If you’re familiar with SEO, then you should know that it means search engine optimization. To put it simply, it is the full optimization of a website so that it ranks at the top of search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

In the past decade, SEO has become increasingly difficult due to the fact that search engines are constantly being tweaked and improved. This is done so that the highest quality content is served on the first page and the top spots.

The most popular and widely used search engine, Google, is known for constantly improving its algorithm to spot deceptive SEO tactics and penalize those websites. SEOs and webmasters typically try their best to get their websites on the top spots because these get the most amount of traffic. This directly relates to more customers and revenue.

With that said, we will now take a closer look at the differences between white hat and black hat SEO.

White hat SEO simply refers to SEO practices that are in line with what search engines want. These are the particular on-page and off-page optimizations that they approve of according to their webmaster guidelines as being acceptable and non-manipulative.

Black hat SEO on the other hand are SEO practices that are not approved by search engines and these practices are seen as wrong and manipulative. As a result, once a search engine determines that you’re using black hat SEO practices, they will penalize your website by either de-indexing pages, reducing traffic, reducing rankings, etc.

Now, you may be wondering, why would anyone do black hat SEO as opposed to simply following the rules and doing white hat SEO. Well, for one, black hat SEO is very effective and it works relatively quickly. It takes advantage of the search engine algorithm to quickly achieve high rankings and traffic for a website.

In some cases, black hat SEO also takes advantage of other websites in morally wrong ways. For example, one popular black hat SEO strategy is to get SAPE links. These are links that are purchased from SAPE link providers who essentially hack other popular and powerful websites and insert a link back to the buyer’s website without the hacked website owner’s knowledge.

This is very effective because these types of links are usually from websites that are highly authoritative with a great deal of domain authority. As a result, they boost the ranking of the linked-to website, quite quickly.

However, these links are morally wrong on the basis that the SEO is hacking another person’s website and placing a link there that they did not approve of. This can have many negative effects on that website in the long run.

Another popular black hat SEO strategy that is not as morally wrong as getting hacked backlinks/SAPE links is building PBNs. This stands for private blog networks and they are essentially websites that are built for the only purpose of providing high-quality links to websites that an SEO is trying to rank.

Basically, the SEO would purchase an expired domain that has high SEO metrics such as a high DA or DR, quality backlinks, etc. Then, they would build out a website that is in the same niche or a similar niche of their main website. Once that is complete, they will simply link back to their main website from this PBN website so that some of the power and “link juice” from that website would transfer to their main website, thus boosting its rankings.

Google and other search engines have a huge issue with these links and they actively seek out and de-index PBNs and penalize sites that have PBN links as this is seen as cheating the algorithm.

Now, you may be wondering, what is white hat SEO and how is it different from black hat SEO. As mentioned previously, white hat SEO follows search engine guidelines of what is acceptable. So, for one, good on-page optimization is at the core of white hat SEO. This means thoroughly optimizing each of the pages of your site for its keywords, including optimizing images, improving site speed, etc.

When it comes to getting backlinks, Google and other search engines approve of natural linking patterns to related websites. You should develop relationships with other website owners in your niche and naturally link through working together.

This can be done through email outreach, social media mentions, etc. The main difference between white hat optimization and black hat is that it is done with good intentions and to build an authentic rapport and relationship with your website and other related websites.

To wrap things up, the difference between white hat and black hat SEO is quite significant. It is highly recommended that you take a white hat approach simply because it is the right thing to do in most cases and it also helps to protect your website from getting penalized by search engines. This will help to protect your website and ensure that you keep on getting organic traffic.

Many people have heard the term Search Engine Optimization flipped around more commonly than the 5-dollar-bill. Everywhere you turn you hear, “Looking for better online rankings? It’s SEO”, “Do you want to reach your marketing goals and improve ROIs? SEO is the way to go” and other exciting hype. Many people are beginning to wonder if SEO is not yesterday’s news and maybe no longer a smart investment.

Well, if you have been asking yourself if SEO is a good investment, the short answer would be a resounding, Yes! Affirmative, SEO is critical to the modern business both great and small.

But, be the judge yourself.

In the following article, we have compiled the most important reasons SEO should form an integral part of your marketing efforts today. Take time to consider how your brand could benefit from SEO investment.

Top 5 Reasons SEO is a Valuable Investment to the Modern Business Small and Great.

1. Websites to Target Your Audience

You make think that SEO is just some hocus pocus where ordained adjusters leave libations for the great search engine spirits, but that’s only a very small part of the entire production.

A good portion of SEO work is designed to create an exquisite online experience.

This involves websites that will have the greatest capacity to engage your target audience and attract a dedicated following of visitors.

To do this takes some skill and expertise in building this kind of online fervor. But, the final result pulls a brand from obscurity and introduces it to the exact pool of customers looking for the services and products provided.

