Ranking highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) can improve visibility and boost ROI considerably. It’s all about driving traffic to your site organically in a bid to achieve specific business goals and while SEO is a huge consideration for brands, there are many different SEO tactics involved. Some are White Hat and others are Black Hat. So, what’s the difference and why should you stick to the rules?
White Hat and Black Hat Explained
White Hat SEO techniques follow Google’s guidelines and focus on enhancing the user experience. SEO of this kind is about tailoring content to humans who will be clicking on and reading the site’s content in detail. Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, violates these guidelines and is done with complete disregard for human users. Black Hat techniques are typically used to try and rank websites quicker than legitimate White Hat techniques. However, Black Hat activity used to trick, undermine or outsmart the search engine ranking algorithm can be heavily penalised, so sticking to the rules is a must.
White Hat SEO Tactics
White Hat SEO is all about playing by the rules to boost your website’s presence. Things you can do include:
- Writing quality content – be sure to write for the end user and not the search engine. Quality is key with useful, factually correct and well-written articles helping to boost the ranking of your site. Google also loves fresh content, so take the time to post regularly to your blog or refresh existing content. Long-form content also tends to get more quality backlinks from sites of authority which is also great for SEO. You can get quality backlinks by building strong relationships with talented content creators who will happily include a link to your site in their content.Â
- Using relevant keywords – keyword research and on-page keyword optimisation is a must when it comes to White Hat SEO. The right keywords will fuel your content strategy and allow you to create lots of interesting material from blogs and articles to videos, infographics and off-site social media material. Aim to use keywords in no more than 2% of the content and pop them in strategic places such as headers, sub-headers, meta tags and image alt text.Â
Black Hat SEO strategies include duplicating content and keyword cramming as well as linking from sites with non-relevant content in a bid to boost authority fast. White Hat tactics might be slower, but Black Hat SEO can be punished at any time by being pushed low down the rankings. Black Hat SEO also involves churning out bad content, so if your content is of the highest possible quality and well-researched, you’re definitely on the right track.
- Improving page load times – a slow loading site can boost the bounce rate, so make sure your site is running as fast as possible. You can do this by reducing large files sizes such as images and turning them into a JPG format.
- Making your website easy to navigate – think about page structure and include plenty of headers and bullet points for all those skimmers out there. If your site is mobile optimised, keep your content scrollable and avoid asking people to click on multiple links.
For a reliable Kent SEO agency, speak to Whitefish Marketing today about White Hat SEO techniques.
