Content marketing

Since the rise of the term content marketing, perhaps three or four years ago, there’s been plenty of talk about the end of SEO and its replacement by this ‘new’ discipline.

It’s true that many search agencies have since rebranded or have emphasized their content expertise, but this doesn’t mean that content marketing has rendered SEO obsolete. Far from it. Indeed, the two disciplines should work together, and the use of either has to include both SEO and content if it is to be truly effective online.

Key differences between content marketing and SEO

SEO and content marketing overlap, but there are key differences.

Aspects of SEO are more technical. This includes the use of correct URLs, title and ALT tags, sitemaps and so on: the stuff that underpins your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is broader and isn’t necessarily confined to SEO goals. For example, a publisher should produce excellent content first and foremost as a way of attracting and retaining an audience.

How content and SEO can work together

There is a school of thought, or at least the perception exists in some quarters, that SEO is merely about creating good content for the search engines to index.

While I’m all for the quality content part, there’s more to it than that. If you haven’t ensured that the on-site SEO groundwork has been done, your content efforts will be wasted.

For example, if your site has a penalty, or Google isn’t indexing pages properly, then you’re going to need some SEO expertise, great content or not. This is why the SEO experts and content teams need to work together. As the stats below show, this isn’t necessarily happening all the time, butthere is a desire for closer collaboration.

Here are some ways SEO and content can work together:

1. Creating original, quality content

While thin content created to provide fodder for Google’s crawlers may have worked to a certain extent a few years ago, it isn’t effective now. Also, weak content produced to make up the numbers will not work from a content marketing perspective, as it will not help to attract and retain readers.

Instead, from an SEO perspective, original and engaging content will set you apart from competitors, as it gives the search engines something to index that can’t be found elsewhere. It also helps your content marketing goals, as original and quality content is far more likely to attract the audience you’re targeting.

Ask yourself whether your content inspires people to linger on your site longer than a minute or so. Does it provide value, such as useful advice that helps them to do their jobs better?

2. Evergreen content and SEO

Creating evergreen content is a great strategy for improving search rankings, as well as making your site a more useful one. A piece of news will often do well in Google while it’s fresh topical, but will fade thereafter. It doesn’t deliver long-term traffic. However, a more useful article that contains valuable advice and insight will attract the kinds of links and engagement metrics that Google is looking for, and is more likely to perform well in the search rankings over a longer period of time.

If you can get this right, it’s a virtuous circle, as higher search rankings means more visits to the article, which then leads to more links, better rankings and so on. One example of evergreen content from Search Engine Watch illustrates this point; this article on writing title tags for SEO is from 2012, but is still useful to readers and attracts plenty of traffic.

It also ranks at No. 1, or in the top three for searches around writing title tags and SEO.

he useful content helps it rank in the first place, but this high ranking means that the article continues to deliver traffic to SEW. It’s great when it works like this.

3. Keyword research

Keyword research is essential for content marketing and SEO to work well together. First of all, the quality has to be in the content you produce, but you should also ensure that the content you spent time creating achieves the exposure it deserves. To achieve this, your content needs to match the search terms that people are using and answer these search queries effectively.

If you use too many technical terms in your articles, this language may not match that which searchers are using. To avoid this, do some keyword research to find out which terms are popular and match the language you use to the way people search

Soovle, shown below, is a good tool for quick idea generation, but there are plenty of other SEO tools available.

4. Monitoring keyword goals

Once you have a list of terms and phrases to target with your content efforts, it’s important to monitor and measure your efforts. Is the content you produce hitting the mark? Is it having an effect on search positions? Don’t expect overnight results; it can take time before you see any shifts in search, and it may be very competitive for certain keywords.

There are no guarantees of success, but a well-applied strategy using focused content will pay off on a long term basis. It’s important to add that, while content can play a key role in achieving SEO goals, it shouldn’t be a slave to those goals. Keywords shouldn’t be crowbarred in so that content quality is affected. The reader shouldn’t notice too much.

