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SEO link building strategies: White hat vs. Black hat

SEO link building strategies: White hat vs. Black hat

by | Apr 23, 2017 | Small Business, Web Design

To get a rank for a website on the search engines, two main processes are performed by these search engines. The first process is the ability of the search engine to get around the site (crawling). The other process is getting the page in the search engine’s index (indexing).

In order to optimize your web page on the search engines, you should consider some points while building your website. While trying to optimize your website, you could either use tactics approved by the search engine to increase your rank. These are known as White hat strategies. Or you could use unscrupulous tactics to raise your website’s ranking illegitimately or lower the ranking of your competitor’s website. These are known as Black hat strategies. Search engine providers can now detect these Black hat tactics. This may finally result in lowering your rank or even getting you banned or penalized by the search engines and affiliate sites.

One of the tactics used in optimizing your page on the search engines is link building tactic. This is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Link building can be either used in a good way which is then considered as White hat; or it can be used in a devious way making it a Black hat.

Here are some dos and don’ts to consider while building links to your website. These will help you get a position on the search engine rank page (SERP) without violating the search engine’s rules.

 

Dos (White hat):

  • One of the best things that you can do is adding link of your page to relevant sites. This can be done by creating and posting relevant content. The links can then be put within a piece of writing, such as an article, infographic, or press release. The best way for gaining links is by using targeted keywords within the content which should be relevant to site.
  • Another thing that you can benefit from in building links is commenting and posting in forums and blogs. It is good to sign up and participate in blogs and forums related to your industry. You can take part in discussions, and post your comments; but you must make sure that your participation is relevant and adding value to the topic discussed. You can then add your site’s link / URL in your signature. This may attract people to visit your website and learn more about you.
  • One more very good tactic is making use of broken and dead links. Broken links are links to pages that have moved or changed. Dead links are those giving you 404 error (“page not found notification”). As a savvy online marketer, you can look for such links on relevant sites and on your clients’ sites. Once you come across one of those links, contact the website owner and inform him about this broken link and offer them an alternative link within your site. You should also track any 404 pages on your own site and make sure to redirect them to a similar page.

Dont’s (Black hat):

  • What you should avoid doing while creating your content is not having duplicate content on your site.
  • You also shouldn’t use irrelevant sites or blogs. Don’t try to mislead people by irrelevant content, or try to mislead the searching engine by using the keywords repeatedly in an inconvenient way.
  • When participating in forums and blogs, first of all, you should make sure that you are not participating in a low-quality blog. You should also make sure not to post irrelevant content on irrelevant sites. Don’t spam those forums and blogs with your links and don’t put your link only as signature in the comments.
  • Don’t deal with link brokers who sell links on various websites to online marketers to improve their ranking on Google. Buying such links from link brokers is a direct violation to Google’s guidelines which may lead you to getting penalized by Google.

Finally, we advise you to follow the White hat tactics on your website. The results of those tactics may be slow, but they are long lasting. Just remember: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

 

Link Building Tips for better SEO results

by | Apr 16, 2017 | Web Design

Link building is one of the important techniques of SEO. This is because it is one of the major factors for how Google ranks Web pages. Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. There are several ways to do it. While some of these methods are good and can increase your rank; others are bad and of low quality and may lead to the opposite. They may even lead to penalizing your website by Google.

Anchor text

One of the strongest methods that the search engines consider when ranking pages is the actual text used by the linking page to talk about content in your page. This is known as “Anchor text”. Although this method is an important and strong way to link to your page, which optimizes your rank at Google search, you should not over use these links. This means that you should not repeat the linking words many times without actual need in the context. It is really great that people write about you and link to your website, but this should be done and the links should be created in a natural way. If you add so many commercial keywords to the anchor text, this is not at all natural and may put you in trouble.

Page quality

Another factor that is taken into account is the quality of the page sending the link. Links sent from high quality and trusted pages count more in boosting rankings by search engines. Thus when using anchor text, we should determine which anchor text to use and decide which page to point at.

Social media

Social Sharing is also another method for link building. In the past few years, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have exploded with the amount of content shared on it for business. Links shared on the social media are also detected by the search engine, although they are treated differently than the other types of links.

The main benefit of the social links is that they are one of the factors that Google takes in consideration in their algorithm. This results in higher ranking for your website. Having good social sites also encourages people to interact with you, which hopefully encourages more people to link to your website. When choosing the social network to engage with, you should put in consideration your industry and your target market. For example, you shouldn’t put big effort in a popular site that your customers won’t visit much.

Web directories and blogs 

Listing in web directories and blogs is another important means of linking. Adding your website to a web directory or linking to your website in a blog will surely increase your rank on search engines. Still this linking must be also used with caution. Your website shouldn’t be just listed in any directory, Some directories don’t provide any real value and Google has excluded them from its search results. You should thus choose the directory carefully to provide useful information to your customers. This directory should be also relevant to your industry.

As for blogs, you should take care not to make a blog with only one post and one link to your site. If you want to have a blog, then you need to keep it alive by writing posts on regular basis. You should also be focusing on your industry and your clients’ needs in your blog. If you are participating in a discussion on a blog, you can share a link as long as it is relevant to your business and the blog. Don’t put your link only as signature in those comments.

 

 

All these methods may take some time till they show their results in SEO. But they are high quality methods which will not make your website blacklisted or marked as spam by Google search engines.