Following and implementing Google’s white hat SEO techniques can be the best way to develop an ethical as well as sustainable business website that will be successful. Search engine bots keep on crawling websites and once a black hat site falls under their radar, the outcome will be a site-wide de-ranking and de-indexing. So, following black hat techniques can erase your entire website from Google. To avoid that risk, you should rely on ethical SEO techniques (also called White Hat SEO techniques) to attain higher SERP ranking and to outrank your competitors.
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What Is White Hat SEO?
White-hat SEO refers to all the optimization techniques which abide by Google’s search engine guidelines. Although one needs to be patient to see results, they are sustainable and create genuine goodwill around your brand. Besides, there is no risk of your site getting banned or bumped down in the search results if there is a new algorithm change. All in all, white-hat SEO is low-risk and high rewards if you do it right. Examples of white-hat SEO techniques include authoring useful and relevant content after doing extensive keyword research, earning links from high-authority sites based on the merit of your on-page content, etc.
White Hat SEO? Black Hat SEO?
Just like cowboys wearing white hats and black hats to differentiate the “good guys” from the “bad guys,” “white hat SEO” and “black hat SEO” denote good and bad SEO practices:
- White hat SEO techniques are heroes — tactics that work within search engines’ terms of service to improve a site’s search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
- Black hat SEO techniques are villains — tactics that may get a site higher SERP rankings, but are unethical and violate search engine guidelines.
Understanding what’s what when it comes to SEO best practices is essential to maintain the integrity of your website, online rankings, and visibility.
Whether they engage in white hat or black hat strategies, content marketers want the same thing — to boost their ranking on Google. Why are SEO strategists clamoring to make Google’s algorithm happy? Because your website ranking high on Google means reaching 86% internet users worldwide.
To better understand white hat SEO, it might make sense to examine black hat SEO and understand their key differences, such as:
- White hat SEO produces high-quality content that matches user intent, while black hat strategies put out low-quality, duplicated, or heavily templated content.
- A white hat strategy includes using well-labeled images with thoughtful alt text, while black hat uses more dated SEO practices, like keyword stuffing and invisible text.
- White hat SEO uses keyword research organically on a page. In contrast, black hat SEO takes a target keyword and overuses it in headers, meta tags, or unnatural anchor text throughout a piece of content.
- White hat content complies with search engine guidelines and builds links by guest posting and authentic link building strategies, while black hat’s strategy is to buy links.
Black hat SEO doesn’t have to be seen as an insidious SEO service because looking closely, some of the strategies are the same. It’s just that black hat strategies create and produce content strictly for search engines instead of people — a practice often referred to as “cloaking.” However, it’s still best to stay away from such practices and build your site authority with long-term, sustainable strategies.
Why Are White Hat SEO Techniques Important?
Failure to engage only in White Hat SEO practices can get your site banned from Google and other search engines.
As the number one search engine, Google is visited by billions of people per day, and each visit presents the potential for your site to be discovered by a new user.
Google is an undeniably powerful source of traffic to your website, and being banned can result in a drastic drop in website traffic and even business. Consider all the work that goes into your website and then think about what it would be like to be banned from the internet’s most commonly used search engine. What’s worse, once you’re banned from Google, there is no guarantee that they will ever re-list you. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences.
Why risk it? Check out a complete description of Google-approved SEO techniques at Webmaster Guidelines. Google’s Webmaster resources are the go-to place to learn Google white hat SEO practices.
Here are some of the steps you should follow to make sure your SEO methods are strictly white hat.
Offer Quality Content and Services
Create high-quality content that meets your visitors’ needs and helps solve their problems. Use SEO keyword research tools to discover the most relevant keywords that your site content should be optimized for.
Then focus on using those keywords in great content, such as how-to articles and videos, that match the intent of the keyword and your end user.
Quality content written for the benefit of the reader, not the search engine crawler, is the most crucial element of modern day SEO. It is the best way to be rewarded by search engines and how they rank your site or blog. Always remember that quality content is king!