5. Link building

Good content attracts links. Just make sure it’s distributed effectively so that it can get the attention of as big or influential an audience as possible. There’s no great science to this; just create content that people will want to link to and see how it works.

On my last site, good posts would generally get between 200 and 1,000 backlinks. However, the odd one received more than 10,000. They weren’t necessarily the most popular posts, either. If I knew the secret, I’d bottle it.

We can see how evergreen SEW articles have attracted impressive numbers of backlinks. This article on Excel shortcuts and tricks fits the bill in terms of being a useful resource for marketers, and has therefore attracted plenty of links, as Majestic data shows.

6. Internal linking

This is an obvious way to use content to help with SEO goals, as well as improving the user experience. Internal linking can help Google crawl your site more effectively, help pages to rank well for certain search terms, and also point users toward content that is relevant to the article they’re reading.

It’s simple enough to put into practice, and should be a part of the thinking when writing and editing content.

7. Measurement

It’s vital to measure the effects of the content you create in terms of SEO goals. If you’re aiming to improve rankings, there are some useful tools out there to track changes in ranking positions and see the results of your efforts.

You can also use analytics to see how the volume of search traffic changes over time, and which pages and articles are most effective for this.

Content marketing metrics should be applied too. If you’re creating the kind of content that is valuable to your target audience, then metrics such as bounce rates, time on site, and visitors viewing multiple pages should be moving in the right direction.

8. Headlines

Headlines are very important. They should be descriptive and should work hard to convince people to click, but they shouldn’t try too hard. For example, a title such as “10 useful tips to improve your landing pages” is fine, as long as those tips are useful and deliver on the promise. However, “10 awesome tips that will improve your landing pages and make you a millionaire” might be promising more that it can deliver.

Headlines must be written for the Web, and you need to consider the keywords and phrases you use in headlines. How do people search for these topics? How will people find your articles? What do you want to rank for?

Headline length is important too. It shouldn’t be too long, for a number of reasons.

Google truncates long titles in search results. You want the full headline to be visible in the search results so people are more inclined to click on it.
Social sharing. For example, if you want people to share your articles on Twitter, the headline should be short enough to allow people to retweet without having to edit it, or to add a comment if they want.
Emails. If it’s going in a newsletter, especially as the headline, the title should be visible in the subject line.

In Summary

SEO and content are distinct disciplines that require different skills and knowledge, but the success of each depends on the other. Content teams should be writing with a knowledge and understanding of SEO goals, ensuring that basics such as internal linking, headline optimization and use of keywords are covered.

To repeat my previous point, the quality of the content is all important and should not be compromised by SEO goals, but it is perfectly possible to write naturally while fulfilling the SEO work. In turn, SEO teams should be working with content creators, ensuring that they are aware of the basics, and helping to set goals which can be achieved through content.

Google Analytics

For marketers, there are few skills more important than a deep understanding of Google Analytics and its conversion measurement capabilities.

After all, this is the tool that tells you whether your efforts are actually translating into results.

Unfortunately, mastering Google Analytics can be challenging, even for experienced marketers. There is far too much data and too few easy-to-follow dashboards to sort it out.

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of seven custom and standard reports you can use right away to get better insight into your marketing performance.

1. Mobile Performance Report

You know this already: Ours is a mobile-first world. The total number of mobile users now exceedsthe total number of desktop users…

… and mobile e-commerce is nearly 30 percent of all e-commerce in the US.

In fact, mobile is so important now that Google even penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly.

For marketers, knowing how their sites perform on smaller screens is vital to staying alive in the SERPs and winning over customers.

The mobile performance report shows you how well your site (not app) is optimized for mobile and where you need to make improvements.

You can even segment the report further to see which mobile devices/browsers customers are using to access your site. This will tell you if your site is performing poorly on some devices.

Accessing this report is easy: Just go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview.

This will show you how your site does on different platforms:

You can add more dimensions here as you see fit. Take careful note of bounce rate, time on site and page views to see whether your user experience is failing on one or more mobile channels.

