If you own a website, one of the biggest goals of your site would be to rank number one on search engines. In this article we will discuss how your website can rank high using
white hat SEO techniques and increase organic traffic.
What is White Hat SEO?
A
white hat SEO is using
SEO techniques, strategies and tactics, approved by google and other search engines to improve your search ranking on
SERP. The main focus of these SEO techniques are to give users the best results of their search.
White hat SEO is also called ethical
SEO. Not to follow these google approved rules of
SEO or using black hat
SEO might lead to penalties or even life time ban of your website. With ever evolving google algorithms, it is getting difficult to use unethical
SEO practices and get away with it. Although not impossible, some websites do manage to rank higher at
SERPS while using these techniques. However, it is not worth the risk.
Let’s look at some of the
white hat SEO techniques which can help draw traffic to your website and make it rank higher, Understanding the google approved
SEO techniques will also give us an idea about
black hat SEO and what not to do.
White Hat SEO Techniques.
There are 200 Google’s ranking factors. Andrey Lipatsev from google revealed the top three signals.
1.Content:
It’s a no brainer now that to rank higher on any search engine your website needs original and quality content. It should be relevant and useful. Always keep your audience and your industry in your mind while writing your content. It should cover the whole topic in depth.
Blog posts that have a word count of 1900 to 2000 words rank the highest on search engine result pages(SERPS). Lengthy blog posts decrease bounce rates and naturally increases the inclusion of keywords variation. The images in your content should have a description, alt tag and a title. If the artist is known give the artist/photographer the credit. This goes for quotes and source of content too. Quote the sources and the people you are mentioning in your content.
2.Links: External links
also called inbound links and backlink is an important
SEO technique. External links increase your authority and trustworthiness. Make sure to get backlinks from high-quality websites that also have relevance to your content and website. Get as many backlinks from different authority websites as possible using White hat SEO practices. Having links from more websites is better than having several links from fewer websites.
Placing internal links is also an important SEO method. It will help the user navigate from one page to another and thus spending more time on your website. This also decreases the bounce rate. Other than that internal links help search engines to crawl through all your website, which helps you rank higher. Use keywords as anchor texts.
3.RankBrain
: It’s a machine-learning artificial intelligence used by Google. It teaches itself how to interact with links and content and gives an understanding of how the search engines are ranking pages. This just means better content quality and links will increase authority, ranking and traffic. We don’t really need to concern ourselves with this ranking signal right now.
Other than these Google approved ranking signals you can use a number of other ethical SEO techniques to rank higher on search engines. Some of them we will be mentioning below.
•
Google search console:
All those white hate wearing SEOs should immediately start using google search console if they already aren’t. This search console would tell you if your website is being compromised by those black hatters, um, hackers. This place would also let you know if your site is facing a penalty. Not only this, this section reveals how your sites appear in search results. Google would let you know which keywords users used to find your website and would identify common errors and flag them here. Overall, the google search console would keep a track of every detail of your website and would help you in improving it and hence increasing traffic and rank. Best thing? It is FREE.
•
UX
: User experience matters a lot. In order to give better UX your website needs to be user-friendly, easy to navigate, beautiful, loads in a jiffy and most importantly is mobile friendly. If your website is not compatible with a mobile phone or a tablet you are losing a lot of business, you can say 50 per cent of the internet users now have mobile phones. If you are not sure how much your website is mobile friendly go to google search console and go through the mobile usability report and fix any issues your website has with mobile phones.
•
Keywords:
Take your time with keywords research. Use long-tail keywords relevant to your content. Don’t forget to use the LSI keywords, LSI KWs are the keywords that are very closely related to your keywords. In easy words, they are synonyms and similar phrases. For example,
white hat SEO techniques and Ethical
SEO practices. These two are basically the same thing but it would help you not sound repetitive. Just don’t do overstuffing of similar words and phrases.
As opposed to these
SEO practices, as mentioned above, Black hat SEO techniques do not follow the rules. They can as the name suggests, sometimes be just unethical, like hacking into websites for backlinks. Other than that these techniques revolve around finding loopholes in algorithms. Some of these practices are;
• Use cloaking and gateway pages
• Spam comments
• Using the same content
• Page swapping
• Overstuffing the keywords
• Preferring search engines and not users
Not all of the
black hat SEO techniques are unhelpful for the users or waste their time but this is a topic for some other time.
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Written by:
Itechx