It doesn’t matter if you are creating a website for pleasure or work, it can be frustrating to find out search engines don’t recognize the website. There’s a good chance that search engines won’t show your website in their results pages. This is especially true in today’s world, where people no longer simply enter the URL of a website in the address bar.
People will search for products or services using search engines such as Google when they are looking. Your website must rank well in search engine result pages (SERPs) to get any traffic. This feat can be achieved by your company or yourself through various search engine optimization practices (SEO).
White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO
It is important to remember that not all SEO strategies are ethical and permissible. Google is known for constantly updating its guidelines. Webmasters will be careful not to use any illegal SEO techniques, which are often called black hat SEO. Many black hat SEO techniques can be used to boost a website’s ranking, including spamming its comment section and spinning and stuffing keywords throughout your content. This ranking won’t last in business. This can often lead to a loss of reputation for your company.
You can also have SEO practices that do not give any unfair advantage to any website. These practices are often referred to as white hat SEO by many experts. It ensures everyone is treated equally, making it easier for everyone to rank on the first page of the SERP.
White hat SEO is essentially about improving one’s website to benefit a human audience, rather than tricking search engine algorithms. White hat SEO best practice always keeps the users in mind. Black hat SEO, on the other hand, focuses only on manipulating Google’s algorithm.
Why White Hat SEO
Google and other search engines will ban websites that use black-hat SEO techniques. Because potential visitors use search engines before finding a website, being banned from any search engine will result in a dramatic drop in web traffic. This can lead to a loss of revenue for your business.
Google may not re-list your website if you are banned. Your brand will suffer tremendously if you don’t use white-hat SEO. If you don’t have the skills to rank high in search engines and are not an SEO expert, it is in your best interests to hire professionals such as Digital Sisco.
White Hat SEO Strategies to Drive Organic Traffic
Now that you understand the differences between white and black-hat SEO, and why you should always use the latter, you can start to learn some strategies that will drive more traffic to your site in 2022. Google updates its guidelines regularly so what worked last year might not work this time. Here are the top white-hat SEO techniques to drive more traffic to your website.
- Good Design and Navigation
Google uses many algorithms and factors to rank websites. One of these is the bounce rate. If users leave your website quickly, you have a high bounce rate. Bad navigation and design can lead to users leaving your website very quickly. You don’t want a high bounce rate. Make sure your website is well-designed and has easy navigation. Your bounce rate will be reduced if users stay longer on your site.
The color contrast ratio is another important element in your website’s design. A high contrast ratio makes your website easier to read and improves user experience. Make sure your colors are consistent across all of your ads and promotions. Customers will associate your brand colors this way. There are many tools online that will help you test the color contrast ratio of your website.
- Make your website mobile-friendly
Numerous articles have shown that the number of mobile internet users has significantly increased. There will be 6 million mobile internet users in 2020. This is an enormous increase from the 3.7 million who used the internet in 2016. This is why Google has focused its efforts on the mobile-first indexing platform. When applying your SEO efforts, you need to be mobile-first.
You can start by making sure your website design, whether you are designing it yourself or hiring an expert to do so, is mobile-friendly. Texts, images, and other content should load quickly.
- Use the Correct Keywords
These two techniques focus mainly on the UX of your website. This is not the only white-hat SEO technique that you should be focusing on this year. You must also ensure that you choose keywords that are relevant to your business. Avoid choosing keywords that are difficult to find or high in search volume. These keywords will make it difficult for you to rank against sites that already use them.
You should start by looking for a keyword search tool if you are unsure how keyword research works. This tool will make it easier to find keywords. After the tool has generated keywords relevant to your industry, you can then select those keywords and plan your content around them. White hat SEO is about choosing medium-range keywords with a difficulty between 50 and 70.
Keep in mind that keywords can be classified as either short-tailed (or long-tailed). The former is more difficult to find keywords, while the latter is easier and more focused on customers. Long-tail keywords can increase your chances of selling your products and services to the people you are targeting. Long-tail keywords can be a better way to get targeted traffic.
- Create long, link-worthy content
You can increase your organic traffic by creating more than 1,500 words of content in 2022. You must also ensure that your content is linked-worthy. How can you create link-worthy content?
Link-worthy content is based on proper keyword usage. Once you have chosen the best keywords, make sure to share your content via your social media channels. Remember that SEO will be greatly affected by articles, blog posts, and product pages as well as guides.
- Create High-quality Backlinks
Backlinking, just like in previous years, is a reliable white-hat SEO strategy that can drive lots of traffic to your website and increase its authority. The authority of your content will increase if you build high-quality backlinks. Google will reward you with a first-page listing if it considers your site an industry expert.
Your website should not be spammy. Instead, focus on quality links. This is particularly important as Google will analyze your content and verify the authority of any links you place. Google will penalize you if they discover that you are using spammy links. This could negatively impact your brand’s reputation.
- Create a Rich Snippet
A rich snippet is extra information added to a search engine result page. A search engine result page will have a rich snippet. This gives the user a better idea of the content. Because it is appealing to searchers, rich snippets are more likely to get clicks (CTR) or generate more traffic.
You must have structured data on your site to add rich snippets. Google will show you a snippet if there is structured data on your website. Google will use this data or code to determine the most relevant data and display it in their SERPs.
Rich snippets can’t be used in any type of content. The following are some examples of rich snippets you can add to your content:
- Events
- Apps
- Products
- Companies and organizations
- Recipes
- People
Final Words
White hat SEO techniques are not going to deliver the results it promises. It will take around a month for your website’s rankings to improve. Although it may take some time, this is a great opportunity to find out more about white hat SEO techniques from different sources. Black hat SEO strategies should be avoided. It is important to practice white hat SEO with patience.
