Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of drawing traffic to a webpage. In the era of internet information is available to one and all, anywhere and everywhere, anytime and every time, right at the fingertips. Search engines like Google bring up relevant web pages every time users search for keywords that represent those web pages.
The more frequently a webpage appears for a set of keywords, higher is the probability of search engine users visiting the webpage. More the visits, more is the possibility of conversion of the visitors into customers.
SEO can be both at local as well as national and international level. Optimization of a business’ webpage for it to appear whenever a user searches for a product or service at the local level is called local search engine optimization. Whereas, the latter focuses on searches at the national and international level. SEO companies offer a wide range of SEO related services to mid to small-scale businesses.
Internet marketing, which lies at the core of marketing for businesses of every scale has a significant dependency on SEO. The strategy of internet marketing considers many factors. That includes the mechanism of search engines, the algorithms that run the search engines, what people are searching for and the keywords they use for the search, and importantly, which search engines do users prefer.
Let’s consider a few dos and don’ts for search engine optimization
Dos
- Make a user-friendly and mobile-friendly website and ensure it has decent speed.
- Update old content and post fresh content frequently.
- Check your website frequently to detect backlinks to avoid penalty from Google.
- Longer content covers more keywords, giving way for search engines to bring forth your webpage.
- Ensure that your website is easy to link.
- Create a sitemap. This aids search engines to index your website’s pages.
- Infographics can help in building quality backlinks. Make use of them.
- Internal links also aid search engines to quickly locate and index your website.
- Know the keywords and include them in the title, body and Meta descriptions of your content.
- Quality content is the king. Engaging and adequately researched content always draws traffic organically.
Don’ts
- Avoid usage of irrelevant links or links that are not relevant to your content.
- Usage of too many keywords can stuff your content.
- It is advisable not to get links from blog networks.
- Usage of cloaking techniques and doorway pages can lead to penalties by search engines.
- Write or be a guest blogger for only reputed sites. Any association with a website of a quality lower than yours can prove to be costly.
- Over optimizing anchor links also gets penalized.
- Submitting your website to several search engines may not prove to be helpful. Let them crawl and index your site on their own.
- Don’t do an exchange of links and don’t link to a penalized website.
- Copied content doesn’t get you anywhere in the longer term. Avoid copying.
- It is advisable not to get linked with a webpage that already has too many external links. Too many external links signify that the webpage quality is poor.
Ethical and Unethical SEO
White Hat SEO are search engine optimization techniques, tactics, and methods that follow search engine terms of policies and rules. These techniques target human audience rather than the search engines and are also referred to as Ethical SEO techniques.
On the other hand, Black Hat SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that do not abide by the search engine policies and rules. Often termed unethical SEO techniques, this practice targets search engines rather than humans. Black Hat SEO is generally meant for achieving short-term returns, whereas White Hat SEO has a long-term perspective.
Example of White Hat SEO would be a website that is well optimized for search engines, yet concentrates on organic rankings. Thorough keyword analysis, backlinking, link building and using quality and useful content are some of the ethical SEO practices. Examples of Black Hat SEO would be the usage of unrelated keywords, page swapping, stuffing the webpage with keywords and using the poor quality content. Let’s have a detailed look at the techniques.
White Hat SEO
- This conforms to all the policies and guidelines of search engines.
- If users see the search engine indexed and ranked content, it indicates the use of White Hat SEO techniques.
- This technique does not involve any deception.
- It ensures that web page content has a good quality.
- It indicates there is useful content on the web pages.
Black Hat SEO
It is also known as spamdexing. Any ranking improvements that are not approved by search engines is spamdexing.
- Do not resort to cloaking techniques. Cloaking refers to serving different versions of the same webpage to visitors and search engines.
- Avoid meta tag stuffing. Do not repeat keywords in meta tags and use only those keywords that are related to the website content.
- If the users get redirected from a page which the search engine has ranked to a page meant for users, it is said to be a Black Hat SEO tactic.
- Hiding text with the help of page background colour or deliberately using tiny font size or hiding with the aid of HTML Code as ‘no frame’ sections.
- Doorway or Gateway pages are again a standard methodology of Black Hat SEO technique. That refers to the creation of low-quality web pages that contain too little content but is full of relevant keywords.
- Avoid keyword stuffing. Any calculated keyword placement to improve the density and keyword count of a webpage is unethical.
- Hosting multiple websites by way of creating mirror websites is a form of spamdexing. Mirror websites indicate similar content, but different URLs.
- Page Hijacking is another form of unethical SEO practice. Creating a copy of a popular website, but when clicked, web surfers get directed to an unrelated or a spam website is called Page Hijacking.
With all the advantages and disadvantages of both white hat and black hat SEO mentioned above, it should not be tough to select which one to use. If you are still undecided, discuss with a specialist and find out what is suitable to your requirement.
Author Bio:-
Sujain Thomas is a freelance content writer. She has written many good and informative articles on different categories such as Web Design, SEO and Business. She is very responsible towards his job. She loves to share his knowledge and experience with his friends and colleagues. To know more about Search Engine you can visit LA SEO.
