Search Engine Optimisation or SEO refers to a set of optimisation techniques for making your website search engine friendly and improving your search rankings. SEO’s main focus is on organic traffic, making it a viable way of driving FREE traffic to your site.
SEO comes in different shades. We have
- White Hat SEO
- Grey Hat SEO; and
- Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO uses unethical methods. That’s why you need to be careful when choosing an SEO service provider and make sure they are not one of those who rely on these banned strategies. These approaches are against search engine policies and can have your website eliminated from the search engine results. While Black Hat SEO can increase your page rank quickly, they are very dangerous in the long term. One of the most used black hat strategies is the use of hidden text coloured similar to the website’s background or positioned off screen.
Cloaking is also commonly used by SEO specialists who are doing Black Hat strategies.
This technique involves loading a different page depending on whether the page is accessed by a human or a search engine spider.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO on the other hand is summed up as creating content for users and not for search engines. In this case, the content is relevant to the target audience. Search engines value relevancy and will rank a site based on how closely its content matches what visitors are looking for. Hire an SEO company that uses ethical SEO strategies and you will enjoy long-term success.
Many specialised SEO tools can help you determine the popularity and competitiveness of your keywords to help you improve your search engine ranking. The effectiveness of an SEO campaign depends on a number of factors:
- Site structure
- Content
- Keywords
- Methodology
Keyword rich content will help strengthen the theme of your website. That is why it is very important that you come up with unique, creative and informative content for your website. Unique SEO content is always king. SEO content attracts visitors and converts them into potential customers.
In the past, Googlebot used to see text only and this made people concentrate on the text part of their website. However, the engine is nowadays very sophisticated and it reads CSS and JavaScript and the crawler can see whether your site’s presentation is appealing for users or not.
Using the right SEO tactics requires effort, knowledge and experience but brings about success when done right. Since you cannot achieve all the benefits in an instant, hiring an SEO firm would be a big help.
A professional SEO agency will assess your site and make recommendations that will help increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. Once website optimisation has started, they will provide recommendations and monitoring reports to keep you updated of the progress.
SEO agencies know how to navigate through several online marketing tools and this helps them increase the value of your marketing strategy. The agencies know how and where to get important SEO information they need to save time and reduce your in-house cost.
SEO is not something you do once and then forget.
It is a continual process which has to be done over the entire life of the site. Always remember that the web as a medium is dynamic and under constant change.
New competitors appear, search engines change algorithms, new marketing opportunities appear and links that used to be good can become stale and not very important anymore. That is why it’s crucial to keep an eye on your SEO efforts and focus on new techniques that may prove to work better.