Search engine optimization, known as SEO, is the practice of increasing the amount and quality of traffic you are bringing to your site through organic search engine results.
There are a whole host of things that contribute to your Google ranking, and Google classifies these methods into Black Hat, WhiteHat and Gray Hat SEO. This means that some methods are preferred and others that you should clarify at all costs, but we go through the best, the worst and the ones we are not sure of…
White hat SEO
This type of SEO is what you should use, white hat SEO. White Hat means that you are looking at Google’s guidelines and you are adopting a strategy that is ethical and is going to help develop your site, but only through methods that go by the guidelines. You must know what the white hats are and your digital marketing agency is following them:
If you are going to offer value to your users then focus your efforts in excluding great content, then putting out great content will give you a huge amount of Google.
Quick loading times and mobile-friendly make sure your site is becoming increasingly important as Google has opted for a mobile-first indexing system. This means that they will soon be ranking sites based on their mobile version.
- Making your site easily crawlable
- High authority, relevant backlinks and internal linking
- Descriptive, keyword-rich meta tag
- These are the SEO methods that your digital marketing agency should use and they will have the best effect on your website in the long run.
Black hat SEO
Black hats are seen as risky practices that you should not use. Unfortunately, they work and there are many different methods that you should not use but people do. They often create strategies that will be patted on at some point in an update, but they can be anything from things that go against search engines to more daring strategies against guidelines that can lead to manual action. It is not illegal to break Google’s guidelines, and it is unlikely that legal action will end (unless you are hacking), it is something that will harm your rank if you get caught. Black Hat SEO is not something decided by a governing panel on Google; This is the one that is closest to the SEO expert guidelines as a collective idea and is acceptable and not cheating the system.
Some examples of Black Hat SEO include:
- Keyword stuffing
- Negative SEO (Reporting your competitors with false claims)
- Buy link
- Commenting on your link on forum posts
- This is phishing, viruses or malware pages on Trojans
- These SEO techniques will work in short term wins. Unfortunately, they will increase traffic to your site and they will help in your exposure but are the penalties worth it? If you are using these methods, you can see your site indexing, so everything you paid for will not be there.
Grey hat SEO
So as you can probably work by now, grey hat SEO are techniques that are in the middle. They have different opinions based on the SEO professionals they divide and which agency you visit. The SEO community also cannot decide on a definition for this, it differs from the mix of both black and white hat techniques which is a technique that is currently white or black but may change depending on upcoming updates. But other than that, it is something that you are not telling Google what you are doing, but also that you should not be punished immediately for doing so. So while it may not be that it is bad, it is probably something you want to do all the time and in the main way that you are improving your search rankings. These things are as follows:
- Cloaking This search engine is providing the spider with the content you are providing to your user
- Duplicating Content on Your Site
- Social media automation and buying your followers
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