Technology is rapidly changing and healthcare businesses are greatly relying on healthcare digital marketing to improve their reach and make services/products available to a large number of consumers. Healthcare SEO techniques help to bring more visitors to a website by making it rank high in search engines. The goal of SEO techniques is to improve traffic volume and quality of the site, and there are two major types of SEO tactics – Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. White hat techniques are a good means of improving the search engine ranking of a website since these tactics follow Google’s rules. Black hat techniques are deceptive and not approved by search engines; these are largely against the rules set down.
White Hat SEO Techniques for Safe and Effective Website Optimization
White hat optimization strategies focus more on a human audience than search engines, and follow all search engine policies and rules. Standard techniques in this category include the following.
- Good quality content: Post quality content that is share-worthy and link- worthy in order to attract the target audience. The content should be original and relevant to your niche.
- Relevant back links: According to Google’s algorithm, links leading back to your site is considered as a mark of integrity and trustworthiness. This means that the quality of the content is good and Google will reward you with higher search rankings. Offsite links should be relevant and offer similar good quality content.
- Use of effective keywords: Use of apt keywords is essential. Identify the effective and relevant keywords by researching, and use them wisely. Single keywords are not always effective. Long-tail keywords or phrases may be much more specific to your service or product, and more effective in improving your rank.
- Meta description: Meta description is a small description that appears in the search results under your page title. This description should be written for people and not search engines. It should contain relevant keywords but should not be overstuffed with keywords.
- Internal links: Linking to content within your own website is a good indicator of the value of your site. Do not overstuff internal links. Having two or three links to deep-seeded pages within your site is ideal.
Black Hat SEO Tricks – Risky Strategies Focused on Quick Results
Black hat SEO is used to achieve higher search engine rankings mostly by breaking search engine rules. These techniques have only the search engines in mind and not a human audience. These strategies may yield quick results but are risky in the sense that Google may ban your website totally for unethical techniques.
- Irrelevant keywords: Simply making your content keyword rich with irrelevant keywords is a red flag for search engines. This can lower your search ranking.
- Content automation: Content created by bots can be easily identified. Although such content contains one or two keywords that will help the URL rank higher, it is an automated comment that may not make sense to a reader.
- Invisible text: This method hides text or links within the content with a view to improve ranking. This is a common black hat technique. Adding white text on a white background, using zero size font, or hiding a link in a small character such as a hyphen are some of the strategies used.
- Cloaking: This is a deceptive strategy that presents visitors and search engines completely different content. Search engines are deceived so they display a URL that they would not have shown otherwise.
- Doorway pages: These are fake pages that are overloaded with keywords. Search engines find them easily. When these links are clicked, they automatically redirect visitors to a separate page, and so are meaningless.
Choosing the Right Healthcare SEO Techniques
White hat and black hat SEO strategies are different but they share a common goal, i.e. improve website visibility. Black hat techniques are easy and quick but they give only short term success and Google penalizes the sites using black hat techniques. White hat techniques take more time to see results but the strategy is focused on improving search performance through good quality content while always following Google’s rules. A healthcare digital marketing agency will always opt for white hat techniques to avoid any kind of risk to their client websites.
