Digital marketing has fast become a popular way to market your product or business, and the variety of ways to market your business online is constantly growing. The opportunities are endless, yet some boundaries should be noted when designing your SEO and digital marketing strategy.
Your website’s position on search engine results can be vital to connecting with potential customers and increasing your target audience. This drive to reach the top of the search engines can sometimes be a tough race.
Search engine optimization is flexible and unlimited. However, there are two basic popular methods used for SEO, known as either the ‘white’ hat method or the ‘black’ hat method. Do you know which method your SEO falls under? It would be worthwhile to invest in completing a digital marketing course so you can ensure that your SEO strategy falls well within the ‘white’ hat method.
What are the ‘black’ hat SEO tactics?
Simply put, the black hat SEO method is quite an unprincipled search engine optimization tactic that can be used to raise a website’s search engine results page (SERP) and should be avoided no matter how crucial it is for your website to reach your target audience.
Over the years, various black hat SEO tactics have been deployed, such as creating phantom website pages, spamdexing, and even the hacking of competitors’ sites, all of which are illegitimate ways to better search engine rankings.
What are ‘white’ hat SEO tactics?
As with every ‘bad’ way to target search engine optimization, there are many ‘good’ ways to go about ensuring your SEO strategy is a real success. Using legitimate SEO tactics will ensure that your digital marketing efforts pay off in the long run.
Some of the ‘white’ hat SEO tactics are:
- Including important keywords in the title and URL
- Ensuring that there are sufficient keywords in the text on pages
- Inserting links and buttons to entice the audience
- Adding social media links
- Posting video and audio clips
Why you should avoid ‘black’ hat SEO tactics
It goes without saying that many legitimate SEO tactics can help your website feature prominently in organic search engine results. Any good digital marketing strategy will include this wide variety of ‘white’ SEO tactics.
Should your digital marketing strategy fail to keep to the accepted SEO tactics, search engines, such as Google, will not go unnoticed and may be detected by an algorithm, which often results in an automatic lower ranking.
It’s not uncommon to be banned from a search engine if you don’t stick to their SEO rules, which could damage the very brand you are trying to build. A good reputation goes a long way on the web these days, and the last thing you want to do is get your website banned.
What is keyword stuffing?
You’ve put a lot of research, energy, and thought into your digital marketing campaign, so don’t let keyword stuffing ruin your SEO drive. Keyword stuffing or ‘black’ hat SEO tactics will not speed up your search engine results or ranking any faster; in fact, it may hurt your brand.
Keyword stuffing is where brands fill their website pages with the same words or phrases, hoping that the search engines will rank them higher. Every search engine knows this is a blatant attempt to manipulate the search engines into thinking that their page is the most relevant to the search being performed. Stay away from keyword stuffing to boost your search visibility – it simply doesn’t work. Keyword density must be monitored, and you must ensure that your keyword density percentage is kept at a reasonable rate.
Here are a few types of keyword stuffing:
- Adding keywords that are totally out of context
- Using keywords that are not relevant to your site or topic
- The unnecessary repeating of keywords or certain phrases
Opposites attract
Remember that your SEO strategy and content writing should be aimed at your target audience and ensure that you write for your readers and not gain a higher search engine ranking. Many people think that filling your website pages with the same keywords will engage more people with your site, but the opposite is mostly true. Audiences do not want to be fooled or duped into clicking through to your site, only to be disappointed at obvious repetition.