2. Traffic Acquisition Report

Want to know if people are actually clicking on your ads? That guest post you published earlier — is it generating any traffic to your website? How about your SEO strategy? Is it actually working?

The traffic acquisition report will tell you all this and more. For many marketers, this will be their first step in the reporting process.

This is a standard report, so you can find it by going to Acquisition -> Overview.

This will give you a quick breakdown of your traffic sources.

Of particular insight here is the “Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

Clicking on a referring website will show you the exact pages visitors used to enter your site.

3. Content Efficiency Report

Do you generate a lot of content on your website and find that tracking it is getting a little overwhelming?

Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and a Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, created this report to solve this exact problem.

This report tracks entrances, page views, bounces and goal completions to help you answer questions like:

Which content is engaging your audience the most?
What type of content (images, videos, GIFs, infographics, reviews) performs best with your readers?
Which content converts readers into customers?
Which content is shared most by your users?

Here’s a quick overview from Avinash himself:

You can get a more detailed explanation of the report here. To grab a copy for yourself, check thislink (you’ll need to log into Google Analytics first).

4. Keyword Analysis Report

Getting organic traffic from Google is great. Unfortunately, ever since Google started encrypting search data in 2012, your organic traffic keyword report has mostly shown this:

However, you can still gain a ton of insight about your visitors by tracking the performance of unencrypted keywords.

This report created by eConsultancy analyzes the most popular (and available) incoming keywords to your site. It shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each keyword.

Use this data to figure out what keywords are working best for you, how many of them are actually contributing to your goals and what keywords you need to optimize for in the future.

5. New vs. Returning Visitors

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Usually, the metrics for new and returning visitors are quite different. Returning visitors tend to stick around longer and have lower bounce rates.

6. Landing Pages Report

Your users will enter your site from all sorts of pages. Some will type in your home page URL directly, some will find a page through search engines, and some others will click on a link shared on your Twitter feed.

This report will tell you which pages visitors are landing on when they first enter your site. Based on data from this report, you can figure out how users are interacting with your site.

For example, if the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high bounce rate pages more engaging.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

7. Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate Report

“Bounce Rate” is the percentage of visitors who don’t take any action and leave from the same page they landed on.

“Exit Rate” measures the percentage of your visitors who browse more than one page on your site before leaving.

This report compares the bounce rate vs. exit rate for different pages on your site.

You can find it by going to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages:

Next, select “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.

This will give you a visual comparison between bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).

Over to you

Google Analytics is an essential analytics tool for any marketer, but making the most of it can be challenging. By using a mixture of pre-created custom reports and standard reports, you can gain valuable insight into your users.

Google Analytics’ Solutions Gallery is particularly useful for someone new to analytics. Here, you can import expert-created reports into your Analytics account to build powerful dashboards quickly. You can also use these reports as guides to help you understand this incredible tool better.

considering SEO as a career

“In my day, there was no such thing as digital marketing. You studied Comp Sci, used QuarkXpress, made magazines, and you liked it!”

I was recently asked by a colleague to present on “How to break into a career in SEO” to students in her college-level advertising course. As I planned my presentation, I actually found it a difficult topic to advise on because, as I like to say, I’ve been doing SEO since there was such a thing back in the ’90s. Back then, there were no courses in digital marketing, no internships and definitely nothing like professional certifications available.

Today, there are courses available on digital marketing — but even with those, is a formal education really what impresses me as a hiring manager? And what should someone interested in SEO know about pursuing a career in the field?

In today’s post, I thought I’d tackle the questions above for the benefit of those entering the SEO job market, to help guide them in their exploration of the (potentially) lucrative and exciting world of SEO.

Starting a career in SEO

My intent is not to tell you the right job boards to watch; it is to tell you the things a digital marketing agency or business are likely looking for in an entry-level SEO hire.

Would it be good to have an official degree in digital marketing, communications or computer science? Sure. But would it be enough to impress the manager and beat out others with a similar degree? Perhaps, but not likely. What is likely to make a difference?