Here are the things that you need to understand if you want to produce high quality SEO content.
- Keyword research. To generate more traffic to your site, you need to include searchable terms in your content.
- Optimize your keywords. You need to know when and where to use the keywords and at what times before writing content.
- Do content promotion. Just producing content is not enough. You need to promote it. It helps to build links for your content.
Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags
Content-relevant keywords based on disciplined research around page content is mandatory. Also, pay attention to keyword usage. Stick to one primary keyword and 2 or 3 secondary/supporting keywords.
Keyword-rich page titles and metadata are also mandatory. It’s easy to overlook or underestimate these areas, but optimization is low-hanging fruit for most sites.
Follow best practices when creating meta descriptions for each page on your website to help search engines and users discover your content.
Make Your Site Easy to Navigate
Be mindful when organizing your site’s Information Architecture. Sites that are easy for users to get around tend to perform better in organic search results too.
Lean code and semantically structured markup language, including the use of keyword-rich heading elements on your pages, aid search engines in finding what they’re looking for when crawling your site.
Authoritative inbound links
Authoritative inbound links that are gained organically versus paid links have become one of the most important elements in your SEO efforts. Attaining authoritative inbound links takes time and dedication, but the tremendous impact on how you rank in SERPs and increased overall site traffic make it well worth the effort.
Attracting natural backlinks
Link building is one of the most powerful white hat SEO techniques and can drive an immense amount of traffic to your domain while boosting its credibility and authority. Almost every website that gets ranked in the top of search results has a decent amount of links pointing to it, and this indicates to Google that the website is credible and must be of high quality. While backlinks are a very important part of SEO, you shouldn’t buy backlinks to improve your Google ranking. ‘Link buying’ is a black hat SEO technique and can get you penalized by Google.
Instead, you should build links in a natural way. There are several backlink building methods to do so. For example, you can approach websites for link building opportunities via guest posting. However, make sure to only seek backlinks from high quality websites. Links from spammy websites can actually harm your SEO ranking.
Building links through infographics is one of the best SEO techniques you can EVER use.
Visual content attracts much attention in social media than plain text content. In SEO world, backlinks are very important. Without having quality backlinks to your site, it is very difficult to see growth in business.
The more viral content on social media are infographics. If you want to build authoritative backlinks then start creating infographics.
Mobile optimization
Simple website navigation generally boosts where your site places in organic search rankings. It also helps visitors find what they need without getting frustrated, which is a win for potential conversions.
Fast page loading times is a necessity because, like simple navigation or mobile optimization, responsive sites don’t frustrate visitors or encourage bounce. From an SEO standpoint, site speed is a search engine ranking signal. Sites that are slow in responding to visitor requests for whatever reason (large images, image carousels, etc.) generally rank lower in SERPs because the user experience is jeopardized. Be mindful of functionality and features and how they impact load times.
Satisfy User Intent
Satisfying user intent is Google’s No. 1 goal, so you should also aim for it as a website owner. User intent is the person’s goal when they type a query into a search engine.
The common types of user intent are informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional. If a person visits a clothing website, it’s safe to say they’re looking to buy, and that would be categorized as commercial and transactional. If someone looks up “how to grow mushrooms,” they’d be looking for information.
A few strategies to use to satisfy user intent include:
- Knowing your audience and what they’re looking for
- Optimizing your content to fit specific keywords
- Formatting your content for skimmers — use subheadings and leave a lot of white space
- Using videos and images
Research Your Competitors’ Backlinks
If you want to outrank your competitors, you have to have high-quality backlinks. Remember, the quantity of backlinks is less important than the quality of your backlinks. It is of course necessary to have a decent number of backlinks, but they’ll need to be from high authority sites.
Just like keywords, you can ‘steal’ competitor’s backlinks as well.
Analyze who are your top 5 competitors. Add their website links onto a spreadsheet. You can use Semrush to find your competitors who ranks well for your keyword. Here’s an excellent article on how to steal your competitor backlinks as one of the working SEO techniques.
