This week I thought I would show the good side of SEO and the bad. When doing SEO there is the good, the bad and the ugly.

When doing SEO for your blog, it’s important to know the different between the good and the bad. I will be detailing you the different between what is known as white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

Good SEO:

Good SEO is when you are doing white hat SEO for your blog. So you are not spamming or doing any bad practice that will penalize your site. In my experience I feel good SEO practice does help your site ranks more naturally and you don’t need to resort to cheating/spamming your way on SERP (search engine result page).

How to do Good SEO:

Doing Good/white hat SEO is really simple and not doubt you are doing a lot of these already:

• Using Yoast SEO Plugins and hitting the green light.
• Using Google Webmaster Console.
• Doing proper Keywords research using Google Keyword Tool.
• Not keyword stuffing your site.
• Using the proper technique of the No/do Follow rules.
• Write original contents.
• Has easy site navigation.
• Using proper Meta tags and descriptions.
• Using the alt tag on all images.
• Made the site responsive.
• Using social media platforms to help bring your traffic.

I would also like to note that good white hat SEO will also double your traffic, so if you do care about your blog traffic – do these techniques. I will also like to note that these techniques will also stop your site being penalize on Google.

Bad SEO:

As you can expect, Bad SEO is the complete opposite of white hat. In my experience bad SEO is when the webmaster wants their website to be on the front page of Google using the fastest, quickest method possible. I once had a client who wanted to rank on page 1 of google with 50 different keywords! And he wanted it done within a month!! This client wouldn’t give me a budget (so I couldn’t advertise on Google AdWords) and he wanted it to be done ASAP.  I actually walked out as I wasn’t prepared to go down the black hat route and spam a site just for some fast result.

How to Do avoid Bad SEO:

• Keywords stuffing. When every other sentences are using the keyword you want to rank for.
• Not following the no/do follow rules, and only using do follow on all links.
• Using SEO website directory. That a big no no.
• Not writing fresh content.
• Using invisible links. A link that is visible to the reader but will be picked up by the search engine.
• Spam comments.
• Had hard to understand site navigation.
• Spam your social media platforms with links to your site.
• Having fake news widget within your blog post.
• Keywords stuffing your alt tags.
• Keywords stuffing your meta tags and descriptions.
• Using unrelated keywords that doesn’t relate to your site.

As I said last week, those Google bots are very clever and they will pick on the tiniest details, so don’t ever try to fool them. It will only bite back and it can get nasty.

Ugly SEO:

There also a term called, grey SEO. This is when you combined both good and bad SEO to get the result you want. It a grey area and I tend to avoid it. I believe Google is cutting down on this term and has started penalizing sites that go down this route.

Overall:

That is just a general summery of good and bad SEO, there are more details information online. But I wanted to show you the techniques that will stop your site being penalize and how you can easily improve your site SEO.

I will once again leave it as an open discussion on my comments, if you got any questions or if you are stuck: then feel free to ask.