SEO Strategies: White Hat vs Black Hat
White SEO refers to the SEO practices that don’t go against SEO rules. It follows all of the laid down guidelines by the search engine to provide the audience with valuable content and ease their interactions on your site.
While Black Hat SEO means an underhanded method or technique to trick or for search engines to rank your website on search engine result pages.
Although black hat SEO can yield results, it’s only short-term. Also, any website that engages in black hat SEO practices is exposing itself to danger. If they’re caught, that site can be penalized or removed completely from search engine result pages.
And when this happens, it deals a huge blow to the website and crumbles the business. To be on the safe side, It’s best to not engage in black hat SEO techniques.
Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry.
The search engine is just as interested in helping your business rank just as much as SEO can help your business rank.
Different search engines have different SEO guidelines for your site to rank.
If you’re looking to rank on search engine result pages, then it’s best to follow the set guidelines of the different search engines.
But one thing worth noting is never to play tricks on search engines, it’ll boomerang. And when it does, it spells doom for your brand.
Instead, be ready to put in the work to assist users in having the best online experience on your page. Here are a few search engine guidelines to do that:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Bear in mind that SEO is also about your users too. Focus on users’ intent and experience on your site.
- Avoid playing tricks on search engines with the intent of ranking high on result pages. Come up with new ideas to create unique content that is engaging and interactive.
- Social share, social influence, and social proof can affect your ranking positively.
- Ensure that your page speed is updated to ease users’ experience and reduce bounce rates.
Things to avoid:
- Duplicating content on your website
- Engaging in poor linking practices and link schemes.
- Direct plagiarism from other posts
- Cloaking – this involves showing users different content from what you show search engine bots.
SEO Marketing Basics:
Understanding the basics of
SEO marketing is the first step to increasing online visibility, driving in more traffic, and increasing revenue.
Content
As you know,
content is king because nothing excites and engages a user more than informative, quality content. Content that speaks to their needs and hits their deepest pain points.
When a user searches for information online, for instance, there’s a search about ‘custom made jackets ‘. Google doesn’t just look for the nearest site and make it appear on results pages, No. It searches through its index and tries to provide content that has valuable information that can solve your user’s problem.
You don’t expect your page to rank when your content is not rank-worthy.
Tips for creating quality content
Before you proceed to start creating quality content, your content must possess certain elements like quality, users’ intent, and constant updates. Below are the best tips for creating quality content.
Before you write content, you need to know what your users are searching for. Only then will you know how and what to write down.
- Develop a customer avatar
It’s one thing to know what your users want, and it’s another thing to know who they are, what they like, and why they’re on your site. To put it simply, know your audience.
It’s not easy to hold users’ attention for long periods of time. Long sentences will bore them and make them lose interest fast. Instead, make use of headers and images to catch their attention.
Let the end of your article prompt users to take action. That’s after it must have met their information needs.
Keyword Research and Selection
Keywords play a vital role in assisting SEO to make your site rank. When you incorporate the right keyword into your content, it helps users to find your content faster.
The best way to come up with the right keyword for your content is to conduct keyword research. Keyword research ensures you rank on search engine result pages and creates super relevant content. Pages that rank high on SERPs are always conducting keyword research and generating quality content.
4 Tips for Selecting the Best Keywords
Here are my tips for conducting the best keyword research and selection:
There are tools available to help you come up with the best keywords to ease the stress of conducting wide keyword research. Tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs are very good tools that can conduct keyword research for you effortlessly.
The best way to choose the right keyword is to see how your top competitors are doing it. If a site is ranking well using the same keywords you want to use, search for their URL on a keyword research tool, and see how the keywords are being affected.
Conclusion
SEO is a simple tool that can yield massive results if put to effective use. Ranking on search engine result pages and increasing your online presence doesn’t happen in one day. That explains why some people opt for paid advertising. Sometimes it works, and most times it doesn’t yield great results because the leads you get from PPC are inorganic. And you also continue to waste revenue that could have been put to better use, like hiring an SEO expert
However, SEO is capable of driving in massive traffic and increasing your online presence only when it’s done right. SEO is not some magic trick, so you shouldn’t expect to get immediate results overnight. But with patience and effort delivered in the right proportion, your site will rank on search engine results pages.
