The last few years have seen tremendous growth in search engine marketing. This involves paid search engine advertising and search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is something that drives a targeted audience to your website. It’s without a doubt a very important part of any business. But what’s more important is how you use it.
What Are Black Hat and White Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO techniques may get you lots of ranking success, but it comes with a risk of getting penalized by search engines sooner than later.
This can end up damaging your rankings and brand image. On the other hand, white hat SEO techniques, slow but steady, bring in real and sustainable results and can save you from the wrath of search engines.
Before SEO got all technical, it used to be simple. It was all about creating the best and most relevant content with the help of keywords. This remains the same even today. The only thing that changed is how search engines judge the quality of content.
Relevancy happens to be one of the main focal points of white hat SEO. White Hat SEO refers to any practice that is used to improve your rankings on a search engine result page while maintaining the integrity of your brand and staying within the search engine’s terms of service.
Why Is White Hat SEO Important?
Investing in paid advertising can always be a great way to increase traffic to your website. However, most of the online traffic is primarily driven by search engines. Your website’s visibility and searchability can make or break your business online.
White Hat SEO Techniques
- Use Keywords Logically
Keywords form an important SEO ranking factor that is used by search engines to determine your website’s ranking in search results.
The right keywords, when used properly, can make it easy for search engines to understand what your content is all about.
To produce organic content, you need to understand your audience, the type of content they are looking for and the language they prefer.
This brings your goal of getting prospective customers to visit your website closer. Your content strategy should include details about your potential customer or general market so that you can put out content that answers their questions.
- Program Your Website to Load Faster and Responsive
Website loading speed is an important SEO factor recently added by Google. A website that takes forever to load and has a non-responsive design ranks lower because it has lower visits.
By making your website mobile-friendly and lightweight, you can get onto the good side of Google which helps your page get better rankings. To make this happen, without creating any mistakes it is advisable to take the help of website design services providers who are experts in producing mobile-friendly, and responsive website design structures, which can decrease the load time of your website, and can help you in ranking better.
- Audit Your Website
Auditing your website helps you identify areas that require improvement. A big part of white hat SEO is making sure all gears are greased and ready to go before your site ranks at the top of the search results.
To do this, you need to audit your entire website. Analyze published pages and see how optimized they are for their respective keywords.
You can also tweak relevant content and change keywords to increase their exposure. You also need to assess your website’s structure and build to make sure all the pieces are in their places.
Consider the following while you audit your website:
Metadata: Metadata is very important for SEO as that is what creates the first impression of your website on your visitor. Page titles are permitted to have less than 60 characters and descriptions less than 150. If you go above these limits, your content might be cut off and the visitor can’t see what your page is all about. Using keywords in metadata is also important to rank higher.
Images: Compress your images without compromising on its quality. This ensures that they will load quicker when opened. You can also include alt text that mentions keywords that are relevant to the image. This makes it easier for search engines to read your images and hence rank your page higher.
Broken links: Nobody likes to see a 404-error page when they click on a website. During your audit, look for such broken links and redirect them to the correct link. This will increase traffic on your website, making it rank higher.
The objective of a website audit is to identify factors that are holding your site back from an SEO standpoint.
By improving your site based on the information you get from your audit, you can make it much more usable and friendly to your audience.
White hat SEO keeps everything in place for search engines. Without it, users would find themselves on irrelevant websites which is why search engines have been improving their algorithms to serve only the best quality content and websites that ultimately rank for specific queries.
You can take help from top SEO agencies that will follow all the search engine guidelines and make sure you get to the top properly and professionally.
