In the field of search engine optimisation there are the so called Black Hat and White Hat SEO. These search engine optimisation type of approaches are on different side of a coin, which means one is dwelling on the good site or “legal” side of SEO and the other on the dark side of SEO. However, because of the different tools and SEO techniques that are coming out these days it is difficult for any search engine optimisation company to identify which technique coul be considered as white hat and which could be black hat. Knowing or identifying the type of SEO technique used is imperative for every SEO agency or SEO company because of the fact that this will help prevent them from committing mistakes when developing or when implementing their SEO strategies. Although there is no actual checklist on what White Hat SEO is, due to the fact that some white hat SEO techniques may later on be considered as a black hat SEO technique due to the fact that some SEO consultants or SEO agents would abuse the use of such strategy. Even though there is no legitimate standard list on the white hat strategies there are several criteria that can be considered when identifying a White Hat SEO technique from Black Hat SEO.
One of the criteria that can be considered when identifying white hat SEO technique is that the SEO company or the SEO consultant is always creating unique and high quality content, fresh unique and high quality content for a web page is an SEO gold mine because of the fact that writing fresh unique content by itself is already time consuming and very tedious but the rewards of course is very high. Second criteria for a white hat SEO is the there is a continuous development of the links and such links are taken only from relevant and high quality websites and not resorting to any link farming spamming techniques.
These two criteria if you can notice is rooted to the two factors that can affect one’s SEO campaign that is both content and link.
As what every SEO company and SEO consultant would always say a website especially an ecommerce website is going to be useless if it is not found by its target audience online. This is the major or driving force of Search engine optimisation, the ability to provide website the opportunity to gain traffic by becoming visible over the different search engines. Promoting your website is the second main path that you should take after developing your website which also includes of course the different on-page optimisation processes. Promoting your website can be done by gaining backlinks from other websites, although if your website is regularly updated and is structured properly it is imperative to still promote your website and that could be done via the use of social media sites. Submitting your website to social bookmarking sites could actually help promote your website online, however a word of caution, having to promote your website excessively to social media sites could also harm your campaign as it might be interpreted by many search engines as spam contents or spam promotion.
One of the best way in promoting your website is through blog posts, announcing any updates or new products in your website could help increase your websites’ reputation. Not to mention the fact that you already are marketing your product through your blog post. When creating your blog post though you have to make sure that your content would mean something and not just a one paragraph or one sentence announcement. Go big and write interesting items, remember you are not mainly promoting your website to search engine crawlers you are promoting your product as a whole to potential human internet users.
Second is to think of your target community, open up communication with other people in your target community and spark discussions as this would also again help in the promotion of your website. Avoid spammy link requests and even purchased links.
According to many SEO companies and SEO consultants the steps to an ethical SEO campaign is divided in to four steps generally. The first would be keyword research, second, content development, third web development and fourth link building. These are considered by many search engine optimisation companies and consultants to be the general template for developing the website as well as its promotion. These steps are under the category of white hat SEO and that they might seem to be very easy to do but are in fact very difficult to accomplish. It is therefore important for every SEO company and SEO consultants to understand what are the different steps included in these general categories in order to implement the details of the search engine optimisation campaign correctly.
The first category or step is keyword research, it is a known fact that the keywords which will be utilised on your website will form the corner stone of your entire SEO campaign. It is therefore just right for an SEO campaign to start by researching which keywords would be useful. At this stage SEO companies and SEO consultants will conduct some computation and statistics in order to determine which keywords would help generate a large volume of traffic with less competition. Keyword research also entails researching for the keywords being utilised by your competitors, especially your competitors who are already on the top spot of the search engine.
The second category is content development, at this stage you will already draft your websites’ design and content. The development of the website and its content should incorporate your suggestions and ideas in order to deliver your desired output without of course compromising the marketing plans or designs for your website. Content development includes the incorporation or choosing images for the website as well as developing content for the website and further the design of your navigation structure for the website which is a very important element.
Following the conventional way of SEO and using only White hat techniques you can expect that your websites’ ranking will skyrocket to page one.
Black hat SEO is considered to be one of the “dishonest” way of acquiring links, content and ultimately a high ranking. Although high ranking may be achieved through black hat SEO such ranking is not stable that is there is a huge possibility that the target website that was implemented with Black hat techniques would have its ranking go down in short period of time. This is the reason why it is imperative or important that white hat techniques be implemented in order to have the search engine recognise the target website to be an honest site and a reputable website. There are times however that any SEO company and SEO consultant would accidentally dwell or utilise black hat techniques which can be attributed with the fact that they are misinformed or uninformed on the nature of such SEO technique that they are using this can further be attributed with the fact that the nature of an SEO technique could vary or change depending on whether or not such technique is being abused to give undue advantage. This is why it is important for an SEO company or SEO consultant to be informed of the different techniques that may be considered as black hat SEO in order to avoid, prevent or even remedy a website that was suspended because of the implementation of such. The following are some Black hat SEO techniques:
1. Use of Automation Tool in Link Building – search the internet for any SEO automation tool especially those that would automatically submit information to different sites in order to gain backlinks and you will find out that there are lots of such tools. These tools would enable one to thousand of links in just one click, building link at that rate is considered as unnatural therefore search engines consider such as spams.
