SEO has become really popular, thanks to those who tried and succeeded are still ranking in the top up until today. Businesses that are looking for answers on how they can improve their business and generate more income in the long run are considering search engine optimization for their websites.
Let’s talk more about White Hat SEO, the ‘holy grail’ technique that is highly recommended compared to Black Hat SEO. It’s all about doing the right practices, keeping everything clean, abiding the rules and doing it ethically.
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Why Invest In White Hat SEO?
Both White and Black Hat SEO has their own set of advantages and disadvantages:
| SEO Strategies | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| White Hat SEO | Promote long-term growth Emphasize on promoting good user experience Zero risks involved Ethical way to promote website growth | Takes time to achieve top ranking |
| Black Hat SEO | Ranking can be achieved faster than White Hat SEO | Bad user experience Risks involved is high Short term gain Website may be penalized |
- Your Reputation Will Be Established – We all know how important reputation is and when you are able to build it the right way, it’s hard to break it down. However, this actually takes time to be established, and it requires a lot of effort in maintaining it. If you start using unethical methods just to achieve immediate ranking in search engines, your work and money spent on it will also quickly disappear once caught by Google. You won’t experience this type of problem if you do it the right way. Once you’re on top, it’s not that easy to rank down especially if search engines see that you are providing relevant content to the users.
- Boost Visibility Organically – Once your SEO method is done correctly, and you reached the top rankings or the first page of Google, staying here requires your utmost attention and effort. With this, you will be gaining more organic visibility as users continue to see your business’ name on the search page. It may take longer time to achieve this, but it’s going to be all worth it.
- Higher ROI (Return On Investment) – Many businesses can attest that all the money and time they have invested in SEO have given them positive results. With this, they are now enjoying ROI higher than before investing on this approach. You’d be pumped up to know that this strategy will make you stay on top and even let you enjoy your profits for many years to come. Unlike Black Hat SEO, everything goes down – your effort, time and money once Google catches and penalizes your site.
Reasons Why Black Hat SEO is Big No!
Black Hat SEO may let you enjoy the results but only for a very short time plus the consequences that comes after once you get penalized. Here are 3 very good reasons why you should stay away from this unethical practice.
- It Is More Expensive – There was a time when this approach was cheaper and was seen to be more effective than White Hat SEO. But Google has seen the effects of this method and learned its lesson. Now, the big G is smarter than ever and faster in making sure that those who are doing this unethical practice will be caught. Their constant update is making it even harder for all those who do this, which means you will need to pay for more to your so called “expert” for this and will have no 100% guarantee of ROI. You will need to buy dedicated hosting server, expired domain names, etc. and these are not cheap.
- Riskier Than Ever – Back in the older days of the Internet, Black Hat SEO can easily go unnoticed while enjoying the results at the same time. However, this technique will have to quadruple the work but still with greater risks. Getting caught and being penalized by Google does not sound cute at all, and once you have gotten out, it’s going to be even bad for your website.
- It Has Become More Complicated – It is a fact that this method is bad, but you have to be very knowledgeable with its techniques for you to find the holes in the Internet and execute this successfully. However, this is not shared with the public, and this can get very frustrating for anyone with little information of it.
6 Highly Recommended White Hat Techniques
There are many crucial factors in SEO than can affect a website’s ranking in search engines such as content and user objectives and Google wants you to keep your eye on them. In order to get most of the SEO efforts and achieve desired results, here are 6 highly recommended techniques that you will want to follow each year:
- Only Relevant And Excellent Content Should Be Published – What makes every SEO campaign successful is content. Search engines are considering this as a big deal. Take note of the following details below:
- Make sure it is relevant to what your business and target are to your potential market. It should be useful, that can provide value to those who are looking for information.
- Subject matters are uniquely chosen and not just writing generally.
- It is understandable, error-free and written well.
- No matter how long or short the content is, just be sure that it is helpful to the reader’s situation. It should also be entertaining at the same time to make the user want to navigate and stay longer in your website.
