In today’s digital world, creating a website that has a great reach and shows up actively on the first Google Search Results Page is not easy. There is a strong need for optimization techniques, specifically search engine optimization techniques. However, like all things in life, there are shortcuts to this, but they may not be good for your website in the long run. This blog aims to educate you about the two kinds of approaches to SEO, and what you should choose for your official brand website.
There are two kinds of search engine optimization techniques. The first is the legal way to achieve search engine optimization and is known as white hat SEO. These include tactics that work within the search engines guidelines to improve the website’s ranking on the search engine results page or SERP. They are legal and ethical ways to put your official website on top. On the other hand, there are techniques that are usually shortcuts, and although they provide quick results, they violate search engine guidelines and terms of service in order to give better rankings in a very short period of time. This is known as Black hat SEO and is usually the villain for most digital marketers. Companies that invest a lot of money into their digital marketing campaigns and website SEO strategies, always keep a watch for black hat SEO practitioners. These SEO specialists who use black hat techniques do so in a way that provides an unfair advantage to their brands while stepping on opportunities for the other, more deserving websites.
White Hat SEO Techniques:
There are certain ways to follow white hat techniques. The first way is to write excellent content. Oftentimes we fail to understand how good content can make a difference to our optimization efforts. People look at the website more so for the content they provide, rather than the services that they offer because there are various other channels and platforms available for that very reason. An official website gives a brand a lot of credibility and also helps the audience to become leads. In the digital world today, content is king. The best way to determine how well your rankings are on the SERP depends on how good your content is.
Another way to use excellent content for the best rankings is the use of keywords. Keywords for any website are absolutely crucial. Keyword usage, when done right, can help bring your website to the top of the rankings as they represent the words that website-goers are looking for. Be it a certain product or a service that you sell, the best way to get in touch with them is to ensure that your website is available when they look for those keywords. Content that is rich in keywords such as meta-data, titles, and the initial paragraphs of any webpage, makes it much easier for the audience to find your website. It might be easy to underestimate the use of keywords in digital marketing and SEO, however, the optimization of keywords and the correct usage of them will allow you to have a much more optimized website.
The best way to ensure that you are following white hat SEO tactics is to have very neat code. When you have someone build your website, or build it yourself, you should make use of a highly structured markup language that is easy to maintain and modify as and when required. If your website has clean code and does not have any semantic or syntax errors, then the use of keywords in major elements on your pages will make it much easier for the audience to look for your website and also reduce the loading time of your website, hence optimizing it.
You must also have authoritative inbound links for your website. These are not easy to obtain but have a huge payoff. If you get a lot of paid links, they may not be as effective as compared to inbound links. These take time and dedication but have a lot of impact on how you rank on the search engines results page. It also increases your overall traffic, especially when it is coming from a website that has a lot of viewers on a daily basis.
You must always think about the customer when building your website. If your website has simple navigation, it increases the credibility and the probability of the user coming back and using your website for their own purposes. This further increases your place in the search ranking, makes sure that your visitors are not frustrated when using your website and can easily find what they’re looking for. This is the best thing that you can do to convert your potential audience into actual solid leads.
The functionality of your website is absolutely imperative to ensure that a customer comes back to your website later. If you get a reputation for a slow website, then many people will be averse to visiting it again. This is especially true if your website does not load on time, does not have simple navigation, is not optimized for mobile, and is not responsive. From an SEO perspective, the speed of how fast your page loads is absolutely essential to make sure that the experience of the user is not jeopardized. Keep in mind how your website functions and impacts the user.
Black Hat SEO Techniques:
Just as there are many techniques to ensure that you are following the White Hat SEO guidelines, there are some things that some SEO specialists do in order to achieve shortcuts when it comes to the optimization of their website. These are known as black hat SEO techniques. A few black hat SEO techniques are as follows:
The first is keyword stuffing. This is the use of a lot of code stuffed with keywords that don’t make any sense to the context on the webpage and are only visible to the search engine crawler. This means that the user will not be looking at the keywords but these keywords will still be present on the backend so that they may try to show up on the search engines page. However, even though this may have worked in the past, search engine algorithms have become much smarter and are able to understand when the keywords in any webpage are exaggerated. For this reason, keyword stuffing is an absolute no, especially because search engines tend to rank those websites much lower when they detect keyword stuffing. Another way to do keyword stuffing is to stuff the keywords in titles and metatext where they do not belong such as meta-tags, page titles, backlinks, and even initial text on a webpage. Wherever there is any keyword that is present where it shouldn’t be, it is easy enough for the search engine algorithms to pick up. Stay away from meta-keyword stuffing.
Another thing that Black hat SEO specialists do is to Farm Links. What this means is that the specialists collect a list of links that are completely unrelated to the context of the webpage they want to promote, however, this collection of links on the website will not gain any traffic for your website. In fact, if you do this, it might be easily detected by Google’s algorithms and it will rank you lower on its search engine.
Something that spammers and blackhead SEO specialists have in common is to catfish a user into coming to a webpage thinking that the content is related to something that they are looking for. However, the content on the webpage is entirely different from what the user searched for. These specialists stuff keywords which are completely unrelated to the website so that it may show up on the search engine for searches that have nothing to do with the website. When this happens, users will become more and more averse to that website and it becomes easier for the algorithm to pick up such spam.
Conclusion-
Whichever way you choose to optimize your search engine, make sure that you have a professional touch to help you. If you choose black hat SEO for your website, you may get quick wins, but this will not help your website promotion at all. You will always be at risk of fines, shut down, and putting away potential users that may have come to your website to make a purchase. You will be losing out on a lot of opportunities if you follow black hat SEO techniques. On the other hand, if you get professional help with a digital marketing agency like The Quoteship, which follows white hat SEO techniques, you will get relevant content, higher visibility, more conversion to leads, and huge business opportunities.
Contact “The Quoteship” today to learn more, and to book a one-on-one consultation, absolutely free!