2. Disguising your website – another black hat SEO is disguising the link of your site to be going to a specific page while in fact showing a different page. Wherein one page is fully optimised but not designed properly and such page is only for search engine crawlers while the other one is a page that is not fully optimised but it is developed aesthetically and thus well presented worthy for a user to look at, this process of deceiving the search engine is called cloaking.
These two black hat techniques should always be avoided however tempting they may be.
Many SEO companies and SEO consultants have wasted their time trying to figure out what is wrong with their repeatedly failing SEO campaign and only to find out later that they were not able to create their website according to what the search engine would “want” to. It is imperative that a website be created according to its being SEO-friendly, although design should not be sacrificed when developing a website it is also important to keep in mind the principle that a website will be useless if it can’t be found by your target users. A website will only be considered to be useless if it does not generate any revenue and in order to do that it is imperative to gain relevant traffic and in order to gain relevant traffic a website must be optimised according to the search engines criteria. When building your website therefore it is important to take note the different salient points in a website that is being crawled by the search engine spider or bots.
Search engine spiders or bots do not only gather data blindly they follow specific instructions or algorithms and this is what every SEO companies, SEO Consultants and Website designers should take into consideration when building and marketing their website. The following are some to the different location or area and features that search engine crawlers would look into when gathering data.
First the search engine spiders will gather information about how the web page was developed, that is, taking note on the structure and content of every web page within the website, this is to test whether the pages are optimised and properly incorporated with the appropriate links and content which would be relevant to the entire site in general.
Second the search engine spiders would gather data pertaining to the reputation of a website through the different links both inbound, outbound and in-page. This means that every link will be scrutinised by the search engine based on validity and on relevance. Take note therefore that when link building it is imperative that relevance , validity and even quality must be taken into consideration.
Finally search engine bots will also take full consideration on the proper use of different HTML elements or tags which includes the headers, strong, emphasise, images and anchor tags, search engines will also, although with diminished importance, take into consideration the different meta elements both in keywords and description thus it is important to also write quality keywords and description for every page in your website.
When conducting or implementing an SEO campaign it is very important that the SEO company or the SEO consultant implementing it should understand the two major factors that would determine the outcome of an SEO campaign. Understanding these two Key Factors for a successful search engine optimisation campaign is imperative for every SEO company and SEO consultant as it would help define their SEO campaign against their competitors. Further, these key factors in SEO would help SEO companies and SEO consultants in planning their SEO campaign, where such key factors would become the basis of the different strategies that such SEO Company or SEO consultant would implement.
These two main factors are the Links and the Content, simple as it may seem focusing efforts or strategies to achieve these two factors however will not be so simple. Let us take these two key factors in focus and hopefully understand how search engine view these two key factors and implement a proper or correct SEO strategy or SEO implementation. First let us focus on the links, links in SEO can be categorised into external, or internal where external can further be subdivided into two these are inbound and outbound. For SEO companies and SEO consultants their focus mostly is acquiring inbound links, this is because of the fact that inbound links are considered by search engines as a vote to the website it is linking to thus adding to the reputation of the said website. However, any SEO company and SEO consultant cannot just get any link from any website because along with link one main criterion would be the relevance of the website linking to your website as well as relevance of such link to the content of your website or the target website.
Second is content, content does not only pertain on the text of the website, again relevance will play a very important role. Every website must still contain relevant keywords that would pertain to the search query of search engine users. The incorporation of keywords in the content therefore is imperative however again SEO companies and SEO Consultants should not overdo the incorporation of keywords since it might cause the site to be considered to be a spam site due to keyword stuffing.
These two major factors should be taken in consideration as well as the accompanying conditions in order to make your websites’ SEO campaign competitive if not successful.
Search engine optimisation entails a lot of strategies which are generally categorised in to two, links and content. Links and Content are the main factors that helps increase both traffic and reputation of a website. Traffic and Reputation are the two main purpose why an SEO campaign is being implemented and this is to achieve the ultimate goal of gaining conversions and revenue. One of the strategy that may combine content and link building into one is the integration or use of blogs for this purpose. Many companies online have made or spent a considerable amount of money in order to increase their traffic and conversions but to no avail because of the fact that they have not focused their efforts on increasing both links and content. As what was stated above the links and content can be generated for the target website through the use of blogs or blog sites. This is why one of the main considerations for a website entering into this type of strategy is to incorporate a blog page or a blog within the target website, this way the blog could serve as the overall sites’ fresh source of content.
