One major concern of digital marketing industry players is how to scale up or generate tons of traffic to their website.

The reason digital marketers employ different marketing strategies like SEO, E-mail marketing, Pay-per-Clicks or Social Media Ads is to target possible channels of increasing traffic to their website(s) and ultimately gain more visibility for products and services.

Although each internet marketing strategy has the potential of generating more conversions and leads when targeted appropriately, however, there is the need for you to equally understand how you can achieve the same purpose without you having to pay for it.

Before getting started, I’ll like to clearly state that whichever internet marketing tool you pitch for, the main goal should be to maximize the returns of your strategy because there will definitely be trade-offs for any choice you make.

Expectedly, at the end of this well-thought article, you would have gained a good grasp of White-Hat SEO techniques and how you can annex it in boosting your blog traffic.

Voila!

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

SEO techniques are majorly divided into three parts, although the first two approach is mostly practiced by SEO experts and these includes;

• White-Hat SEO
• Black-Hat SEO
• Gray-Hat SEO

What is White-Hat SEO Tactics?

White-Hat search engine practice is the ideal or ethical SEO standards approved by leading search engines like Google and Bing for increasing the Search Engine Results Pages [SERPs].

For a company providing SEO services using White-Hat SEO techniques, it is expected that each SEO project produces the desired results while staying within the approved search engine optimization techniques.

Highlighted below are some few examples White-Hat SEO experts often employ while seeking to improve their web rankings.

Content Creation: This White-Hat technique entails the periodic creation of quality and helpful contents targeted towards specific keyword (short-tail) or group of keywords (long-tail).

As a content creator or content marketer, you must avoid activities that could infringe on the intellectual property rights of other bloggers by using their contents without properly getting an approval from the author or duly giving credit to the source of the information.

Frankly, I’m quite sure that you will not want to jeopardize your search engine reputation by engaging in such dishonest activity.

If you think you need some fresh ideas or help about how you can create helpful and fresh contents for your website, you can secure a paid service of a freelance SEO Copywriter on sites like Upwork and Fiverr.

Alternatively, you can welcome interested copywriters to contribute to your blog contents through Guest posting.

However, to avoid your blog becoming a ‘dumping site’, ensure the guest post is relevant to your blog niche and equally contribute immensely to existing knowledge.

In addition, ensure that your blog contents are relevant to prospective readers and avoid making unpardonable grammatical errors.

Web User Experience: This aspect focuses on the experience your website visitors get any time they click on your webpage results as delivered by the Search engine.

Here, the user experience is evaluated by considering the Response time or Uptime of your website including the Site speed.

Presumably, I’m quite sure that your decision to stay on this webpage is because the response time it took for you to gain access is considerably fast. If not, you would have opted out to source for another related webpage that equally provides an answer to your query.

For many global searchers, the likelihood of revisiting a website increases if they could view a webpage within considerable time-using mobile devices, Desktops or iPads.

When they fail to gain quick page access, they usually bounce or exit such a website because of the slow page time. It is recommended that your page load time should not be more than 3secs.

There are page speed testing tools available for free which can be easily employed in carrying out a page speed analysis.

Pingdom as well as google pagespeed insight tools are commonly used to give an accurate page speed or a comprehensive website performance report.

Keyword Research: For many White-hat experts, Keyword research is a fundamental SEO building process because it provides important insight into different SEO data like; the Keyword difficulty level, Keyword suggestions and the prevailing CPC bids over a specified period.

To carry out Keyword research, SEO experts often employ the use of keyword tools like Keyword.io Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Adwords Planner that provides reliable data needed to gain an exposure to keyword possibilities.

Landing Page or On-Page Optimisation: This is equally a critical element in White-Hat tactics.

Website landing page is the ‘first-call’ for a new visitor or internet user; as this makes its optimization very important to search engines.

White-hat experts often run SEO checks on a web landing page to certify that each page is optimized appropriately with choice keywords needed for a local search. This is what search engine optimizers or web developers refer to as Local SEO.


What Is Black-Hat SEO Tactics?

Black hat SEO is a contrast to White-hat SEO. It is an illegitimate tactic adopted by black-hat SEO specialists to get an improved ranking on the search engine results pages.

These tactics include purchasing links or using deceptive cloaking techniques like Keyword stuffing to outsmart search engine crawlers, traffic automation software, creating gateway pages that grab users with keywords, then redirect to another (potentially unrelated) site and infiltrating hacked sites to place content links without the approval of the actual site owner.

Nevertheless, Black-Hat practices are becoming less dominant in the digital marketing space as search engine algorithms get more sophisticated from time-to-time.

Consequences Of Black-Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat practices when discovered by the sophisticated search engine robots or crawler like Google's main crawler called-Googlebot can get your site blacklisted from search engines.

Google Webmasters guideline frowns at illegitimate SEO manipulations and has overtime penalized a lot of digital marketers who have gone against the search engine best practices.