Because the website sits at the very heart of your online marketing efforts this is where all the adjustments must begin.

When a website and online presence provides an audience with value, they are far more likely to return and even make recommendations to friends and colleagues. This begins to create an authority for your brand within its marketing niche and brings us to our next important benefit from SEO investment.

2. Build Brand Awareness

As the prominence of your brand within its niche begins to improve the search engines will take notice and begin sending more traffic your way.

This is where an important fact of marketing psychology comes into play. For better or worse, a place first in a list it will get more attention than a business that comes in last place. This fact was exemplified in the days of yore when the phone book was the primary business directory.

Back then, “Zachariah’s Pizzeria” could never compete with “Aaron’s Pizza Shack” simply because of the alphabetical listing.

In the online markets, this truth is taken to a whole new level. Those brands that place high in the search engine’s rankings are considered to be widely respected, highly valuable, and well-established in their industry.

These elements engender feelings of trust and, if done just right, builds familiarity between brand and customer. And these are other factors that play very highly in a customer’s preference of one brand over another – that’s just Marketing Psychology 101.

3. Attract MORE Customers

But, what was mentioned above is only the developmental stages of your long term SEO campaign. It will not be long before the seed matures into a fruit-bearing vineyard and the real benefits of SEO begin to ripen. This will begin with the increased online attention you will be receiving.

Obviously, not every curious visitor who stumbles into your digital market stall is going to be a paying customer, but when beating out the competition, every curious passerby counts.

Furthermore, this initial increase in traffic will further attract the attention of the search engines who endow their SEO adherents with special god-favor – coming up in the next section.

4. Better Conversion Rates

The cherry on the top of your cache of benefits from SEO investment is high-quality targeted traffic. This is when the search engines choose your products and services out of the many for the greatest relevance to the most competitive ranking keywords in your niche.

This means you will be attracting a crowd that has already made their intentions to make business clear by entering their search query.

For example, it isn’t such a stretch of the imagination that a person who enters the keywords “windshield repair the Bronx FAST” is probably in a hurry to find a suitable repairman to fix their vehicle’s windshield in an important NYC borough.

All that is left is to match the customer to the business who can offer the right services, at the right price and in the right time frame. This brings us all the way back to crafting a super-effective website that can close the deal.

Final Notes on SEO Investment

One final thought on the importance of SEO is that the vast majority of customers today perform their searches and make their consumer purchases from information gleaned online.

This means that if there is even the slightest chance that your competition is marketing online and fine-tuning their online presence with SEO, you stand to lose customers and profits as they attract more attention.

You want as many visitors as possible on your site, regardless if you aim to inform and entertain readers, promote your skills, sell products or services. Simply put, the more people come to your site, the easier it will be to build an audience in your target market that you can count on.

But where do you start? There are numerous ways of driving traffic to your website, and SEO or search engine optimization is one of the most effective. SEO is a collection of techniques and strategies that help web pages rank higher in the search engines. What more is that there are numerous ways to improve your website’s SEO, even if you are a novice and we are going to explore a number in this read:

Pick Your Hosting Provider Carefully

The web hosting provider you choose is crucial for search engine optimization. Since search engines put speed into consideration when ranking websites, an ideal host can boost your rankings in the SERPs. The host ideally affects the amount of downtime your website experiences and the distance between visitors and servers, both of which are site ranking factors.

If you have not published your WordPress site yet, you will want to pick one that is reliable and has a reputation for an excellent performance. Even for an existing one, you may want to consider switching if the current hosting provider does not meet these criteria.

Choose a Theme That is Optimized for Search Engines

The theme is one of the most crucial choices you will make for your website. It determines the appearance and layout of your site, give new functionality, and even plays a role in its SEO. Your theme, for example, can affect the website’s speed, which, as mentioned earlier, is important. How a theme was developed ideally matters as clean code provides the best chance in search engine results pages.

As such, you will want to go for a theme that is built with SEO in mind. Such themes are referred to as “SEO-friendly”. Ideally, search for a theme that has features specifically designed to enhance SEO like heading tag options. Luckily, numerous WordPress themes match these requirements.

Optimize For Mobile

When it comes to browsing, mobile is king. Most people browse on their smartphones and tablets more than on desktops, and this will only increase as phone and voice search becomes better.

Search engines know this and tend to reward mobile-friendly websites with better rankings. And this makes sense as Google’s primary goal is to give the best experience to end-users. So, it’s imperative to ensure your site is usable on mobile as well.

The easiest way to achieve this is by picking a mobile-friendly WordPress theme. However, if you do not wish to switch themes, you can use a professional web designer to make it happen.

Build Content Around Keywords

There is a good chance you have come across the concept of keywords. These are terms that describe your topic’s content. For instance, you might pick the keyword ‘marketing tips’ for a post that shares several options for marketing online or offline. By doing this, you are simply predicting that people will type this term into Googe, Bing, etc when looking for such information.

