Understand the different types of SEO available to your business before you start optimizing your site. This includes good and bad techniques. Using these different strategies and techniques will help you create a campaign that drives better organic results.
Throughout this page, we will also cover four types of SEO and four techniques associated with SEO. If you need help optimizing your site for SEO, call us today at 9971311194 to speak with a strategist.
4 main types of SEO
When you’re developing your SEO campaign, it’s important to understand the different types of SEO you can use – and ensure you pick the type of SEO that will result in the best results for your business.
Here are the four most common types of SEO techniques:
White hat SEO
These white hat SEO techniques are the best ways to create a long-term improvement in your SEO ranking, and optimize it for your business, These are the tactics that Google recommends you use to help your site rank better in the search results, and they are compliant with the search engine guidelines and deliver positive results for your business.
These techniques include:
Creating high-quality content:
Creating high-quality content can help you attract content-hungry prospects to your website, This helps you rank higher to attract more qualified traffic, You can create multiple types of content related to your industry, such as blogs, ebooks, videos, and infographics.
Optimizing HTML: The purpose of cleaning up your site’s code is to increase the speed of your site. This includes practices like eliminating unsightly code, removing white space, and reducing unnecessary text, which will improve your site’s performance.
Sharing on social media: Social media helps you drive traffic to your website, you can increase engagement and drive leads to your site, and it helps your ranking.
Making your site user-friendly: You must create a user-friendly site if you want leads to stay on it. This means creating a beautiful design, a well-structured navigation, and uploading photos and videos to make your site more captivating.
White hat SEO techniques take time to produce results. The results, however, are well worth the wait, as you will see lasting growth and continue to improve your website’s ranking.
In order to determine if you are practicing white hat SEO techniques correctly, you can watch your rankings drop every time Google updates their algorithm. When you properly practice white hat SEO techniques, you may notice a drop in your rankings when the algorithm changes. That doesn’t mean you are using bad techniques, but that you are correctly using white hat techniques and will need to make adjustments in order to achieve success.
There is a slight adjustment period, but you can easily get your website back on track as soon as possible. White hat SEO techniques are the best way for you to improve your site’s ranking in search results.
Black hat SEO
Black hat SEO exploits search algorithms to achieve higher rankings.
Many businesses use black hat SEO techniques to achieve fast results. People want fast results without spending much time on the process. However, the downside is that black hat SEO causes businesses long-term damage.
There are numerous tactics that fall under black hat:
Link spamming
Keyword stuffing
Cloaking
Hidden text/links
Using irrelevant, popular keywords
Over optimizing HTML headings
Copying content
Buying links
These are just a few of the tactics that companies use to optimize their site. These methods improve ranking, but the benefits don’t last. Google catches on to these tactics and if it does, your site suffers severely.
Your website will be penalized by search engines and may even be banned from showing in relevant search results. Since Google strives to produce relevant search results, it will only ban people who take short-cuts to reach the top of the rankings.
Gray hat SEO
This tactic is a hybrid between white hat and black hat SEO, This is because this isn’t the best strategy for your site, but it’s not listed as a bad one, thus being called a “gray” hat SEO tactic since it falls into the gray area.
Google does not ban gray hat SEO techniques, but they are not considered a legitimate way to obtain leads. Gray hat SEO techniques are risky, yet are marketed as an “affordable solution.” Companies that use gray hat SEO techniques lower their costs by using questionable methods.
Here are some examples of gray SEO techniques:
Clickbait articles
Spun content
Link exchanges
Paid reviews
Businesses will use these tactics to increase their site’s ranking in search engines. Gray hat SEO techniques aren’t outright prohibited by Google, but they aren’t the best method for helping your site grow. Using these methods can have negative effects that can harm your business instead of helping it grow.
Negative SEO
A negative SEO situation is unique to your business. It isn’t perpetrated by your business, but rather, by a competitor. Negative SEO scenarios happen frequently between businesses and their competitions.
The intent of negative SEO is to damage the reputation of others through the use of black hat and gray hat techniques to hurt their competitors. They implement these techniques to decrease their competitors’ rankings so they can improve their own.
There are a few strategies companies will use with negative SEO:
Building unnatural links to a competitor’s site
Posting negative reviews
Hacking websites to modify content
Negative SEO is designed to harm other sites for personal gain and can be hard to control as other companies are harming your site as well. When you’re running a campaign, you must constantly monitor it to ensure that there are not any unusual or unexpected increases or decreases in activity or performance.
These are four of the most common techniques you’ll run into when you’re optimizing for your SEO campaign. Want to learn more about SEO techniques? Please give us a call at 9971311194 to find out how we can help you drive results with your SEO campaign!
