There are many components to SEO. Because of this, many business owners don’t understand the differences between White-hat SEO and Black-hat SEO.
What is white-hat SEO?
Whitehat SEO is performing search engine optimisation strategies and techniques to the organic rankings of a website. They use the search engine guidelines as a guide to building out their organic ranking strategy. Every search engine has different guidelines however, they all come down to the same thing. Don’t spam people. Don’t provide a bad user experience. And offer the searcher value.
Difference between white-hat and black-hat SEO
White hat is seen as ethical or the correct form of SEO and blackhat SEO is seen as bad or unethical SEO. Below are some examples of black and white hat SEO.
Examples of Blackhat SEO
- Keyword stuffing
- Link schemes (eg PNBs)
- Hidden texts and links
- Blog comment spamming
Examples of Whitehat SEO
- Accurate Keyword research and analysis
- Rewriting meta tags for better relevance
- Backlinking to sites that are relevant and valuable
- Link-building through writing valuable content for human readers.
Benefits of white hat
The benefits of white hat SEO include:
- Improved organic rankings
- Improved website user experience
- Improved conversion rate
- Improved brand exposure
Strategies of white-hat SEO
There are many white-hat SEO strategies an SEO can use to increase their organic rankings.
Create valuable content
Creating helpful and valuable content in the form of blog posts and “on-page content.
Quality link building
Getting links through link building methods that are not spammy or “bought” can help you boost your rankings. Using spam tactics offers short-term gains and is high risk. Posting good quality content and helpful guides using the skyscraper method can help people link to the post and boost the rankings.
Satisfy user intent
Satisfying search intent is an important metric for SEO, especially on-page SEO. We have found that when you add any relevant content to the webpage to help the search make an informed decision on the purchase of the Goods or services they need it helps with your organic rankings. Help the answer any questions they may have on the product or service they require. Additional information can be blog posts and testimonials.
Mobile friendly
Websites need to be mobile-friendly. We are not a fan of “AMP” type plugins because they can cause many issues with crawling but a website theme like DIVI is perfect because the page builder can be tweaked to ensure the website is always mobile responsive. Most users are using phones to access information on the internet so it makes sense to ensure a responsive website for the user.
Easy navigation and layout
This is something that way came across by chance. The impact that a website’s navigation and layout can have is amazing. The easier the information is laid out on the page impacts its readability and the easier the person can find something on the website and on the web page the better the rankings will be. How much better? In one test, from page 10 to page 1 in two weeks.
Descriptive titles and keyword-rich meta
Using descriptive titles and keyword-rich meta descriptions helps the search quickly find the search results they are looking for. This usually leads back to the relevance of the search query. If the web page’s content is relevant to the search and so are the title and meta description you will find a larger amount of traffic coming to the website with a larger conversion rate. These are very important metrics for the business and the digital marketer.
Fast loading of a webpage
Websites need to be fast. The webpage loading speed should be around 2 seconds to load. There are a variety of ways to improve your webpage speed and performance. The most popular is if you are using WordPress would be to reduce the number of plugins you are using, change the theme to a faster theme and change your hosting to a VPS hosting service. There are other things that can be done like using Cloudflare’s CDN and DNS service and WP Rocket caching plugin.
An SEO agency should always work towards using white-hat methods. The blackhat tactics can work but at the cost of receiving a Google penalty, it isn’t worth it. Always verify the links you get to ensure they were accurately attained.
If you are in need of any SEO services, please contact us today. If you require help with your SEO, consider our SEO services in order to get a better understanding of what we do and how we help businesses.