In order to maintain the blog and to increase link efficiency as well as content for such blog it is important that the blog site be provided with daily blog posts, expect an increase in links when you post engaging and as much as possible daily blog posts. Links can be acquired through relentless posts because of the fact that there are blog search engines that would crawl and index your blogs or blog posts.
Once you have incorporated blog and blog posts into your site make sure that you regularly ping your posts. The purpose of which is to broadcast that your blog site has new blog posts.
With this strategy expect that you will gain a good amount of backlinks and indexed pages as brought about by the blog contents or posts.
For many search engines the two main factor or characteristics that a website should have are backlinks and content. One this article we will focus on the first characteristics and that is backlinks. Backlinks are defined as those links that would come from outside web pages or websites other than yours. Backlink building is considered to be a very important part of search engine optimisation because of the fact that it is the criteria being utilised by many search engines in terms of establishing the reputation of the website. Sometimes known as inbound links, a website linking to your website is considered as a vote to your website. Building backlinks however is not an easy task, because of the fact that every link must have met certain criteria before being fully considered as a contributory link to the website.
First thing that should be considered is the quality of the link, more than quantity, quality could contribute more to the establishing of your websites reputation. Quality links are determined by the reputation and relevance of the website that is linking to the target website, SEO companies and SEO consultants would focus mainly on the websites’ page rank and the relevance of the content to the content of the target website. Few websites with a high page rank and with related content that would link to your website would give more chances of your website gaining reputation and page rank rather that thousands of websites with unrelated content and no page rank linking to your website.
Second is to distribute your gained page rank and reputation all over your websites’ pages. Sharing the page rank gained with other pages would not necessarily diminish your sites’ reputation but rather it would circulate the page ranking around your webpages. Thus it is important to practice crosslinking within your website’s pages.
Third, when you already have built your site and content SEO companies and SEO consultants encourage the submission of the website URL to reputable search engines and directories the most popular directory being DMOZ.
Search engine optimisation is a very complex process and a tedious one at that, this is brought about by the fact that there is a lot of strategies and techniques involved in the implementation of a single SEO campaign without any guarantee of achieving the desired results. It must always be remembered that there is no single solution or SEO strategy for every website that needs to be optimised and sometimes the effect of such SEO strategy may take a while or sometimes such SEO strategy may not have any effect at all. This sometimes force many SEO companies and SEO consultants to experimenting on other strategies which sometimes may result to the strategy being considered as a spam technique which would later on cause the search engine to ban the target website. Gaining traffic through search engines is very important that is why as much as possible an SEO company and SEO consultant should avoid getting banned or suspended by the search engine, although the strategies and techniques that are used in search engine optimisation are varying one can follow standard strategies which up to today proves to be effective in search engine optimisation.
The following are some of the basic guidelines that are considered to be basic and standard which are effective in the optimisation of a website.
First is to utilise links in your website appropriately, that is means that your links must be properly in place and that are used primarily to facilitate navigation of your website. When gathering incoming links or inbound links as well as outbound links it is important to take into consideration relevance, meaning your site should only link to or from relevant websites.
Second is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Content is used to inform visitors about the website or the particular web page, further content also is used to inform the search engine crawlers on the keywords of the website so therefore it is imperative to keep the content fresh and updated on a regular basis.
With these two guidelines the basic of search engine optimisation is already outlined highlighting the most important elements in search engine optimisation that is link building and content creation.
It has been said time and again that search engine optimisation is a very tedious and daunting task this is because of the fact that a single SEO campaign involves several tasks and every SEO campaign is not a guarantee of gaining the desired number of traffic going into your target website. Further, an SEO campaign is virtually unending because of the fact that the competition in the field of search engine optimisation is very stringent that a number one ranking today may change to a lower ranking on the following day a change which can be attributed with the fact that a competitor website might have increased its SEO efforts or there might have been a change in the search engine algorithm. These factors are what makes the process of search engine optimisation a very tedious task. In order for some SEO companies and SEO consultants to lighten the burden in the implementation phase of the SEO campaign some of them are resorting to automation, that is using applications to automatically perform SEO strategies that are normally done manually. One example of this is submission of websites to the different directories, social bookmarks among others.
Although automation can drastically reduce the amount of time for the accomplishment of an SEO strategy many SEO companies and SEO consultants would prefer not to resort to automation this is because of the following reasons:
1. Automation can curtail creativity, one must remember that the field of search engine optimisation requires an SEO company or SEO consultant to be creative because of the fact that SEO strategies have already become common and in order for one to get ahead of the pack, so to speak, development of a new strategy as a product of the SEO consultants’ creativity is important.
2. Many Search engines have now incorporated in their search engine algorithm a way of considering automated submissions as unnatural way of link building which means that such automation would make the search engine consider the target website as a spam website.
Automation may help SEO companies and SEO consultants in lightening the burden of the search engine optimisation strategies and although there may be negative effects on the use of automation, it could still prove to be useful in cutting down time in implementing the strategy however caution and moderation should be exercised.