Your actual skill set. Give me someone who knows SEO basics, can read or code HTML, is a good writer and can have an intelligent conversation any day over someone who “only” has a degree. If you have some familiarity with analytics, even better.

An ability to be client-facing. Of course, you can’t merely just depend on your skills — that’s only half the job. The other half is communicating what’s important to stakeholders. This means being able to talk about big-picture business objectives, not just about how cool AngularJS is.

Any work history (job or internship) that involves working on a website, or even an offline publication. It could be that you’ve worked in tech as an editor, a copywriter, a general marketing assistant, posting photos to social media, or something else. This is valuable as long as it shows you’ve worked on a team. Yes, I know there’s a catch 22 — to get a job, you need experience, but to get experience, you need a job. But your ability to show you’ve worked with others in some form of media is important. It’s not often I need a knowledgeable hermit… I need someone who will show up every day and be able to complete assignments.

No job history? Hone your skills on your own. I know there’s only so much a classroom can teach and only so much experience you can have walking into an entry-level opportunity. Those who will succeed in SEO are self-starters and, by nature, curious. A good signal that you, as a job candidate, have those skills is by showing that you’ve developed a website or a blog on your own with some specific focus. Maybe it’s a Tumblr site with crafting how-tos; perhaps it’s a fully developed travel blog; maybe it’s even a website for a favorite local charity or church. (And, no, just liking Facebook and “being online all the time” isn’t enough.)

Certifications. Any Google certifications you can get will be a huge differentiator — Google Analytics individual qualification, in particular. Also of note: SEO Training Course by Moz (free), SEO 101 by Distilled (paid) and Bruce Clay SEO training (paid).

An interest in/familiarity with industry blogs and thought leaders. The ability to keep up with the changes in the discipline is important — but more than that, your curiosity and willingness to learn are signaled by your self-directed “research” on sites like Search Engine Land. I will ask you what things you read and what you think is “next” in SEO.

The best way to start is by learning digital marketing “hands on.”

Is digital marketing the career for you?

Being prepared for a job is one thing, but enjoying it enough to make it a career is another. What are some of the pros and cons of working in SEO day in, day out that may determine how well-suited you are for the “SEO lifestyle?”

Pros

Always something new to learn — constant change. This isn’t just a cliche; something big will happen every few weeks that you must learn about. Don’t get overwhelmed thinking you have to be an instant expert, just understand that you should know why something new matters (not necessarily how it all works).

If you have an idea and plan to test and measure, seniority doesn’t matter. This is true of many tech-related fields. If you have a good idea, innovation or copy “hook” you think will grow traffic and revenue, only a fool for a boss wouldn’t listen just because you’re young.

It is a “test and learn” culture. As long as you’re watching/measuring, surprises, and even setbacks, are seen as a path to improvement.

Chance interact with cool people in the industry (Well, as long as you think nerdy is cool). People in digital marketing are usually an interesting bunch who are fairly laid-back and free with the knowledge they’ve gained.

Fly all over the world. It’s all caviar and champagne, don’t you know? Well, not really, but if you’re in an agency of any size, it’s likely you’ll make a trip or two during the year to attend a client meeting, presentation or conference.

Cons

Always something new to learn — constant change. The speed of change isn’t slowing, it’s accelerating. The constant need to stay informed and leave old tactics behind can be taxing.

Hard to maintain work/life balance. This is probably the biggest challenge — because we love it, we are thinking about or working on SEO all the time. Sometimes, bosses even think that because you think it’s cool and you’re young, it’s not really like work if they give you impossible deadlines to meet. Well, it is real work, and even if you love what you’re doing, it’s possible to burn yourself out without anyone else pushing you. Know that you are a limited resource and there will always be some reason to work late or skip a vacation. Be smart, and get off the computer as often as you can.

You won’t be management overnight. Sweet SEO skills alone won’t make you a manager, director or VP — it’s your ability to communicate, maintain an even temperament and focus on client needs (not SEO tech-ery) that will help you rise up the ranks. Those things are only gained over time and in situ.