Picking a keyword for every post and using it in various sections is a common means of communicating your topic to crawlers and boosts the chances of showing your content in the relevant searches. However, you will want to be smart when implementing this. Avoid keyword stuffing or forcing the phrases in places where they sound unnatural.

Numerous SEO tools can help you get started, SEMrush being an excellent example. This tool helps you do keyword research, backlink analysis, track your rankings over time, and even analyze your site for search engine optimization issues.

Optimize Images

Images are essential for almost every site. They give context, and visual appeal, as well as help, break up text to make it more readable. As you might have already guessed, they can also boost your SEO efforts when optimized properly. For starters, the size and quality of the images can affect the loading speed of the site. Ideally, crawlers will access particular information attached to the images like alt text and filename when indexing the site.

Addressing these aspects can go a long way in boosting your SEO efforts. Ensure you optimize the images and other media to have the least impact on performance. Next, give every image a descriptive alt text and file name.

Conclusion

This is by no means a comprehensive read on WordPress SEO, but the tips mentioned above are some of the most effective. It is important that you implement them today to ensure you have better exposure and a chance of getting more visitors.

If you have read anything about SEO over the past few months, you must know by now that website speed is a ranking factor. Visitors have a low attention span these days which means they want everything to be instant. This also means that your website should load almost instantly. If it doesn’t, there is a higher chance that your website won’t get any traffic from search engines.

You can write as much high-quality content as you want but if the website is not optimized for quick loading, your content will never reach its intended audience. After all, your competitor is just a click away.

Google has categorically said that loading speed is now a ranking factor. In fact, it is a more important ranking factor than commonly understood. Websites should not only load fast for users but you should know that loading time also influences crawling.

Speed optimization has a much bigger impact on bigger sites. Bigger sites have to think about crawl rate and crawl budget in addition to user experience. A fast loading website means Googlebot will visit your website more often.

Fast loading websites result in better user experience which, in turn, leads to higher conversion rates and a reduction in bounce rates. It also helps in building brand loyalty and trust. User experience is also a ranking factor and a fast loading website means better user experience which means people will come back to your website more often.

Tips to Boost Website Load Time

1. Reduce HTTP Requests

Whenever a browser fetches an image, page or a file from a web server, it is counted as an HTTP request. Research suggests that almost 80% of the load time of a web page is taken up by these requests. Also, modern browsers limit simultaneous connections for a domain from 4 to 8 which means if there are more than 25 HTTP requests at the same time, your web page will take a long time to load.

One of the ways to reduce HTTP requests is to combine all the JavaScript and CSS files. It can be complicated but merging all these files will help in improving the load times.

Another way to reduce requests is to use conditional statements to load only what is needed. For instance, some scripts are required only on mobiles whereas some images need to be loaded only on desktop. Conditional statements can be used to achieve this objective. You should also try to get rid of irrelevant images, especially heavy once.

2. Make Use of Content Delivery Networks

Simply put, a CDN is nothing but a collection of web servers that allow content to be distributed across multiple locations for more efficient delivery to users. These are typically meant for static content.

There are several CDN providers. In fact, there are some free CDN that can be utilized for cheap or for free by smaller websites. Using CDNs is straightforward as all the companies provide the necessary documentation to upload static content to CDN servers.

3. Image and File Optimization

Use image optimization software for optimizing all the images on your website. Several images can be easily replicated with CSS which will help in reducing the file size. In case you have downloaded stock photos and uploaded them straight to the server without optimization, use optimization software to reduce the file size.

As far as using a particular type of images, use SVG for vector images, PNG for images that need transparent background and JPG for images where fine details are not that important.

4. Compress Bulky Pages

All webpages above 100 KB in size are considered bulky and require a lot more time to download. It is recommended to compress these pages by converting them into RAR files. When a browser requests a file from the server, the server will send the RAR file which will be expanded by the browser to display on the screen. This alone has the potential to increase website speed by almost 70%.

5. Enable Cache

Certain elements of a webpage such as images and layouts are stored in internal storage. It is recommended to enable cache to increase the website loading speed for your regular visitors. It has the potential to increase the site speed by up to 40% for your regular visitors.

6. Minify CSS and JavaScript

It is the process of getting rid of all the unnecessary characters from stylesheets and JavaScript without making any changes to the functionality. It’s easy to minify the stylesheet and JavaScript with the help of several online tools. Minification will help in reducing the overall file size which, in turn, will lead to reduced website loading times.

Conclusion

Overall, website load time is an important ranking factor and it is completely under your control. Make use of the above-mentioned tips to reduce the website loading time. You should also use free online tools such as Google Insights to figure out things you can do to further reduce the website loading time and improve the SEO of your website.