White Hat Techniques to Adopt and Black Hat Techniques to Avoid

Hi, this is Rajeev Rajagopal from MedResponsive. We are Managed Outsource Solutions specifically focus on the healthcare industry, providing digital marketing and search engine optimization. Thanks for listening to our podcast.

Today we’ll just go over a few white hat techniques that are important to the site, and a few black hat SEO techniques that you should definitely avoid. Technology changes, and as technology continues to change people are trying to adopt or accommodate according to the technology, trying to see if they can trick search engines into getting more traffic into their site. There’s no tricks that works. You have to be very careful about how you try to drive traffic to your site – be very straightforward, and make sure that you follow some of the good white hat techniques to improve your search engine optimization.

Let’s cover some basic rules here:

Good quality content – Well, I don’t have to tell anybody that content is king. Post good 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 needs and to your site. Make sure the content you write are unique and not something that you pick from other websites and push towards, and try to put a page together…

Next is relevant backlinks. Again, very basic, very simple, something that has been tried and proven to be very successful for decades now, these are gonna be backlinks. According to Google or search engine algorithm, the links linking backing to your site is considered a mark of integrity or trustworthiness. This means that the quality of the content is good and Google will reward you with higher search rankings. Now how do you find good backlinks, etc? Well, I’ll cover that in another podcast.

Use of effective keywords – the keywords you use are very critical. What is your site about? Make sure the keywords are relevant to what your visitors do want or would be searching for. It is important to make sure your site is written well, and the keywords used on your site are appropriate to what your services or your products are and it is very important to do the research and do it right. Always remember, single keywords are not as effective as long tail keywords or keywords with more than one specific word in it. Maybe have two or three – they tend to work very well, and, so definitely focus on those and make sure that you do your research before you use these effective keywords.

Meta description – since, you know, people started putting up our websites, there’s always between meta title, meta description, meta keywords – there were times when meta keywords were more important than anything, times when meta titles were more important. Now, search engines have given very good value for the title and description, and description seems to be increasing in value, mainly because it basically ties your title to the content on your page and provides a visitor to your search engine a good idea of what your page is about.

So, you know, as an example, let’s say you are a physical therapy practice or a pain management practice featuring joint pain treatments and give pain treatments for the joint. Title may be “joint pain treatment in Brooklyn”, the description should really focus on the fact that you provide the treatment in which ever location you are in. So, it could be as simple as “your clinic provides joint pain treatment at Brooklyn, New York”. You could also add things such as “efficient treatment protocols”, which include physical therapy, or pain management injections, or whatever your services might be or what is reflected in your content. It is important to make sure that the tie-in between your title and the description is followed up between your title and your body of your content is followed up on your description correctly, so meta description is very important.

Internal links – many people try to link every single part of their site together. It is important to link sites, I mean, important to link pages back and forth, but within a certain limitation. It has to be something that is valuable to the visitor. So don’t link just because you want to link, link because it gives value to the user. Do not overstep internal links. Make sure these links are appropriate and, then, do it right you know, and if you think that if you visited your own site and that’s a link that you would like to go to, maybe the things that you’re visiting is about again, as I said, “joint pain”, well the next link from that page might be for “physical therapy treatments for joint pain”. Now that’s a valuable link. Now that page is linking to something else such as “migraines”, well, that’s different. You’re not looking at the right kind of traffic, the right kind of people finding the right information, so always go for that. Good information is always important.

Black hat SEO tricks that people still use, it’s interesting that you still find people using some of these which have been abolished by many good search engine optimization firms.

Irrelevant keywords – you think certain keywords are important, but guess what, what you think is not what’s important, what your visitors think is important. It is critical to know, your visitors might be looking for something very specific, and providing them the right information on your site with the right keyword is very important. Do not try to stuff keywords onto a page because it’s a red flag. Be very careful and make sure that you are writing your content for the type of visitors you want to come to your site.Content automation – Do not use bots or companies that will tell you that they can bring made content for you in a heartbeat by using certain software, etc. because they do not check for proper grammar, sometimes there are issues with content being copied from other sites, so basically you’ll get penalty because you’re taking the content from another site. Be very careful. Make sure that the content is unique and is written correctly for the visitor.

Invisible text – I don’t want to go into details of how it’s done other than do not put something on your page which only the search engines can see and not your visitors. That’s invisible text – it’s been abolished for a very long time and I still find people using it and it’s not a good thing. It will get you caught and you’ll get penalized by the search engines.

Do not cloak. Cloaking is a very deceptive strategy that’s been used over the past few years, and it’s not a good thing. Cloaking is when you present visitors and search engines completely different content. You write a specific content for search engines and visitors come and they see something that’s completely different. This is not a good thing. It’s deceiving. It’s not something that search engines like and this will be penalized right away.

Doorway pages or doorway domains – People add pages that, you know, they write for search engines, overload it with keywords, search engines find them easily. When somebody clicks on it, immediately redirects them to another page or another domain. That’s not a good thing. You do that, well, you do that at your risk, and you will definitely get penalized. These robots search engines use are very intelligent and when it comes to search engine optimization, make sure that you follow the techniques that are correct.

White hat techniques are very important to be followed. Black hat techniques are not good. So make sure that you follow the right techniques, do the right thing. Yes, it takes time. There’s no shortcut to any of this. Hard work is what gets you good results on search engines. Good luck as you continue to optimize your site, and hope you have a great strategy and if you do need any help, definitely look out for a good search engine optimization or a digital marketing firm that can help you. Thank you all.