Clients and CEOs can have unreasonable expectations. There are definitely those who think SEO is like magic, and, if you just sprinkle some on their project, success will come overnight. Even with guidance, patient counseling and careful presentation of progress, you sometimes cannot reset those unreasonable expectations. This is closely related to the next item…

Many have misconceptions about how SEO works. Part of what makes SEO cool is that a lot of people don’t really know what you do or how SEO works. But that can also be dangerous; they may have misconceptions about the level of skill required to execute a good SEO campaign or the time it takes to see results.

You’re likely to step on toes. While it may be tempting to jump into a new project and start ordering SEO-based code changes or say that it’s SEO’s job to provide the language used in copy development, be aware that there are likely IT and PR departments in the room who think those things are their job. My advice: Before calling their baby ugly, always acknowledge the necessary role of IT to provide a good code base and/or PR to craft the brand’s message — then explain how SEO can enhance, not replace, their work.

Final thoughts

Is SEO for everyone? Definitely not. If you like learning a way of doing things that you can execute until retirement, don’t get into the field. If you like figuring out the way things work — and you can recognize when talking about your SEO ninja skills should take a back seat to the business needs of the project — then jump in and stay humble.

blogging

Gary Illyes from Google said at the Search Marketing Summit today in Sydney that Google will be updating the page speed ranking factor to specifically look at the page speed of your mobile pages when it comes to the mobile-friendly algorithm.

This report came from Jennifer Slegg, who said Gary Illyes from Google said this is months, but not years away from happening.

The issue today is that many of the ranking signals Google uses today for mobile rankings are based on your desktop web pages, not mobile web pages. So if you have a really fast desktop web page, but the mobile version is really slow, it currently doesn’t hurt your mobile rankings.

When Google updates their mobile-friendly algorithm, they hope to add mobile-specific page speed as a factor and not rely on the desktop version.

As you may remember, page speed became a ranking factor back in April 2010. In June 2013, Matt Cutts hinted that a negative factor would come to slow mobile pages. Then a year ago, Gary Illyes said they are working on mobile-specific page speed, and now, he said it is months away.

But Gary also said on Twitter it is in the planning phase, so hopefully, it is still months away.

It is just logical for page speed, as well as other factors, to be mobile-dependent and not desktop-dependent. This seems to be Google’s plan.

AdWords

Search marketers the world over watched with baited breath last week as Google finally unveiled a whole raft of new features and improvements coming to the AdWords platform.

Although you could technically lump everything Google announced under the same banner, there was so much new information to digest, there was no way we could condense everything into one post (not that we’d want to). For this reason, the various changes coming to AdWords dominated the WordStream blog in May, so if you missed the big reveal and what it means for your campaigns, read on.

Of course, there was a bunch of other exciting stuff going on at the WordStream blog this month, but in light of Google’s epic announcement, we won’t be offended if you overlooked it – kind of like if a nifty new tool were released on the same day as Godzilla was sighted off the coast of Japan, for instance.

1. 5 Big Changes Coming to AdWords: Everything You Need to Know: This was the story in digital marketing this month. Google unveiled a host of new features that advertisers and marketers can expect to take advantage of as early as next year, including location-based ads in Google Maps and new responsive display ads. Larry was at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, for the announcement, and this detailed summary of the impending changes should be at the top of your reading list.

2. 5 Brilliant Competitive Advertising Strategies to Outsmart Your Competition: Some businesses shy away from directly competing with other companies in their space, favoring a less confrontational approach. However, as Larry explains in our second-most popular post from May, going straight for the throat can be a remarkably effective advertising strategy. Check out this post for five ways you can go after your competition – and win.

3. 7 Excel Tricks to Make You a Power User: Let’s face it – Excel will never be a “sexy” application. Although few people are impressed by pivot tables and other Excel features, that’s not to say they’re not incredibly powerful. In this post, Larry highlights seven cool tricks you can use to level up your Excel skills.

