Search Engine Optimization helps you bring organic traffic to your website. The main goal of an SEO campaign is to raise awareness, increase your company’s visibility, and achieve a higher ranking. However, SEO practitioners are quite familiar with the terms like white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO. Ethical SEO professionals use white-hat SEO techniques. But, some SEO practitioners apply unethical or black-hat SEO tactics. They try to trick search engines and violate rules.
How does white-hat SEO differ from black-hat SEO?
Although both types of SEO campaigns have the same goal, practitioners implement their strategies in various ways. A white-hat SEO expert never violates Google’s rules and algorithms.
Backlinking
One of the best ways to develop domain authority is to gain backlinks. However, some black-hat SEO professionals recommend buying low-quality backlinks. Often, these links come from sites not relevant to your website content. They are also placed on low-authority pages. Moreover, these backlinks will negatively affect your SEO efforts.
But, white-hat SEO professionals apply ethical tactics to develop backlinks. To run a link-building campaign, SEO specialists create high-quality webpage content that easily attracts backlinks. Developing linkable assets is the most significant step for a backlinking campaign.
Another good trick is to identify broken links on web pages in your niche. You can then reach out to webmasters to replace the broken links.
For instance, a user who has clicked on a broken link will reach a page that shows a 404: Not Found error message. It gives a bad experience to the user.
So, you can apply a broken link-building tactic to find benefits. The website owner repairs broken links while you receive a backlink.
Besides, you should look for backlinking opportunities by conducting a link gap analysis. Perhaps, a website has linked out to several competitors of your business. So, there is a high chance of linking out to your site.
Blog commenting
Blog commenting is a valuable yet simple way to build industry relationships, gain attention, and develop brand awareness. But, if you have posted irrelevant comments on different blogs, it is known as blog comment spam. The sole aim of black-hat SEO professionals is to get links back to their sites.
However, blog commenting can be a successful white-hat SEO strategy if you have invested time and effort. Every comment on the blog should value to others. You should not ask for a link right away.
Many internet users who go through blog content read comments to know other’s views. So, while publishing comments, you should represent your brand. If you have left comments strategically, it draws attention to your site.
Besides, if your comments provide value, others will naturally pay attention to you. Insightful comments with your website link enable people to learn about your business. But, make sure you have not provided inactive and fake email addresses while posting comments.
Guest posting
Guest posting is considered a white-hat off-page SEO for a link-building campaign. It helps you develop your profile as a thought leader or industry expert. You can also grow your target audience and improve your SEO performance. The most significant advantage is that you will gain authoritative backlinks with guest blogging.
As a guest blogger, you publish valuable content on other’s websites. In exchange, you get a high-authority backlink from the third-party site.
But, black-hat SEO practitioners abuse this SEO technique, as they produce low-quality, repetitive content. They circulate spammy blogs on third-party sites. Besides, the low-standard content is full of bad grammar, broken sentences, jargon, and wrong punctuation. Content creators often use AI tools to create these low-quality blogs.
The best quality guest posts should be aligned with your brand. So, the content of your guest blogs will help you convey your message.
However, a lengthy guest blog is not enough to make the content actionable and tangible. If you give your readers a highly practical value, they will think of you.
Keyword-rich content
Maintaining a proper keyword frequency is vital for SEO purposes. However, black hat SEO practitioners apply keyword stuffing techniques, which is a type of spam. It means they overuse some keywords to manipulate search bots into ranking the site. So, if you use too many keywords for the main web copy, page title, and other places, it is referred to as keyword stuffing.
The ideal keyword density is 1% to 2%. So, how will you determine keyword density? You should calculate how many times you have used the keywords on the page. Divide the amount by the number of words on the content.
Instead of using a particular keyword several times, you can incorporate keyword variants into the content. These variants are terms close to the primary keywords.
However, with the growth of your website, you can find the calculation complicated.
You can use keyword density tools if you do not want to make this calculation manually.
Writing fresh content versus duplicate content
Creating fresh and plagiarism-free content is highly important for your SEO campaign. As search engines have become much more advanced, they can easily detect websites with duplicate content. Some black-hat SEO professionals try to publish duplicated or copied content obtained from other sites. But, Google will penalize these websites for using duplicate content.
There are other risks for using plagiarized content. Original content owners can take legal action against you. So, create fresh and new content by researching your topic. Use your own ideas and words to craft the content for your blog or website. Choose a plagiarism checker to ensure no copied section in the content.
Conclusion
An SEO campaign can facilitate or hinder the success of your site, depending on the tactics you have implemented. White-hat SEO professionals deliver relevant content, increase visibility, and improve your website rank. Your site will receive more clicks if it appears in the search result. Although black-hat SEO gives faster results, you will find higher bounce rates, bad user experience, and low conversion rates. Connect with a reliable SEO company to hire a white-hat SEO expert.