What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process designed to optimize a website for search engines. It helps websites achieve a higher ranking in search engine results when people search keywords related to their products and services. Thus, it increases the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. See the following image to understand the basic activities involved in SEO.
Types of SEO
White Hat SEO
It refers to the SEO techniques which are in accordance with the SEO guidelines set by the search engines. It means it uses
approved search engine optimization techniques to improve the ranking of a site
on search
engine results pages (SERP).
Unlike Black Hat SEO, it mainly focuses on the human
audience as opposed to a search engine. People who are looking for long-term
investment in their websites rely on white hat SEO techniques.
Black Hat SEO
It refers to the SEO techniques which are not in
accordance with the SEO guidelines set by the search engines. These techniques exploit
the weaknesses in search engines to get higher rankings for websites on
the search
engine results pages (SERP).
It mainly focuses on search engines and not on the human
audience. People who are looking for a quick financial return on their website
rather than a long-term investment use black hat SEO techniques.
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
White hat SEO
The techniques which comply with search engine guidelines
are used to improve search engine rankings.
Don’t need to worry about getting penalized or deindexing your site.
Focused on providing quality and relevant content to the
users.
Suitable for people who are looking for long-term
investment.
It focuses on the optimum use of keywords in the title, metatags, and body of content.
Black hat SEO
The techniques which are not approved by search engines
are used to improve SEO of a site.
It may get your site banned, de-indexed, or penalized by
search engines.
Don’t care about the quality of the content.
People looking for quick financial returns prefer black-hat SEO.
Keyword density is increased to achieve higher search
engine ranking.
White Hat SEO Technique
A list of
5 popular white hat SEO techniques is given below:
1) Good content
A unique
well-written content makes your website appear more trustworthy and valuable to
search engines and human visitors. It optimizes your website for search engines
which helps you get higher ranking on the search engine listings as search
engines offer the most appropriate website to the end users for their search.
2) Proper use of title, keywords and metatags
The
information contained in the HTML code is known as Metadata. It provides
crawler the information about the site for classification and indexing
purposes. So, proper title, keyword and metatag should be incorporated in the
metadata.
3) Ease of navigation
Search
engines also consider the ease of navigation while assessing the usefulness of
a site, so avoid the irrelevant links and use universally recognizable links.
It is not only important for the users but also for the crawlers who index the
sites.
4) Site Performance
Site and
page performance is another factor considered by search engines to assess the
sites. The unavailable sites or the unavailable pages cannot be indexed by
crawlers of search engines; a week or even a day of non-performing site or
pages can adversely affect the site traffic. So, make sure your site loads fast
and is accessible all the time.
5) Quality inbound links
The site
must have quality inbound links as search engines regularly assess back links
for their relevance. If a site is found to have irrelevant backlinks it will be
discounted or penalized by the search engine, e.g. a website about farming in
India containing a number of links from Europeans websites about technology
will be degraded by the search engines.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
A list of top 6 black hat SEO techniques are given below:
1) Keyword Stuffing
Search
engine analyzes the keywords and key phrases on the webpages to index the
websites. To exploit this feature of search engine, some SEO practitioners
increase keyword density to get higher ranking which is considered a black hat
SEO technique. Keyword density between two to four percent is considered
optimal, increasing keyword density beyond that will irritate your readers and
affect your ranking.
2) Cloaking
It refers
to coding webpages in such a way that search engines see one set of content and
visitors see the another set of content, i.e. a user searching for "gold
price" clicks on a search result "current gold price" and is
greeted with a travel and tourism site. This practice is not in accordance with
search engines' guidelines which say to create content for users not for the
search engines.
3) Hidden Text
The text
which search engines can view but readers can't is known as hidden text. This
technique is used to incorporate irrelevant keywords and hide text or links to
increase keyword density or improve internal link structure. Some of the ways
to hide text are to set the font size to zero, use CSS to set text off-screen,
create white text on a white background, etc.
4) Doorway Pages
The
poorly written pages which are rich in keywords but don't contain relevant
information and focus on the links to redirect users to an unrelated page are
called doorway pages. These pages are used by black hat SEO professionals to
pass on user traffic to unrelated sites.
5) Article Spinning
It
involves rewriting a single article to produce its different copies in such a
way that each copy looks like a new article. The content of such articles is
repetitive, poorly written and has low value for the visitors. In this
technique, such articles are regularly uploaded to create the illusion of fresh
articles.
6) Duplicate Content
The
content copied from a website to publish it on another website as original
content is known as duplicate content. This black hat technique is known as
plagiarism.
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