- Do not use thin and bad content since this can harm your rankings.
- Publish evergreen content. It is search-optimized content that continues to stay fresh and relevant for a long time for all the users.
As long as you maintain it well, you don’t need to worry about your competitors, especially if Google finds your website appealing and has value to the users.
- User Experience Enhancement Is A Must – Google looks into how your site could give the best experience to the users. The objective of the UX design of a business is to satisfy and build loyalty; this is according to a study done by Oxford Journal. This is achievable as long as the site visitor is pleasured or happy when navigating and interacting. What are the things that you need to look into?
- The intent of the website visitor.
- Only the best UX practices should be implemented.
- Always plan before executing. You can talk to a website builder, look around and do your research first.
- Try experimenting with UX concepts so that you will identify which the users like the most. Continue to do this until your website visitors won’t face any types of issues anymore.
- Revive And Enhance Old Contents – Users will not be happy seeing the same and old content every time they visit a website, and all search engines favors sites that keep their content updated. Some are using 301 redirects wherein the users will be sent to a different URL with a new content. However, this can affect the speed as well as the mobile sensitivity. You can renew the older content that you have so that you can keep everything looking fresh and maintain quality at the same time. It can also continue to drive traffic to your website.
However, be careful when doing this. Don’t delete it instantly but you can instead make an archives page on your old URL. This can add authority to the URL that you already have and make it more user friendly, which also enhances authority to the central domain name.
- Use Schema To Stay On Top Of The Competition – According to studies done recently, Google favors websites utilizing Schema and approves of this tool at the same time. About 35% of search results in Google are found out to have Rich Snippets that is supported by Schema. Surprisingly, only around 0.3 percent of web pages use this tool. This is an opportunity that many businesses have missed that could potentially outrank their rivals.
Let us get to know more about what Schema is and its purpose. These tags can be used and added to a certain page so that a more comprehensive description may be created that is actually seen in SERP or search engine results pages.
When you try to search for something in Google, you can see Rich Snippets by Schema – the ratings, reviews, etc. And the advantages of having it are as follows:
- Searchers looking for info through the search engines can see more data about a certain page.
- It can make your website look more appealing and stand out above the rest.
- Search engines approve the use of Schema because it is easier for them to recognize what your website is.
- If users see information upfront on the search engine results page instantly, in a way this can increase your website’s click-through rate.
- Research Your Keywords Wisely – SEO is also about using the right keywords; this is an important ingredient of the method. The use of keywords has evolved over time. No matter what type of tool you are using for this, it all boils down on knowing what should be done and getting the results that you want. Google’s algorithm called RankBrain is the new improvement that they created. It uses machine-learning AI system so that the content will be placed in context.
With RankBrain, Google doesn’t need to depend solely on Metadata; it understands what your web page is all about. Now, you can’t just put a lot of keywords in your page since Google can identify if you give value to the users or not.
Google is smarter than you think. Aside from its ability to understand synonyms, it can also look for answers to your questions. However, with the use of the best research tools, you can gather data and target the keywords that you can use to improve your rankings. This can also assist you in creating the perfect content for the keyword searches and incorporate it with the phrases that are extremely appropriate. With this, you need to be wise just like Google.
- It Is Best To Entice The Right Kind Of Links – The relevance as well as the quality of your page is also judged by links that you have to rank in search engines. You can build a strong White Hat SEO strategy if you are able to attract good-quality links. When you do this, you would want to get the back-links that:
- Has relevance to the theme and content of your web page.
- Has user participation wherein it has to undergo an actual editorial review.
- Are received only because of quality, significance as well as value of the published content.
One simple way for you to build links is to create enticing contents that can offer a lot of value that other sites are enticed to link with it. Remember, you have to execute link building correctly.
Conclusion
White Hat SEO will never be a dying trend. It will still exist tomorrow or even in the future. Doing the right way is always the best choice. Search engines will continue to update and maintain quality. If you think that your website needs SEO work, and you only have little idea on what White Hat SEO is, then you would want to talk to an expert today.
