Last Updated on Feb 25, 2020 by James W
Local Businesses Benefit from SEO
Getting customers in your door starts with local SEO. If you have a business that caters to local customers, you will benefit from skilled SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a name given to all the natural (unpaid) techniques used to help your website rank higher in searches. SEO doesn’t include techniques like paid advertising (including pay per click ads), since this will not affect natural listings that come up for search engine results. Search Engine Optimization deals with optimization techniques and tools you do to make your website more prominent in search results.
Avoid Black Hat SEO at All Costs
Not all SEO is a good thing. There is black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Black hat techniques may be effective, but they can get you banned from search engines. Common techniques like keyword stuffing, link farms, and similar things are a way of deliberately manipulating search engine results. Google and other search engines have ways of determining if your website is using white hat or black hat techniques.
Getting Banned Could Put You Out of Business
Once a website gets banned, it can take years for your website to be reinstated. In the man time, your company could go out of business. The most important thing to do is to make sure that the SEO company you are working with is very careful about what techniques they use and that they are a reputable company with a good reputation. Going with the cheapest SEO company, or the one that promises the most dramatic results, can be disastrous.
Ethical Practices Get You Ahead
When performing optimization on your site or hiring someone to do it for you, you want to only use the most ethical local SEO practices in order to avoid getting banned. It can be tempting to use black hat techniques because they often give results quickly. Good practices generally take more time than sloppy or black hat techniques.
Are they Peddling White Hat or Black Hat?
If you feel uncertain about a SEO technique suggested to you by someone, check Google’s instructions for webmasters. You can be banned by multiple search engines, and they have varying rules and guidelines. Most search engines go with the same general rules as Google (in some cases, Google is stricter), so if you abide by Google’s rules you should be safe with all search engines.
Rules to Determine if it’s White Hat or SEO
When you’re checking out Local SEO companies or determining techniques to try yourself, here are some things you can use to determine whether it is white hat or black hat. First, ask yourself if the technique is something that is trying to fool the search engine into thinking your company is something that it is not. If it is intended to deceive, it is going to be banned eventually. Your website shouldn’t contain any hidden text or hidden links. It should not be loaded with keywords or contain any duplicate content.
