If you’ve been running your site for a while, chances are you tried to either learn the basics of SEO or contacted some SEO guru who promised really nice and fantastic results within a month or two. Plus he did not charge that much. Sorry. SEO does not work that way. And you know that if you did business with such snake oil SEO guys. The aim of this post is to educate you so that you can discern the bad from the good in terms of SEO because if you can’t tell the difference you can easily get yourself in a situation where you pay for nothing or for something that even harms your online business. For example, it can happen if you buy some SEO deals from Fivrr.com
White Hat SEO
The benefit of White Hat SEO is that it’s time-proof and just ethical. So, what you do now to your site in terms of SEO will not backfire down the road and you can sleep safe without worrying about the future of your online project. There will be times when you’re not exactly sure whether the thing that you’re going to do is white or black. The best way to figure it out is to think if your innovation benefits the user or not. If the answer is no, drop it and run for your life! 🙂
The major search engines themselves clearly explain and define what is White Hat SEO. And what you or your SEO guy should do is just stick to those guidelines or rules, which are:
- keyword research and targeting;
- unique and quality content;
- internal links and proper site structure;
- quality links from other sites.
Though these guidelines sound like a no-brainer, it’s not that simple to put them to practice. Especially if there’s tough competition in your industry or just for the keyword that you’d like to rank for.
The thing is that the results of SEO do not come that fast, unlike in the case of PPC or email marketing. You need to implement your SEO strategy for a few months (and sometimes even years) before you can see tangible outcomes. The good news is that once you get your site off the ground in terms of SEO, it’ll gain momentum and keep you going for a very long time.
So, get ready to do SEO for yourself, your boss or your client’s site for a few months in a row before you’ll be able to see any results. SEO is a strategic thing rather than tactical.
Black Hat SEO
Now I’m going to give you a few examples of what Black Hat SEO is. I’m not in no way encouraging you to use it. It’s strictly for educational purposes because implementing the black methods of SEO is for one unethical and – secondly – they will not stand the test of time in any case. Just stay away from them because if you make use of them your online business is at severe jeopardy and you may wake up one day and see that you can’t find your site in Google, Bing or anywhere else. And I’m not saying that just to impress you or something. There are real life cases that show high real it can be. And the vast majority of the sites that had such a problem never got their rankings back. Still let’s see what these techniques are.
Paid links
Though this method is being widely used, it’s steadily getting more and more dangerous to do it because Google learns to discern such links way easier and once it does you and your site may suffer quite badly. The search engines just don’t like if you try to lead them to believe that your site is more relevant than it actually is in reality.
You may have heard some SEO people saying that Google does it to keep justice and allow small businesses who are on a shoe-string budget have a chance in terms of ranking high but judging from the last Google algorithm (algo) updates, it does not look that it’s their prime aim in any respect. Let me explain what I mean here.
Google seems to be very negative about paid links … or is it? On one hand, it is not happy when you buy links from third party sites but on the other hand if you buy ads from Google themselves they are totally fine with that. So, it smells like double standards in the air. What do you think?
Duplicate content
It’s another technique that Google and the other search engines are not happy about. Duplicate content is such content that is either the same or just about the same and is of no use or help to the end user. So, it should be avoided on your site. If you really want to write something on your site that has already been discussed somewhere else you need to at least make sure that you are not just copying and pasting. Make sure to invest some time into re-writing it and adding your original thoughts and ideas as for the topic discussed.
Keyword stuffing
First off, what keyword stuffing means. It’s the process or result of adding as many keywords in your copy as possible. That used to work to an extent back in the day (like in 2000) but now it is a total no-no. As a matter of fact, if you’re doing an overkill with adding too many keywords you site can even have issues because of that. So, it’s another technique to stay away from. Just use keywords in a natural way. First and foremost think about the user that will read your copy.
Cloaking
Cloaking is shoing one version of your site to a search engine and a different one to the user. There are a slew of cloaking methods but all of them are in disfavor of all the major browsers. Should you try one or a few of them, you’ll be caught red-handed anyway. Plus your competitors can report on you if they watch your website performance closely enough. So, as you can see this technique will definitely cause issues and it’s just a matter of time.
Building links on autopilot
If you visit a few SEO forums, you’ll definitely see a whole lot of promises to submit your site to 200-500 directories for $30 or something like that. You’re asking what’s wrong with that? Well, the problem that I’m having with this particular technique is that they just submit to those low-quality directories which are designed specifically for that purpose and they are of no value whatsoever!
Conclusion or whatever you call it … 🙂
So, having taken into account all the factors outlined above, it really makes sense that you need to stick with ethical techniques because both you and your clients can be sure in that case that their sites won’t lose rankings one nice morning. Be on the bright side.
