How To Achieve Legitimate Growth With White Hat SEO Techniques

Why White Hat SEO beats Black Hat SEO?

The primary goal of any SEO marketer is to rank their company in the first page of the Organic Search results of Google. Why? Because research shows that more than 90% of the people never advance to the 2nd page of search results. In the past, there have been multiple not-so-legitimate ways used to rank a website in search of quick gains, also known as Black Hat Techniques.

Let’s name a few Black Hat SEO Practices==NOT GOOD practices we should avoid before moving on to the right way to do it

• Keyword Stuffing
• Spam Comments
• Paid Links
• Duplicate Content
• Article Spinning
• Invisible Text

Here is 1 Reason Why you should become SEO Knight in White Armour:

Are you trying to build a genuine business?

Are you in it for the long run?

If the answer to any of these 2 questions was YES, then Black Hat SEO is a Big NO for you. Google routinely penalizes and sometimes even delists websites which are using Black Hat methods to increase their ranking and traffic. Also, Google releases an average of 500 updates each year aimed at providing a quicker, more useful search to its users. So, if you are using Black Hat SEO and havent been found out yet, it is only a matter of time.

Resting my case for using ONLY White Hat SEO techniques, here are 3 best practices to follow for increasing the page rank of your websites and achieving long-term legitimate growth for your businesses.

1. Optimize Your Post For A Long Tail Keyword

Step 1: Choose a Long Tail Keyword

Long Tail Keywords are 3 or 4 word phrases which your potential customers are likely to search for. For example, if you are selling second hand cars in bangalore, then your customers are more likely to search for terms like “used Skoda cars in bangalore” or “used automatic bmw cars in bangalore” , and not just “used cars”. Choosing a long tail keyword gives you the following advantages

• More ready-to-buy visitors i.e quality traffic with higher conversions
• Less competition as this keyword to more specific to your business offering

For choosing the best long tail keywords relevant to your business use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush.

Also, answering the questions or solving your visitors problems are great topics for your content. For example, in this case your visitor may be searching for “What is the right price for a used Skoda car?” or “How to check a used car before buying it”.

Step 2: Target to use the keyword in maximum of these possible places

• Title
• URL
• H1 Tag
• Image Alt text
• In-content link text
  

Step 3: Optimize your body content around the keyword

With the introduction of Google Hummingbird update, the search engine recognizes the keywords with variations like

• Change of order
• Addition/subtraction of some words
• Synonyms
• Words whose intent is the same, though it is completely different in phrasing

Hence it is not necessary to use the exact phrase or keyword throughout the content for it to rank high. The point is to use the keyword along with its variations as well as words which are releveant to the topic of discussion.

While optimizing a page for a long tail keyword, keep in mind that keyword stuffing i.e unneccessarily repeating the keyword is not a good practice. Your main intent is to provide valuable, useful information to your visitors, and not just rank in search results.

2. Share Using The Right Social Media Channels

SEO Expert Neil Patel, makes a clear case for the statement “Social is the new SEO” in his article. Once you create great content,it is impertinent that you actively share it on social media channels. Here is how you to do it in an effective manner.

Step 1: Find your target audience

When you curate a content, it is a good idea to first figure out who you are writing the content for. Who is that customer? What does he do? How many kids does he have? What does he do for fun? This creates your buyer persona or profile or customer avatar. Experts like Hubspot suggest creating multiple buyer personas for your business, which includes a fictional name along with all their details. Use this buyer persona to find out which social media platform they use most frequently and hang out the most.

Step 2: Map your content to relevant platform

With the large number of social media platforms currently, and even more coming up, it becomes important to find out where your content fits in. This purr-ing infographic by avanlanche media gives us an idea of where our content should be promoted according to the type of content

The 3 top social media platforms to promote websites and blog posts are Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

Step 3: Create a social media automatic sharing/re-sharing schedule

Once you have figured out which social media platform is right for you, it is time to create a plan or schedule for sharing on each social media platform. Each social media platform is different.

For example, on Twitter you might schedule the post to go out multiple times on the same day. This will make sure that your followers wont miss out on the content. Also, if the content is evergreen, you may choose to reshare it again in the following weeks or even months.

However, on Facebook you might have a different strategy. Share your post once & promote it using Facebook advertising.

Tools like Buffer can be used to help schedule your content effectively.

Step 4: Improve Social Media Reach By Creating Engaging & Sharable Content

There is no one solution to creating engaging content. In the overall sense, engaging content draws the reader in from the first moment, keeps him entertained by telling a story, and leaves him with a feeling of having gained something.  Engaging content adds value to the reader’s personal or professional life. It might just be something funny, add a new perspective, evoke an emotion or compell you to take action. 

You can make your content easily sharable by adding social sharing icons to your blog posts.

3. Create Content Which Includes Industry leaders/Influencers

One effective way to increase your reach and backlinks is to create content that incorporates Influencers in the field.

Here are 3 ways to do it.

1. List of “Industry Experts” or “Influencers”

Content which is a list of the Top Experts in your field has the following advantages:

• It is sharable
• Can be used as a reference
• It is a form of gentle ego boosting. This can be used to request experts to share it with their network

For example, this blog post on Digital Marketing Experts is a roundup of experts with blogs that can be a great learning resource for students of digital marketing.

2. Interviews

This content strategy includes Interviewing multiple experts in the field & publishing them in the form of podcasts, webinars, or blog posts.

Here are a couple of pointers:

• Create a list of experts/influencers in your field
• Contact them asking for an interview with an introduction of your company, how it will be beneficial to them to be interviewed by you. Include details like how much exposure or reach your website can give them. If your website has an established audience, probably a high percentage of your proposal will be accepted.
• Publish the interview in a form that is easy for your target audience to consume. Invite your experts to share a couple of comments on your business or product.

Digital Vidya has conducted 50+ expert interviews which are a great resource of information as well as inspiration for their target audience of potential & current digital marketing students.

3. Expert Round Up Post

This type of content is created by inviting multiple experts to give you an opinion or comment on a compelling question. It is a 3 step process

1. Find an interesting/thought-provoking question or topic. For example: What is the most important skill a digital marketer should have?
2. Contact the industry leaders and influencers in the field
3. Promote the post on all the right channels

So, what are you waiting for? Start using these White Hat SEO techniques in your posts and growing your audience today!

Photo Credit: avalaunchmedia.com