4. Google Expanded Text Ads: 10 Things You Need to Know: Last week, Google announced the biggest change to its text-based PPC ads we’ve seen in 15 years – but what’s going on? Find out in our fourth-most popular post of the month, in which WordStream’s Fearless Leader Larry Kim highlights what you can expect from Google’s newly expanded text-ad format, and how you can leverage these new features for maximum gain.

5. Why You NEED to Raise Organic CTRs (And How to Do It): In the world of PPC, most marketers are primarily concerned with the CTRs of their paid campaigns, an understandable position. However, if you’ve been neglecting your organic CTRs, you could be in big trouble. Larry drops some knowledge in this post about why you need to start focusing on your organic CTRs, too – right now.

6. 3 Landing Page Optimization Myths EXPOSED: Conversion rate optimization is arguably the hottest trend in digital marketing since content. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad information out there, including some stubbornly persistent myths and misconceptions about what landing pages should be and do in the first place. In our sixth-most popular post of May, yours truly debunks three of the most common landing page myths, and offers several suggestions on what to focus on instead.

7. Easy AdWords Bidding Strategies for Newbies and Math Haters: Getting started with AdWords is easy. Grasping complicated bidding strategies is another matter entirely. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a doctoral candidate in applied computational mathematics to start leveraging the power of AdWords’ bidding options, as Erin expertly demonstrates in this post. Essential reading for those hoping to exert more power and control over their campaigns.

8. These Coding Skills Will Make Every PPC Specialist More Valuable: These days, it seems like everybody’s learning to code. Even if you don’t know a string from an array, or couldn’t declare a function in JavaScript if your life depended on it, you can still learn fundamental coding skills that will make you considerably more valuable to employers and clients as a PPC specialist. In this post, guest author Frederik Hyldig of Denmark’s s360 agency shows you how to do just that.

9. 7 Totally Underrated Free AdWords Tools: You could be forgiven for thinking that you don’t need any more free tools to help you manage your PPC workflows. While you might be right, these seven free AdWords tools are seriously underrated, and Erin shows us why in this post. You never know, you may just find the tool that could save you hours of time.

10. 9 Easy Ways to Improve Your Marketing Resume: Looking for a job in marketing? Have you optimized your resume? No, I’m not kidding. In our final post of this month’s round-up, Elisa explains why you should absolutely include keywords in your resume (yes, really), why listing Microsoft Office “skills” is a waste of space, and other great tips to help your resume stand out from the crowd. A must-read for new and experienced marketers alike.

SEO Optimization

SEO has a long history. It’s simply not something new. And before it became this technical, it was merely a matter of content, which is the main focus of White Hat (or sometimes known as organic) SEO. When SEO was yet unconscious, content was almost everything. And right now, content is still one of the main driving factors when it comes to SEO.

When content mattered most

‘Content is King’ as they say. And SEO will not argue with that statement. Content may still well be king even up until now but what’s a king without the queen and their subjects?All the other factors that a Google spider verifies such as meta tags, image alt text, keyword density, backlinks and whatnot are just as important.

White hat SEO focuses mainly on content – basically on how user-friendly and information-packed your content is. When your content is good, people will buzz about it in Twitter, Facebook and all the other social media tools and online tools that are available to the internet users today – which will, in turn, drive traffic to your website.

White hat SEO is the way to play it safe. It obliges in all of the terms of agreement of social media, it implements good, clean, Google-approved strategies in order to gain higher page rank and get better search engine visibility. Compared to it’s counterpart, which is black hat SEO, the white hat method will ensure your brand’s reputation in the web.

If you are aware of your online reputation and brand then you will probably choose the white hat method. The only thing about being a white hat practitioner is that it takes longer for clients to see your results. Businesses pay for fast, easy-come results. They don’t pay for slow, time-consuming processes which will have them wait for them to see the results (which is exactly what white hat is all about!)

Yes, it will take time – a lot of time. My SEO services have a minimum contract of 6 months (yes, I’m a white-hat practitioner, and yes, I am paid per month) for you to start seeing the results. That’s how long it takes for you to just see the results of the white hat method. But it’s also much cheaper than the black hat method even if the black hat method is quicker to get your page rank up.

