What are the right techniques to improve your site rankings using SEO? There are two commonly used SEO techniques- White Hat, which is the correct and ethical way of improving rankings; and Black Hat, which is unethical and can get you in the firing line of Google and attract penalties.

We give you a quick heads up on the differences between the two!

White hat Seo tries to grab audience attention by providing comprehensive, engaging and accurate information. Black hat Seo uses unethical tactics like keyword stuffing, cloaking and using private link networks as short cuts to get higher page ranks.

Content quality

Quality content keeps your visitor engaged for a longer duration and improves page visits, automatically getting your page listings higher on the search engine results page (SERP). Keyword stuffing gives a boost that is temporary and your page will drop down in the list very soon. As soon as the search engine crawlers find that your content is not user friendly, your page may get de-ranked or may even be deleted completely from the SERP.

Some Black Hat techniques that are frowned upon by genuine companies are the following:

Keyword stuffing

Black Hat SEO uses keyword stuffing, that is sentences that are unconnected and have poor readability but have keywords stuffed into them. Keywords are those words or phrases that are searched for the most, and adding them just to rank higher is a very unethical way of creating content. People will not find any reason to linger on your pages when they find out that the content is not relevant. The more keywords you add, the higher the chances of being found by search engine bots which will automatically de-rank your page.

Using bots for comments

If you have come across a comment on a blog that makes no sense at all, it’s probably the work of a bot. These comments usually hold a keyword so that the page ranks higher on the SERP. They are randomly created so it is easy to recognize when a comment has been made by a bot. This is an unethical or a Black Hat SEO technique.

Fake pages

Doorway pages are often stuffed with keywords and rank highly for specific search queries. They are created to capture the attention of search engines, and lead to essentially the same destination. They lead to multiple similar pages in search results, creating confusion for users.

Cloaked text

Cloaked text is almost invisible, as it often matches the colour of the background or is resized to zero. It contains links and keywords that are meaningless but are created just for the sake of higher SEO ranks.

How can you create White Hat SEO?

It is generally found that White Hat SEO takes time to respond, but the results are promising and are sustainable. The most important technique is creating quality content, that is highly relevant and contains no grammar or spelling errors.

These are some more White Hat techniques:

Meta Description

The meta description is written in the code of the page in the Metatag. When people are looking for something on a search engine, they will find a lot of websites in the SERP. The meta description  is a short description of the website which is upto 160 characters long and should be well written to capture viewer attention.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is done to find out which are the phrases that are most commonly searched for with respect to your web page. You should add the proper keywords to optimize your content, while making sure that too many keywords are not present.

Relevance of the content

Relevance indicates how much of your content is meaningful to the search terms that are commonly used on search engines, and it is related to keyword research. Without finding the right relevant keywords to work on, you can never improve your site ranks.

Internal linking of pages

To get your site crawled and indexed, internal linking between the different pages of a website are required. Your sitemap will do this. You can also have hyperlinks between pages, and add content on blogs with keywords linking back to the main pages. There is a chance of missing a page if it’s not connected to other pages of the site

The primary goal of Search Engine Optimization is to improve the site’s performance. If you are looking for a temporary boost then you can try short cut Black Hat methods (beware of the penalties, though but if you are looking for a long-term solution that is better and gets your business noticed, then your only option is White Hat SEO.