Types of SEO: Step By Step Guide

Admittedly, hats weren’t a must for content marketing, even in the holy days of the mid-2000s. However, the terms “SEO black hat” and “SEO white hat” are two major types of SEO that have been taken from Western iconography to describe misleading search engine optimization tactics and quality-oriented strategies that comply with search engine policies, respectively.

Today almost all black hat techniques no longer work. In addition, using them can seriously damage your placement on search results pages. This makes analyzing good and bad more important than ever when it comes to SEO.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO covers a wide range of practices that work to manipulate a site’s search engine rankings. Since search engines tend to improve user experience by focusing on intent, value, and relevance, it makes sense to mislead backlash tactics. Simply put, the Black Hat type of SEO  is all about tricking the search engines into giving your site a prominent position in the SERP, rather than working for it with quality content and site best practices.

“Tactics like keyword stuffing, link buying, duplicate content, and masking may have worked in the past, but now all of these will seriously damage your online visibility. If you are still committed to these techniques, you should give up on them and start creating unique content on a healthy website with a proper user interface and design that will help advance your SEO. ”

The most common types of black hat SEO

Numerous tactics fall under this type of SEO umbrella. Among the most common examples:

Keyword: We’ve already written about why keywords are still important for content marketing, but including them in random posts is a great way to tell search engines that your content is of poor quality.

Link schemes: This can mean many things, from buying inbound links to simply exchanging links with a website that is not relevant to your audience. Both are bad for all parties involved.

Cleanup: Re-posting content without permission, also known as cleanup, can hurt you in two ways. In addition to the duplicate content fine, you may run into legal problems.

Hidden: Anytime you promise a site visitor something at the other end of the link and don’t deliver it, it counts as hiding and doesn’t look good.

Automated Content: There is software that can create basic content, although these are blogs full of keywords that read as if they were written by a robot, not a human. Search engines and readers react accordingly.

Site Manipulation: From both creating mirrored websites to post duplicate content to creating useless sites to build links, site manipulation saturates the Internet with useless URLs and prepares you for punishment.

Invisible text and links: This is the practice of hiding text and links on a web page to increase its ranking by using fonts that match background colors or are 0-point in size and links that are attached to individual characters. Search engines don’t fall for this anymore.

Clickbait: Search engines flag sites that don’t appear in their titles. Think twice before using the word “free” when trying to charge visitors.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, the examples above show a clear picture of what is considered an SEO black hat. These examples are not only unethical, but they also have another important quality: search engines will punish you.

The algorithms used to power today’s search engines are sophisticated enough to see the black hat SEO tactics and punish the pros accordingly. This means that you will be preparing for punishment without reaching your original goal if you try to use them. Overall, this is not a very good plan.

What is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO stands for SEO tactics that follow and work according to the terms of search engines like Google. This type of SEO basically improves your search engine rankings on the search engine results page (SERP) while maintaining the integrity of the website and following the search engine terms and conditions. This is also called ethical SEO. This is done through organic link building, that is, through natural links to other sites.

Its goal is to create a quality website so that its audience is prioritized or interesting. White Hat SEO adheres to all the rules and policies of the major search engines. This prevents webmasters from deceiving the audience and providing false information. The goal of SEO is to provide relevant information on the site and present it honestly.

White Hat SEO Techniques

Here are some SEO techniques from White Hat: –

Good Content: Unique, well-formed and well-written content makes a website more valuable and trustworthy for both visitors and search engines. It optimizes a website that helps you rank high on the search engine listings as the search engine provides the most relevant website for clients and visitors to find them.

Correct use of keywords, meta tags and titles. Information written in HTML is called metadata. It provides site information for indexing and classification purposes to crawlers. Thus, the correct keyword, meta tag and keyword must be added to the metadata.

Ease of navigation: Ease of navigation is also considered by the search engines, while the usefulness of the site is assessed, therefore generally accepted links should be used, not irrelevant links. This is important for both users and crawlers when indexing sites.

Site Performance: Site and page performance is also considered to rank sites. Search engine crawlers do not index inaccessible pages and inaccessible sites. The unavailability of a page or site, even for a day or a week, can greatly affect site traffic. Therefore, it is important that the site loads faster and is accessible easily and constantly.

Quality inbound links: Search engines often rate backlinks for relevance, so sites need to have quality inbound links. Websites are penalized or devalued by search engines if they find they contain irrelevant backlinks.

Have short URLs: Some research has shown that shorter URLs (uniform resource locators) rank higher than longer URLs. It’s ideal to add a few keywords to URLs, which crawlers can do to help you rank higher for your site.

In short, your site URL should be clean and short with some keywords mixed in with it. You should prefer to use hyphens “-” as word separators.

Optimizing images: Image optimization means using images to improve the ranking of your site. Be sure to include some of the image elements in order to comply with Google’s standards and policies. When using an image, you should keep in mind that the image must be compressed and crisp so that it does not affect the performance and speed of your site. Try to use keywords to name your image so that Google can easily understand it.

