What Are The Secrets of White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO:

White hat SEO is the best way to improve your business’s ranking in search engines. It’s also known as ethical SEO because it doesn’t require any tactics that are against Google’s guidelines. Here’s Google’s full explanation:

According to Google,:

“Panda is a machine learning system that assesses sites using thousands of machine learning methods that operate in parallel while interconnected to produce a result set that broadly captures all of Google’s information retrieval capabilities.”

That means that, if your website’s content is of low quality, such as thin or duplicate content, you won’t be able to rank well on Google. It also means that you will have lower organic traffic and sales because people won’t want to spend time on low-quality websites.

When Google talks about the Panda algorithm, they’re referring to the Panda Framework. Basically, this is another example of how Google improved its search results by increasing the size of its index and “re-ranking” the results it pulls new information from. This has to lead it to change how webmasters should create pages. In initial versions of Panda, two different ranking methods were employed back in 2011. One method was to simply have a large number of pages on your website but the ranking was based on text content, while the other method used many more pages to rank but the content used was on fewer pages.

Nowadays, that second method is considered old outdated and no longer applies to website owners. But for websites that pre-date the Panda update and are in the red – such as beauty companies – the fastest way to get ranked in Google is to create high-quality content. Here are five questions you can ask yourself to check if you’re missing a golden opportunity to boost organic traffic and sales:

Keyword Research:

Keyword research is the most important part of SEO. Keywords help search engines understand what your content is about. The more popular the keyword, the more competition there will be for ranking it higher in search results. Keywords are also important for helping you understand what your target market is looking for.

Panda is about staying relevant. Good leads and ready-to-buy products or services are gone as soon as your site makes a change that isn’t "in line with your audience’s evolving needs." David Mihm makes this clear in his Technology + Business Landscape update (November 2009):

"Your greatest temptation as a business is to take your eye off the ball — to put all your efforts into creating the most amazing, amazing-looking site that you possibly can. This is the wrong way to think about your site. Instead of focusing all of your attention on the things your visitors want, concentrate on making those visitors’ lives easier and refine your site to keep it in line with their evolving needs."

A challenging situation arises when you stray from your ultimate customer or customer group. Real people are far more likely to stick around and convert because they are fulfilled through buying from a company they trust. A change that is reciprocal or "in line with your audience’s evolving needs" is far better in the long run.

If you really want to stay relevant and create content that matches the needs of your audience (your visitors), make the following changes:

Pick a product or service and create useful, helpful content about that. Make changes to the product to match changing needs. Examine the content you are currently writing to see if it fits the needs of your audience. Find a web developer who will copy and paste content if it needs to be modified. Find a copywriter who can write helpful body copy. 

People want to click on your content. People will stay on your site longer if they know it supports their needs.

Quality Content:

Quality content is crucial for marketing. You can have the best SEO strategy, the best website, the best social media strategy, but if your content isn’t good, it’s not going to do you any good. It’s important to consider the quality of the content on your website, on your blog, on your social media, etc. If it is low-quality, it won’t do you any good. There's nothing worse than finding the scraper sites, or sites whose back page content is questionable, only to find out later that yours is just as bad.

Here's a quick tip to avoid that (if you want to). If you don't have a manual penalty form submitted via email, you can simply send the page to Google and specify sites. Try something like:

site:ebay.com pages about me and 4 others with content you found elsewhere and removed identifying information

Once you have done this, Google will determine whether they should “penalize” you, and you won't have to worry about them penalizing your site with a manual penalty. This only works if your site is English, and you don’t have language settings on your blog that are highly visible.

Another SEO tactic that kills content is bringing about duplicate content issues and having to deal with them on your end. By simply disinfecting duplicate content, you can reduce the amount of time and effort required to deal with it. There is one major issue that gets people in trouble with Panda—not fixing their duplicate content issues. Incorrect content will lead to an overall lower quality score, so if you keep your pages essentially the same, there should be little/no need to change the content—so everyone’s content should be the same, right? Wrong.

As mentioned, smart SEOs will utilize and utilize many different techniques to achieve optimal results. One of these techniques is to completely update the content on their low-quality pages to fix their problems. To do this, all you typically need to do is go in and clean up the old outdated content.

Link Building:

1. Link building is the process of obtaining hyperlinks from other websites to your website. These links are incredibly important for SEO because they are the signals that search engines use to understand the quality of your content. The more quality links you have, the more likely you are to rank for competitive keywords.

2. Panda prevents sites with low-quality content from displaying on search results pages (SERPs). Other terms for SERPs are

1) SERP, a search results page’s summary of results above the regular site index; 

2) the backlink network, the set of websites that a webmaster association pays for to promote the content of its sites; and 3) the authority status, which indicates the catchability of a website to relevant keywords.

3. Panda penalizes sites with lots of low-quality links. To analyze whether a website has high or low-quality content, search engines use the total number of links pointing to a web page. If a website has too many bad links, it will decrease its ranking in search results by one or two positions. Thus, to improve the search experience, many websites fix links on their web pages. This results in falling traffic to the site, lower search rank, and decreasing visibility.

Notice the term search engine, which is the tool search engines use to determine a website’s quality. What does this tell you? What a poor SSL certificate, outdated web design, and a high amount of links pointing the wrong way all have in common is that they make a website less user-friendly and a harder-to-navigate experience.

4. Panda uses machine learning to determine a ‘healthy’ ratio of links pointing to a website. To optimize if it gets too many, bad links have to be cleaned up. Good, clean, links are still shown, but search engines may put a premium on what appears as a quality score over other factors.

The Panda update effectively demoted or outright removed many websites from search results pages due to website tracking, spammy links, automated connection questions, compromised content, and bad SSL certificates.

Traffic Strategies:

Traffic Strategies for your website should always be a priority as, without traffic, you won’t be able to build an audience or convert leads into sales. Here are some traffic strategies that work:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): SEO is the process of improving the visibility of your website in search engines to drive traffic and leads. You will need specialized tools to get the most out of SEO. It is essential to have “brand” related keywords in your website title, H1, headline and to have your website structured so search engines understand your content. A great resource for SEO tips is this article SEO 2013: Tips to Increase Traffic and Mobile Visibility. 

2. Direct Mail: This is a system of sending campaign materials to consumers for a nominal fee which makes it a cost-effective method to build trust and authority in your community and to garner potential leads with quality targeted campaigns. A great resource for direct mail campaigns is the article How to Use Direct Mail.

3. Social Media: Social media is a great way to build relationships with leads, create lead gen content, and generate advertising revenue. Lots of companies spend a lot of money on social media each year (around $ 6 billion). What is great about social media is that it is affordable; there are no texts or calls involved. There are many great tools to use for social media marketing including Twtrland (automated Twitter create online tools), Hootsuite (language and content creation tools), and LinkedIn (blogs, communities, and media sharing platform).

4. Forum Marketing: Forum marketing is a method of attracting a brand name. There are many forums online such as Yahoo Answers, Google Answers, Quora, and other Old School-type forums that are great for brand awareness, generating leads, creating flash sales, and nurturing relationships. A great resource to create content with can be found in this article: Inbound Marketing Forum Marketing Tactics.

5. Referral PPC: A fantastic way to increase your visibility in search engines and drive leads for your on-site marketing is through the use of paid search ads.