This is a guest post by Glen who is a part of the NetIdnow team that helps individuals and businesses alike on how to create an online store using WebStudio Website Builder—an online store builder that allows people to make a website with or without HTML skills. Glen also enjoys sharing valuable information on SEO and Web Design.

You cannot trick search engines, or if you think you can, you are sure to find out in the next couple of months or algorithm update that your website is invisible in SERPs—and this is not even a warning but a flicker of reality. If you ever think about optimizing your website for search engines, think about creating a website that benefits users and not for search engines because once you prioritize users first, everything else will follow.

You may know how to do SEO yourself or hire a company who can, but how can you be sure that your kind of SEO works? First, it is so much advised to stay away from Black Hat SEO techniques and tricks because there’s no way that in the future it won’t be caught by the major search engines. Black Hat SEO techniques include:

• Adding Hidden Texts and Links in the Background of the Website
• Keyword stuffing
• Cloaking
• Adding duplicate contents 
• Participating in link farms

If your SEO firm suggests using Black Hat SEO techniques to make your website rank faster in Search Engine Results Page, keep in mind that the long term effects of Black Hat SEO is not irreversible. Always look for services that offer White Hat SEO.  Trust a firm that offers White Hat SEO techniques:

• Improving the quality of web content – Quality means being able to come up with a good number of words using relevant key terms related to the niche of the website or what your website offers. “Content is King” they say and it is indeed true as search engines crawl, index, and retrieve data in a very categorized and organized way to be able to give quality website suggestions to search engine users.

• Improving Titles and Meta Data – While there’s a huge debate going on for giving importance on meta data (as this was not too much of value today because of the wide spread spamming of many websites and keyword stuffing in the meta head), still, it is a good way of telling search engines on what a certain page of the website is all about. Also, it helps end users to identify your web pages because it has been properly described in the meta head. 

• Improving Images – Images are not yet being crawled through search engines yet, but since Google Search offers Google Image search, they use picture names, descriptions, and alternate texts being added to the photos in order to bring good results upon search. 

• Improving the permanent link structures – When pages are represent by this kind of URL: "http://www.badwhether.com/=?129.htm" instead of "http://www.goodweather.com/January/Utah.htm" it wouldn't be too helpful for users to understand where else in the website they are already in, plus, it would be too lousy for search engines to even consider them to crawl and index on. 

• Link Building Strategies – When you perform link building strategies for a website, always make sure you link to high quality websites (use SEOQuake or Opensiteexplorer to do some evaluation), relevant and related websites (websites that are of the same niche or related niche), and are constantly updated. 

Through constant research and application of White Hat SEO techniques, your website surely will fare well in the competitive market. Do your own keyword research and look for keywords that have a low-medium competitive level with good traffic and take cues from PPC rates if they’re worth pursuing or not. Present your research to an SEO firm and agree on rates, time of completion, et cetera. Lastly, do not expect to get a huge boost in traffic or even conversions after doing SEO after a week or two. Be patient to wait for Search Engines to catch up and eventually grade you to be the best in your chosen field.


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