To make it simple for all of you guys, white hat method is the good, clean way which makes quality, competitive, information-packed content it’s main weapon and tool. While black hat method is the ‘how-to-go around the rules’ method which uses doorway pages, invisible texts, keyword stuffing and comment spamming. It abuses artificial and technical loopholes as it’s main route to attain higher page rank.

Here’s a table taken from the site: Silverdisc.com that explains the difference between a white hat and black hat approach to SEO

	Black Hat	White Hat
Content and Links	Search Engines	Humans
Visibility to Humans	Hidden	Visible
Quality of Work	Hidden	Visible
Search Engines	Enemies	Nothing / Friends
Domains/Brands	Disposable	Cherished, Primary Domain
Site & Relevance	Apparently Improved	Actually Improved
Results	Yes, “Short” Term	Yes, “Long” Term
Ethical Techniques	No	Yes
Legal	No?	Yes?

Tips for Keeps:

If you are trying to build your brand or company online, then the White hat method is what you want. Start a blog for your company or online brand and create good, quality content that people will love and need. If your article information is good, it will definitely create buzz.

seo agency

White Hat SEO is a practice used to improve search performance that is in line with terms and conditions of a search engine. In this tutorial, you'll learn:

What White Hat SEO is, exactly
How White Hat SEO can affect your website and business
How to Implement Effective White Hat SEO Tactics Without Breaking the Rules

So, What is White Hat SEO, Anyway?

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, White Hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search performance on a search engine results page (SERP)while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines' terms of service. These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. Examples include:

Offering quality content and services
Using descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
Making your site easy to navigate

Why Are White Hat SEO Techniques Important To You?

Not engaging in White Hat SEO can get your site banned from Google and other search engines!

As the number one search engine, Google is visited by hundreds of millions of people per day, and each visit presents the potential for your site to be discovered by a new user. Google is an undeniably powerful source of traffic to your website, and being banned can result in a drastic drop in website traffic and even business. Consider all the work that goes into your website and then think about what it would be like to be banned from the internet's most commonly used search engine. What's worse, once you're banned from Google, there is no guarantee that they will ever re-list you. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences.

Why risk it? Check out a complete description of Google-approved SEO techniques at Webmaster Guidelines. Google's Webmaster resources are the go-to place to learn Google white hat SEO practices.

Should You Implement White Hat SEO Methods?

Definitely! Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical, sustainably successful website and business. Does this mean you can't use automation in your search campaigns? Definitely not!

WordStream has the best of both worlds: intelligent, cutting-edge automation that makes it easier to rank your site, as well as tools like an SEO keyword tool that enable you to observe Google's guidelines. Let's revisit Google's suggestions for SEO best practices and take a look at how WordStream can help:

Offer Quality Content and Services

WordStream's Keyword Discovery Tool and Long Tail Keyword Tool provide content ideas and product enhancements. These tools work together to grow your keyword list and content suggestions by recording search queries that brought people to your website and automatically adding them to your WordStream keyword database for your review.

Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags

By organizing your keywords based on relevance, our Keyword Grouping Tool works as a guide for meta tags and meta keywords, including common misspellings and different variations of your keywords.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Use the software's Search Engine Optimization tools to visualize and implement keyword hierarchy and Information Architecture. Once keywords are grouped by relevance and popularity, it's easy to see which of your pages should receive higher prominence across your website.

At the end of the day, it's usually good to play it safe. After all, getting on Google's bad side doesn't really help anyone. White Hat SEO practices produce effective, long lasting and ethical improvements to your website and are always good business practice. However, running with the crowd has its consequences too, especially if you want your website to stand out from the competition. If you follow White Hat SEO practices in the same way everyone else does, you're not doing much to stand out, and you may not achieve the search results you desire.

What you want is a mix of White Hat and Black Hat: Think creatively to get ahead of others without breaking the rules. Learn how to think outside the box while minimizing risk on our page regarding Grey Hat SEO.

SEO DEVIL - BE OPTIMIZED

Eight ways content marketing and SEO can work together