How to Get Better Rankings (without Falling for Black-Hat)

Let’s tell you a bitter truth you may not be aware of: There’s a thin line between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO.

The former is not just about following Google’s guidelines. It’s also about delivering an optimal user experience and knowing what black-hat SEO is and is not.

This post is aimed to solve most of your confusions, if not all, and to discuss how you can unleash the maximum potential of SEO and actually turn visitors into clients.

Be linkable

This doesn’t mean doing all the spammy things in the world to get people link to you. Guess what? People won’t link to you until they find something terribly valuable, because there’s already enough crap on the Web.

This means delivering content that provides value … creating design that establishes trust and lowers bounce rate … architecting navigation that’s intuitive and user friendly … being something that people are looking out for … and above all, selling products/services that’re worth it all.

Get those hard links

We recently did a post on link building, in which we discussed why building links is not a sketchy activity and covered some high-quality ways to build hard links.

Though we didn’t talk at length about link spamming, we touched the tip of the iceberg:

“Well, Google doesn’t say so but they don’t mind if you invest your efforts in building high-quality links … Google just doesn’t want you to indulge in link spamming or buying do-follow links for search manipulation”.

Link spamming is creation low-quality backlinks (often of one kind) in order to trick rankings. It can be done in many, many ways: Article marketing. Link wheels. Link exchanges. Press release syndication. Directory links. Comment Spam. Forum spam. Social bookmarking spam. Sponsored do-follow links. And counting…

Is it bad to optimize anchor texts, you ask? You need to understand three things here: First, your site rankings thrive on link diversity and not on links of just one kind.

Second, it’s just bad to obsessively optimize anchor texts and to hyperlink to content that doesn’t provide much value.

Third, being on visitors’ side means you’re on Google’s side. See, Google aims at providing the best possible answers to its users. By taking care of your target audience, you inevitably take care of a section of Google’s visitors, too.

Also Read: How To Improve Ranking Of Online Betting Sites On SERP?

Get better and better at social

Social signals today more than ever have become an integral part of SEO. And with a good reason: Search engines not just want to know if your content is great – they want to know whether it wows your target audience and make them click the share button.

And for those who don’t know, search engines are intelligent enough to track whether your likes and shares are genuine. So rather than investing in fake likes and shares, invest in creating sharable content.

Here’re some must-read posts on how to leverage social media:

3 Social Media Tactics That Work in 2013

Preparing For The Be All And End All Social

Is Google Plus the Best Way to Rank in 2013?

How do you pave your way to the top? We look forward to hearing from you.