White Hat Marketing: Tips From The Good Guys

Search engine optimization is an essential online marketing tactic. It is the tactic you need to earn visibility for your website and help reach a larger target audience.

If you’re unfamiliar with SEO, you need to know that there are a variety of different tactics you can implement. Unfortunately, not all of them are morally right.

When it comes to SEO, there are two categories of tactics you can choose to implement: white hat tactics and black hat tactics. White hat tactics include the strategies that are considered “good” by the search engines. This tactics typically take more time to marinate and to show results, but the search engines will eventually praise you for your efforts.

Black hat tactics on the other hand are those tactics that are frowned upon by the search engines. These tactics tend to generate results more quickly, but they are also considered a form of cheating the system. If you are caught using these tactics, the search engines will likely punish you for it by deindexing your site from their results pages.

If you are looking to implement an SEO strategy into your online marketing, the following are some great white hat tactics from the good guys.

Use keywords.

When search engines crawl through your website, they are looking for keywords. If you truly want to improve your SEO, you need to add keywords to your content. But before you go throwing a bunch of random keywords in your copy, you need to keep in mind that these keywords need to flow naturally in your text. If you keyword stuff your content, the search engines will flag your site as inappropriate. Make sure to have a list of appropriate keywords and place them naturally in your content to ensure SEO success.

Optimize your site for mobile.

Search engines today are relying heavily on the use of mobile, so it’s very important that you optimize your website for mobile. If users cannot access your website through a mobile device, they will leave your site and visit another one. This will decrease your website traffic, and this will have a negative impact on your SEO.

Add conversational content to your website.

Search engines are putting a major focus on conversational content. The more conversational your website content is, the better it will rank on the search engine results page. However, most website owners do not have the time, money or manpower to change out all of their website copy—and you don’t have to.

An easy way to add conversational content to your website is to add an FAQs page. Think of the questions your audience is likely to ask, and create a page on your website that contains these questions and answers. If these questions are asked in a search query, your conversational content through the FAQs section will generate results.

Add local content.

Search engines are also utilizing geolocation technology. A great way to increase your SEO is to add local content to your website. Add descriptions, such as nearby destinations, roads, buildings or landmarks. You should also be sure that your physical address is listed on your website. This way, when users perform searches close to your location, your website will be more likely to appear in the results page.

IN order to increase your location content, try to join local directories, such as Google Places or Yelp.

Transcribe audio or video files.

Having strong keywords on your website is extremely important. Unfortunately, if you have audio and video files on your website, they will not do much for your SEO. Search engines cannot read what’s being said on these files, which means the content being spoken will not benefit your SEO. However, if you were to transcribe these files and place the transcription on your website, the search engines would have content to crawl through. They could then use this content to rank your site more appropriately.

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Guest Author: Travis Biggs is a freelance writer and an online reputation management consultant. Travis shares his experience and tips by writing articles that are educational and entertaining.