The folks over at Axandra.com have published a new article today about “Mosaic Cloaking” and how search engine optimizers are now using it to “game” the search engines.

Mosaic Cloaking (the basics)
It’s not much different from regular cloaking, except that instead of serving completely different pages to the search engines, clever marketers are now just serving different parts of their pages via cloaking.

For instance, you might have an E-Commerce site selling bikes. To the average visitor, you’re going to present them with a great photo, bullet list of the bikes features & an easy way for them to purchase. For the search engines, you might swap out that entire product section and fill it with an optimized article about that particular bike.

While this new Mosaic Cloaking is certainly a twist on the original, I would be willing to bet that those of us reading about it now are months (if not years) behind the game, in terms of keeping up with other SEO professionals.

This new method may work for some sites, for an undetermined amount of time, but with it now out in the light and more people talking about it, you can bet that Google and the other search engines will be creating a way to detect it and penalize those sites that are using it.

I’ve never used cloaking personally and our company, MorePro Marketing, has never employed that practice either - something I’m rather proud of. We’ve been able to acquire top search engine rankings for our clients without resorting to that level of “black hat” optimization.

I was reading an SEO newsletter this morning and they had mentioned a number of important SEO strategies to consider when undertaking the optimization of your website on your own.

A number of the SEO tips were quite common and should be practiced by all SEO strategists, not only those working on their own sites, but also those working for agencies and an actual SEO company. Some of those tips include:

• Navigation and internal linking
• Titles & Meta tags
• Unique content
• Relevant backlinks & continuous linking programs

There were two other SEO tips that I feel are generally disregarded or not implemented on a frequent basis:

• Your site’s Value Proposition (Find out how to craft your site’s Value Proposition)
• Code bloat / Site download time

The Value Proposition (VP) issue isn’t always that easy to resolve quickly, because it takes a lot of constructive thinking in order to determine what sets your business apart from your competitors - especially how to communicate that to your potential customers. A good VP can make a world of difference on how your website converts visitors to sales (or leads).

The other item was the “Code bloat / Site download time”, which I strongly feel is overlooked on a regular basis.

The concept is simple… reduce the size of your pages (code & images) and they’ll load faster, enabling better usability from your site visitors, as well as allowing the search engines to spider your pages more quickly. There are a number of rather easy ways to reduce your code bloat & increase your website’s download speed:

• Convert all inline JavaScript to external files and call them as separate files
• Convert embedded font styles & formatting to an external CSS file and reference it as a separate file
• Optimize the size of the images on your pages - For some industries/markets, having crystal clear images is important and those visitors should be willing to wait a few more seconds. For most industries, however, they’re not going to wait, so your fancy, slow loading image is actual a friction point that will hurt your chances of converting that visitor.

There’s nothing that I’ve mentioned here that’s “new” - it’s common knowledge. Use these SEO tips on your website and you’ll see improved results.