Use Google Search Console: The Google Search Console helps you tell Google your view of how you want your site’s search results to appear and the version of the site you prefer to use. Google can help you find out how people found your site and what keywords are used the most. It also alerts you to issues that may arise with your website and requires your urgent attention or change. This console will also help you find out if hackers have done anything to your site and if any penalties are affecting your site.

Submitting a sitemap to Google. The search console mentioned above allows you to submit sitemaps to Google that will help it find out the location of your pages. It also gives Google a roadmap for every page on your site and helps increase the importance of that page.

Encourage posts and comments on social media: Google views posts and comments on your page as an engagement factor. If the comment rate is very high, Google rewards the page or article by increasing its ranking.

Gray Hat SEO

The term “gray hat” SEO, however, is not easy to understand and is sometimes tossed in a bunch. SEO techniques labeled gray hat mean that sometimes they’re okay, sometimes they’re not okay, and more often than not they are just ignored because they are so confusing.

Gray hat SEO tactics you might have missed

The following explains a few gray hat tactics and some situations in which it is advisable to use them and avoid being punished by search engines:

Duplicate content: Publishing the same content online twice is causing headaches for readers and bots. After all, you don’t want to sift through the same content in search results; it just doesn’t help in the simplicity the internet needs. However, search engines consider it okay if a site exists for the sole reason of indexing articles on the Internet.

Cloaking: Cloaking refers to the practice of providing search engines with information that is different from what users see (usually by changing metadata or IP addresses). It’s rare that this practice is acceptable, but if you have a website where certain information is only available to members of your site, you will need two different sets of information. Again, this is very rare, so if you are serious about this, you can google to see why this is necessary.

Paid Links: Always try to earn your links organically, so don’t pay anyone for a link. Google sees this as a way for companies to rise to the top just because they have more money, not because they offer a quality product. However, there are directory sites that serve as a place where people can easily find businesses in their particular niche. If the directory site is not full of spam and offers quality listings, you are in the public domain.

Social media automation: We all know that social media is incredibly important, which is why some companies are trying to use automated software to earn more followers and connections. However, companies that consistently release great content by hand, connect and interact with relevant customers may want to use this type of software briefly. If so, you will probably be fine.

What is SEO?

The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This includes all strategies and practices that aim to improve the placement of a website in the rankings of search engines and thus increase the visibility and findability of a website on the World Wide Web.

Anyone who operates search engine optimization has the best chances of achieving a high match rate between demand (search query) and supply (offered user benefit) for certain key terms. This secures a good ranking position and has a clear advantage over non-optimized websites and ultimately competitors. Good positioning in the ranking means traffic for the website and thus a higher probability of good completion rates, in other words, to achieve set goals such as leads.

What are the two types of SEO?

Types of SEO Tool

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is known and loved as a tool for rapid crawling. All links are followed during a crawl. Every single URL is called up and all available information about it is successively collected. This means that individual URLs or entire domains can be crawled without any problems. These are then loaded page by page in order to be able to initiate all necessary optimization measures after evaluating the data output.

The tool is divided into three modes:

Crawl mode: The Frog SEO Spider loads a URL and follows all existing links from there. If you want to crawl really large pages, you need a specialized tool.

List mode: Here certain specified pages are passed to the Frog SEO Spider for crawling. Only these pages will then be checked

SERP mode: This mode checks page titles and meta descriptions for their correct length

Ahrefs

Here comes a specialized backlink tool among SEO tools. It creates backlink profiles of a page in more detail and precision than almost any other tool.

What else Ahrefs can do:

1. A site explorer searches backlinks
2. A position explorer easily carries out a traffic analysis of the competitors
3. A content explorer searches for and finds suitable content
4. A crawl report indicates SEO problems
5. Keyword research including investigation of the traffic potential for keywords
6. Keyword difficulty is determined and complementary keyword searches are guaranteed
7. On-Page optimization and building backlinks
8. Useful alerts for backlink news

SimilarWeb

With SimilarWeb’s online marketing tool, you can look at the most important key figures, such as page views, SimilarWeb rank, the length of stay and the bounce rate of your competitors. Even in the free version, SimilarWeb offers a lot of background information that you can use for your competition analysis.

In addition to a very cool Firefox plugin, SimilarWeb also offers chargeable extensions that significantly simplify a detailed and extensive competition analysis and can be designed by you very attractively using screenshots of the infographics offered.

Deep crawl

Deepcrawl has recently become established among SEO professionals. All you need to use the SEO tool is a user account in a cloud. Then several websites can be crawled at the same time. If you want a regular crawl, you can also schedule this. In this way, changes can be kept permanently in view.

The software offers a total of five types of crawls:

Crawling the website
Crawling the sitemap
Universal crawl
Backlink crawl
List crawl

WooRank

The automated tool WooRank combines many different functions. In addition to website checking, keyword tracking and website crawling, this also includes competitive analysis, which enables users to monitor their competitors.

The software provides advice and insights to help you monitor and optimize your website. In addition, WooRank offers white-label PDF reports and a unique lead generation tool for digital marketers.