Now, you have the list. Let’s see how to steal your competitor’s backlinks.
1. Collect all information about your competitor: You can do this by setting up backlink alerts. Go to Ahrefs, click on “alerts‘ tab. You can create backlink alert for each of your competitor. You get notification whenever they are mentioned anywhere online. This is to track your competitors link building and online marketing.
2. Find sites that links to more than one competitor: Go to Ahrefs, click on “tools ” tab then click on “link intersect”. Enter top 5 domains and click on “show link opportunities”. It will return a report of sites that link to all the domains you entered. Check individual links where it shows to what site they have links. If it displays forum beside your competitor link then go to that forum and promote your stuff.
3. Check your competitor’s guest posts: Guest blogging helps in building links to your site. How to check?
- Use Google search. Try search “author name” + “guest post” – site:competitordomain.com -site:https://domain.com or else you can try searching, “author name” + inurl:author.
- Use ahrefs. To find the content written by a particular author, use ahrefs content explorer. Just enter, author:”author name”
4. Find your competitor’s most popular content: Find their popular content and create even better and then promote. It is one of the great ways to build backlinks. Head over to ahrefs, click on “site explorer” tab and enter your competitor link. Under “pages” tab, click on “best by links” and also “best by shares” to know your competitor’s most shared content.
When you are ready to promote your content, just enter your competitor URL under “site explorer”. To find their backlinks, click on “referring domains”.
5. Fix your competitor’s broken backlinks: You can check broken links information of your competitors by going to ahrefs > site explorer > enter domain . Under the “backlink profile” tb, you will find “broken”. Just export all these results. Now take each result and plugin to check my links chrome plugin. It confirms the multiple broken links on that page.
Now, reach out to that site, tell them about their site broken links and offer your site as an alternative provided you have similar content on your site.
Don’t over depend on your competitors for backlinks. By doing these, you will not only have backlinks but also gets some topic ideas which helps in creating unique campaigns. This helps in increasing your blog search traffic.
Giving value to your audience
The best possible way you can perform best in the search is by giving value to your audience and preferably, your industry too.
This includes:
- Having a site that is well built, performs well and is capable of being used across platform (desktop, tablet, mobile)
- Producing content that is actionable and contains fresh ideas
- Having a good mix of multimedia content, not just written
- Utilizing social media so that your brand is recognizable across all platforms and content can be distributed. This is becoming more important now more than ever, social signals (Facebook likes, G +1s, Retweets etc.) indicates that your content is useful, as people are reading/watching and ideally, sharing and commenting.
It’s also worth mentioning that your link profile remains important but that this is something that takes time and should be carried out sensibly and organically. Buying links will get you a Google penalty, as will any indication that you might have.
Guest blogging remains a valid white hat technique, but it’s vital that this is approached naturally. This means that you begin guest posting on sites that are of a similar Domain Authority to your own. If you suddenly appear to have a lot of very high quality links to your site, then this appears to Google as if they have been purchased.
We’ve really just touched upon white hat here and there are many techniques that can help you, including SEO professionals and for SMEs, using specialist SEO software. The most important thing to remember is that content should always be excellent and this should be the main driver to your site.
Conclusion…
Businesses that fail to engage in the white hat SEO strategies only will run the major risk of getting banned by Google and all the other search engines.
As Google is the top most search engine, billions of search users visit Google everyday.
Each visit presents businesses like you with a new opportunity to get discovered by new search users.
Undeniably, Google can provide a powerful source of web traffic to any website.
Once a website gets banned it will experience a drastic drop in the web traffic it receives followed by tremendous loss in business.
Now, you should also evaluate the amount of efforts that goes into your website.
After all the efforts it could be very taxing to just get banned by some of the major search engines.
The worst part is once you get banned by the Google, the chances are that Google might never re-list your website again.
This kind of lifetime ban from the top search engine can have tremendous negative consequences.
So, why should you even risk it?
That’s all, folks!
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