Undeniably, the search engines remain a veritable source of traffic to your website and getting banned can result in a drastic drop in website traffic and even business.

Infact, once your website gets black-listed, the chances of your domain getting re-listed on the search engine is very unlikely. Therefore, before employing Black-Hats SEO tactics, consider the consequences.

How To Apply White-Hat SEO To Generate Blog Traffic

At this point, you will discover the practicality of White-Hat SEO practices and how SEO experts employ it to increase conversions and ultimately generate leads.

#1 Optimize Your Website For Local SEO

The impact of optimizing your website for Local SEO helps in no small measure. According to HubSpot’s report, about 46% of search engine queries is initiated by a local searcher.

Hence, if you’re a local business and you have not registered your business citations on relevant Business directories or Google business listings, you’re missing an opportunity to get found every time someone searches for specific product or services related to your business environment.

To understand how you can register on Google Business listings.

#2 Optimize Your Blog Content Appropriately.

Yes, if you are keen on ranking top on the SERPs, you need to understand how to optimize your blog content appropriately.

The Title-tags, Snippets or Meta description on the content page must be optimized with either a short-tail or long-tail keywords.

Appropriately, the Meta descriptions should not be more than 55-60 words which give a compelling overview of the body texts contained in the content.

The permalink and title tags should also be edited to reflect the choice keyword(s) so that it will assist search engine robots to quickly come to terms with what the webpage is trying to tell a visitor and ultimately index its content.

Alongside, you must carryout a keyword research to get keyword ideas before engaging in your content writing. Having many keywords to work with helps you to have a rich keyword density rather than a thin content.

#3. Link-Building Strategy

Link building strategy is an off-page optimization technique channeled towards ensuring a webpage gain more ‘page authority’ ahead of other SERPs.

White-Hat techniques for building links is highly recommended if you want to get free traffic from the search engine.

Backlinks, internal linking and Anchor texts are veritable link-building strategies that you can employ during content creation. However, as an SEO Copywriter, have it at the back of your mind that overcrowding your content with irrelevant links could put you in trouble with the search engines.

#4. Improve Your Site Mobile Experience

With the increase in the metrics of smartphone users and data consumption density, there is no doubt that optimizing or integrating your web theme for mobile responsiveness will give a better user experience which will culminate into increased web traffic.

Furthermore, it is essential that your website navigation makes a new visitor get easily familiar with what your site is all about.

A site navigation system is a website road map which guides a webpage visitor while exploring to discover the different pages and information contained within the website.

Types of Web Navigation

Basically, there are three different types of website navigation:

#1 Hierarchical Website Navigation

Here, the website architecture is designed to provide an easy navigation for a web user when he or she opts to navigate from general to specific. This helps in providing a clear, simple path to all the web pages from anywhere on the website.

#2 Global Website Navigation

Global website navigation shows the top-level sections/pages of a website. It is usually adopted by a global reach brand.

#3 Local Website Navigation

Local navigation features different hypertexts within a given web page that internally links to other pages within the website.

Features Of A Good Web Navigation System

Depending on the website you own, web navigations could be structured using different styles.

However, there are specifics that should be featured on your site navigation irrespective of the type of website you own or intend to design.
These navigation specifics include;

Navigation bar: A navigation bar or (navigation system) is a section of a website or online page which exists in helping web visitors travel seamlessly through an online document.

XML Sitemap: An XML site map (or sitemap) is a list of webpages which are accessible to web robots or crawlers including web users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design or a Web page that lists the pages on a Web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.

Dropdown menu: A drop-down menu or drop-down menu or drop-down list is a user interface control or widget like a list box, which allows the user to choose one value from a list.

Flyout menu: This menu works great with graphical user interfaces, it is a menu that swipes either down or to the side when a web user clicks or hover using a mouse.

Anchor Element: An anchor element is called an anchor because web designers can use it to hold a URL to some texts on a content page. Usually, when users view the web page in a browser, they can click the text to activate the link.

#5. Create Helpful And Write Compelling Header Titles

Ensure your content writing is well researched and targeted to solve problem’s related to your niche. You can get fresh content ideas from sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, Askthepublic and other keyword tools.

Attempt to include in each content you create other important content features like; infographics, images, webinars, and podcasts. This helps to improve user engagement while viewing the content.

On a Final Note

Increasing your blog traffic using White-Hat SEO technique will save you a lot of cash while generating organic traffic that helps you build a search engine profile and increase leads.

Although you can equally adopt other methods to drive traffic but be ready to spend some dollars especially when you are using Facebook Ads or Google AdWords, otherwise known as Search Engine Marketing [SEM].

Therefore, if you operate a long-term marketing plan for your online business, I recommend you consider learning SEO techniques or hire a freelance SEO consultant who will help manage your SEO portfolios.

However, you must keep in mind that it’s for the long-term digital marketers. If you desire a cash-cow or short-term marketing approach, SEM or Social Media Ads will be a good fit for such a strategy.


Source: https://seofingers.com/white-hat-seo/