The internet is the new future for the current business landscape. This means that businesses that are not investing in SEO will not enjoy any benefits and will soon become extinct. Successful companies must have a solid online presence for them to leverage the more than 3.62 billion users. Furthermore, there are billions of other websites and you need to be equipped to handle stiff competition. Your website should be optimized for the search engines to ensure that you rank higher and stay ahead of your competition. For successful internet advertising, SEO is the only secret.
Businesses should never undermine the importance of ranking higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for your target keyword. Your website should be on the topmost position if you want your target audiences to find your business. This is why SEO is important for any business because it allows you to boost your visibility and improve your website rankings. With more than 75% of users not scrolling beyond the first page of the SERPs, businesses should strive to rank highly for their target keywords.
White Hat Vs. Black Hat SEO
In the past, all that you need was a good looking website and you could use all SEO techniques to boost your SERP ranking. However, over time a division of the SEO techniques emerged.
Black hat techniques are SEO strategies that are used to manipulate the search engines. These techniques work to play around with the system by making a specific website appear more relevant to the search engine crawlers thereby getting a higher ranking. However, black hat techniques usually result in poor user experience because the content on these websites are never relevant to what the users are looking for.
White Hat SEO techniques focus on providing internet users with relevant and high-quality materials that they are currently looking for. This content is created by seasoned and skilled experts and they do not manipulate the search engines in any way. White Hat Techniques will adhere to all the search engine guidelines with regards to terms of service and the experience to users is usually highly beneficial.
Black Hat SEO techniques that should be Avoided
White Hat SEO techniques usually take time and resource to yield the desired results. Because of this, many websites still employ Black Hat SEO. When you hire the right SEO expert for your business, you must ensure that he/she will only employ white hat SEO techniques that will not result in algorithmic penalties. With regular search engine algorithms updates, you must know the black hat tools that your SEO project should never use. Here are black hat strategies that your SEO consultant should never use.
- Keyword stuffing: keywords are some of the most abused SEO tools and this is something that started years ago.When an SEO agent may randomly add target keywords, so as to deceive the search engines about the relevance of your page on the search. However, keyword stuffing will negatively affect the SERP ranking of your website. In addition, it will result in poor user experience that will affect your conversion rates.
- Link exchange and Buying: many people still do not have a complete understanding of Link building. When using links, always focus on the quality rather than the quantity. Google Penguin and other algorithm update can easily determine spammy links that have been procured from irrelevant sites. This can lead to penalization of your website, which will, in turn, affect your online business.
- Hidden text: Hidden texts involve the use of invisible texts on a webpage that the search engines are able to see, but the users cannot see them. This is mainly used to manipulate the search engine crawlers and avoid high bounce rates.
- Cloaking: this is a popular black Hat SEO methodology that your SEO specialist should avoid at all costs. It involves the coding of web pages so that they display two different kinds of content. One is meant for the search engines while the other is meant for the users. Cloaking works to manipulate the search engines by displaying content rich in keywords to ensure better ranking. On the other hand, the website visitors will find more readable text.
- Article spinning: many lazy webmasters utilize the readily available online article spinning tools. As a result, they keep publishing new content but it does not add any value because the information on these web pages already exists on your website.
Other black hat SEO techniques that should also be avoided include doorway pages, link farms, duplicate content, spam comments, link bait, and switch, and many more. Your business website is important and when used correctly it can take your brand to a whole new level. Therefore, you should not jeopardize your website by using Black Hat SEO techniques.
