The 3 different types of SEO techniques

White Hat SEO

• What Is White Hat SEO?
  
  White Hat SEO is a type of SEO technique that uses strategies that focus on organic rankings. They often employ the use of ethical backlinking, link building, valuable content creation, keyword research, and keyword analysis.
  
  It is considered the safest way to boost your traffic because it follows the proper rules and strategies for Search Engine Optimization.
   
• What are the Ethical Strategies Under White Hat SEO?
  
  Research & Analysis
  
  Research and Analysis can be time-consuming, but it can go a long way. This technique allows you to know the perception of your chosen audience. It will give you an idea of what keywords are they using when they are browsing in search engines. Many SEO companies rely on keywords to rank well and choosing the right keywords can make or break your campaign.
  
  Audit-initial analysis client
  
  The Audit-initial analysis is a technique where you get an initial audit of your website. This will determine which part of your website needs further optimization. It allows you to know what are the issues that are hindering your website’s traffic.  You can hardly fix anything if you don’t know what needs fixing. Thus, it’s important to integrate the proper SEO auditing tactics that work.
  
  Competitor Research
  
  Competitor Research is one of the important points when you are initially starting your SEO campaign. This technique allows you to understand your competitors. It also allows you to understand what are their lapses in their campaign. Competitor research can make you understand how you can improve your traffic, keywords, and backlinks gap. It helps you determine where you stand and where you should go.
  
  SEO Friendly Website
  
  As you start to create your website, make sure that it is SEO friendly. If your website is SEO-friendly, it is easier to increase your customer base and revenue.
  
  To make your website SEO-friendly, you should make your content indexable. Also, on top of making your website attractive to actual human visitors, you should also create a strategy that attracts the search engine crawlers. Learn how to think from the search engine’s perspective. Your links should also have crawlable structures. When adding images, make sure that these are optimized to ensure that your website won’t take too much time to load. If you are using keywords, they should be mapped out properly. The bottom line is to make your website alluring both for human users and search engine bots.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

The online marketing sphere is a dog-eat-dog world. Thus, some websites are tempted to resort to the unethical means of Search Engine Optimization, which is commonly called Black Hat SEO. It includes techniques that are aggressive in nature and are not devised chiefly for the human audience but for the search engine, which usually breaks the rules of the major search engines like Google. And since they are against the ethical guidelines, sites which make use of Black Hat strategies suffer from grave consequences, making their SEO success even harder to achieve.

Here are Black Hat SEO techniques that you should avoid if you want lasting SEO results that can give your site an enduring extent of perks.

• Cloaking
  
  Cloaking is an SEO strategy wherein the content presented on a page is different from the content seen by search engine bots. Some examples include:
  
  - Displaying a page of HTML text to search engine crawlers but showing only a page of Flash or images to users.
  - Inserting keywords or texts into a page only if the user-agent that requests the page is a search engine spider and not an actual human user.

This tactic deceives search engines, and if caught, websites which use this black hat technique are bound to get penalized.

• Hidden Text
  
  This includes putting illegible text right at the bottom of a page, making the textual content the same color as the page’s background, or formatting images or texts as links which are not visually detectable. You should only put texts that are intended to be read. Do contrast the text with your background color to make any content visible. If not, you will do more harm than good to your precious website.
   
• Duplicate Content
  
  Merely copy-pasting content is one of the usual Black Hat SEO strategies. You shouldn’t even attempt duplicating content as Google can track it almost instantly. You should make high-quality and original content not used elsewhere. Use plagiarism tools to ensure originality before posting your content. You can hire freelance writers to create original and high-value content for you.
   
• Keyword Density
  
  There is a huge difference between keyword usage and keyword stuffing. It’s important to use keywords in your articles, but you should not use them too excessively. Instead of integrating the same keyword multiple times, try making use of a variety of related long-tail keywords instead.
   
• Doorway pages
  
  These pages are particularly designed to rank well in search engines. These pages are sometimes unattractive, merely containing meaningless paragraphs. Most of these pages are orphaned pages (not part of the website’s normal navigation). Most of these doorway pages are created by software applications in which most of the content is just mere duplicates of the existing pages (except that the keywords are swapped out).
   
• Orphan Page
  
  An orphan page is somehow similar to a doorway page. It’s not linked to from any other page and can hardly be accessed. If you have orphan pages which don’t serve any purpose anymore, do clean them up as having useless orphan pages could affect your SEO ranking negatively since it’s hard for Google to crawl them and figure out what they are about.
   
• Backlinks from an irrelevant page or doorway page
  
  Link building is an important aspect of SEO. However, it should be done naturally and effectively. The websites pointing to your pages should be relevant and related to your niche. Also, they shouldn’t be doorway pages as Google can detect them. To generate organic backlinks, work on making your content valuable and shareable. Also, your link building strategies should only involve high-quality and relevant sites that add value to your campaign.
   
• Paid backlinks
  
  Google’s algorithm is so sophisticated that it can recognize paid link farm directories and forfeit the paid links generated by these paid directories. So, even if you buy thousands of links from them, the count could still be zero. Plus, Google could punish sites which breed paid backlinks.

Grey Hat SEO

What is Gray Hat SEO?

The Gray Hat SEO is a strategy involving a set of practices or techniques that are still considered illegal. But if you use this technique wisely, it can still yield an extent of effectiveness.  It is important that you have an in-depth idea of what Gray Hat is. Some people don’t usually use this technique because it often changes. Some techniques this year may be considered White or Black Hat a year after.

Techniques that you can use under Gray Hat

• Social Media Automation and Buying Followers
  
  This technique refers to buying followers and likes in social media accounts. This is a good idea to build your brand reputation, especially for startups.  Many people usually consider buying followers, so they can boost their chances of eventually attracting more organic followers. However, the problem with this technique is that there is no immediate engagement happening between the account holder and its followers. It can also risk malware issues between the bots and the organic followers.
   
• Buying Old Domains
  
  Some people also purchase old and expired domains.  Old domains are useful primarily if they have been used for SEO purposes before. When buying old domains, make sure that their old keywords are relevant to your campaign. You can also place several backlinks on the site. Make sure that they are visible to your audience. The contents should be new and must have a high-quality that is related to the campaign of the old site. Then, use AdWords on the content and use satellite SEO to ensure that your trust rank will go up.
   
• Paid Reviews
  
  Another technique that you can use is paying people to make a review. Some website owners are considering to hire people to create a review for them for a specific price. These reviews can be beneficial especially if they effectively promote the products or services of the site.
   
• Using Charity Links as Paid Links
  
  This technique involves giving small donations to relevant charities. After doing so, you can make a content that promotes the endeavor and goals of the charity. Make sure that you attach the link to the page where they can make the donation.  You can then ask the charity to link back to you.
  
  Apparently, White Hat SEO techniques are the safest way to approach your SEO campaign. Black Hat and Grey Hat SEO have their fair share of risks. Thus, assess your SEO goals well and see which strategies you’re willing to take. Work with the right SEO specialists and invest in establishing an effective SEO strategy that can truly get you to the top.