leads through search. Somehow, sites are seeing drops in traffic but not all of them are seeing commensurate drops in revenue, because Google is figuring out which keywords drive revenue for each site. So, the question is whether you know which keywords are driving your own revenue. How are you tracking the connection between marketing effort and spending and your actual sales? If you’re an e-Commerce company, it’s easy–just track the sales through to your shopping cart. But for most companies–the ones that sell offline–tracking sales back to the online tactic that led to it is still an elusive goal.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

SEOs love to talk and write about industry best practices, as well they should. To best serve their clients, following industry-established SEO best practices should always be the goal.

But what about those shady types on the fringes of the SEO community who advocate, hmmm, let’s call it a less reputable route? Not surprisingly, these SEO are also typically the same ones who claim they can absolutely get you to be the #1 spot in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Guaranteed, no less! There’s a reason the old adage, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t” remains so relevant in our lives.

If you run a business and are shopping for SEO services and consulting, if any of the following techniques are mentioned (and please do ask!), you can be confident that the consultant in question is following well-known (in professional circles) SEO Worst Practices. The results of such efforts used on your site will likely backfire, causing your website to be penalized (lowered in rank) or, if excessively egregious, perhaps even purged from the index. This applies to both Google and Bing.

Let’s take a look at a few top choices in SEO worst practices:

Keyword stuffing

If the grand plan for getting your site to #1 includes adding ~150 highly searched for (but largely irrelevant) terms and phrases into the <meta> keywords tag, not only is this poor form in terms of webpage spam, but it’s also a hopelessly out-of-date and obsolete technique. First of all, stuffing the <meta> keywords tag is a tactic that was old 10 years ago. Because so many sites used this tag in an attempt to increase their page rank for targeted keywords by repeating those words countless times (or, alternatively, expand the relevance of the page to keywords not otherwise used on the page), the search engines long ago abandoned using the <meta> keywords tag for keyword relevance. Google has come right out and stated it does not use the <meta> keywords tag for keyword relevance. Bing has taken a more nuanced position in that the tag is actually not really used today, but states there are hundreds of ranking factors that are considered, and one day, if the intentional spamming of this tag finally dies off due to neglect, it might eventually become useful again. Maybe. But not today, not soon, and no promises beyond that.

The act of keyword stuffing not only occurs in the <meta> keywords tag, but can also occur in <title> tags, <img> alt text, heading tags, anchor text, even sometimes boldly in plain body text!

The search engines crawl web pages and see what is in the code. They see the text within the <body> tag, as well as the page metadata. They see when a word is repeatedly used to excess, and they can mitigate any attempted beneficial manipulation in their page ranking assessment. Keyword stuffing is dumb, clumsy, ineffective, and amateurish SEO.

Keyword stuffing caveat

If the use of repeated terms is legitimate to the business of the page, the search engines will understand that and accommodate that in their search for what otherwise is web spam. For example, if you are an attorney who can help clients with income taxes, tax deductions, tax penalties from the IRS, interest on back taxes, business taxes, rules for excise taxes, estate tax planning (you see the point), the repetition of the word “tax” is not spam because the phrases in question are normal word usage, not artificially done for web spam.

The difference between this sample usage and keyword stuffing is intent. The search engines spend a huge amount of time and resources trying to parse legitimate from illegitimate intent. If you are incorrectly identified as a spammer and your site suddenly tanks in the rankings, and it’s not due to larger algorithm changes like Google’s series of Panda updates, then you can appeal a penalty in Google and/or Bing. Just note that if you were penalized for violations of the official webmaster guidelines of Google or Bing, your entire site must be cleaned up of all web spam techniques and republished before you apply for reconsideration.

Hidden content

Search engines don’t like seeing pages that have hidden content (content that’s crawlable in the code, but doesn’t show in the browser window). That’s considered to be the equivalent of telling the search engines, “Here, this extra bit of content is just for you.” They consider that to be a maliciously manipulative attempt to earn page ranking credit for material not actually shown in the page. As Martha Stewart might say, that’s not a good thing.

Webmasters use a multitude of easily detected techniques in the effort to hide content from display. They use code like <div style=”display: none;”> to hide entire passages of body text. They use style attributes to make text the same color as the background, rendering it invisible, or configure the font size to be so small that it’s unreadable. There are many such “tricks” used to stuff extra text in a page. Of course, the search engines see all of this coding and can interpret that it’s intended to be hidden from view. If the intent of the usage is malicious, penalties can ensue.

Hidden content caveat

The use of <input type=”hidden”> controls are not by themselves suspicious, as some controls are not revealed in the default view of a page. The issue is always intent. If passages of text are hidden, especially if they contain keyword stuffing as mentioned earlier, this is what raises the red flags for search engines.

Cloaking

Cloaking is where the web server uses the identity of the user agent making the request for the page to determine which version of the content is returned. For example, if an IE 6 user agent requests a page and then the Googlebot user agent requests the same page, but the content is different, that indicates there is user agent filtering (cloaking) occurring for the purposes of manipulating what content search engines see. The goal of malicious cloaking is always to artificially inflate the rank of the page the user sees. Cloaking can show users normal pages and serve search engine crawlers keyword-stuffed pages. Alternatively, cloaking can serve search engines nicely optimized, relevant pages but serve users junk sales pitches for illicit pharmaceuticals, porn, or other such content that would not rank otherwise for that query.

Cloaking caveat

Pages that filter for mobile browsers to show abbreviated or custom-formatted versions of the desktop page are not considered to be malicious cloaking. Again, it comes down to intent. Is the web server attempting to maliciously manipulate the search rankings for a given page? The use of cloaking on search engine user agents is not a good idea. The search engines will detect it and penalize a site employing that technique accordingly. Filtering user agents for mobile devices, as long as the content stays similar, is relevant to the search query, and useful to users, is not a problem.

Intent is key

All of these SEO worst practices are based on the intention to deceive, be it the search engine crawler or the human end user. As long as businesses create great sites that are of value to human visitors, have compelling content, and are easy to navigate (meaning they are also easy to crawl), they will be assessed accordingly. Those are the sites that earn backlinks and citations from other sites, and that is what is needed for white hat SEO.