SEO rules and standards: white hats, black hats – how to skyrocket or ruin your website

As online marketing is gaining more ground, keeping up the pace seems to be impossible for some marketers. Some call it natural selection and are happy with it, while others are forced to shut down their websites because it’s no longer profitable for them to support the maintenance of the site. If you ask me, it all comes down to knowledge and skills; rules and standards.

We’re living in an age defined by information and speed. The good side is that all of us have access to both of them. In the earlier times, when industry ruled, things were a little different and the knowledge was passed down from one generation to another in a more limited way.

Now, it’s about how you deal with changes and how well you manage to absorb and apply information.

Any online business starts with a good customer experience. If you want your business to last, then you must make sure the customer experience is unforgettable – that the user finds it easy to navigate around your website, that they find everything they need – and even things they didn’t know they needed until they stumbled across them on your website.

But how can you measure the satisfaction of your visitors without risking ruining your stats? How can you know if they like it or not before they visit your site?

The answer is simple, and it’s a metric you’re rather forced to consider; SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. This is one of the greatest tools that online marketing offers, and it can work for or against you. Once again, it all comes down to your knowledge and skills, so if you are not inform about SEO, it is best to get into a SEO for beginners class.

SEO is a process initiated by a search engine to evaluate every website. There are specific criteria that are verified through crawlers (bots that are specially designed for this task), and each of them gets scored. If the overall score of your website is positive, you’re on the right track. If not, it means you still have some work to do.

To view the full infographic, click on the image.

One thing you do need to know about SEO is that search engines constantly change the algorithms that determine how trustworthy a website is. Google, for instance – which leads the search engines market – has stated that it updates its algorithms as often as twice a day. Therefore, if you want to stay in the online business for the long run, there’s no second guessing about complying with the standards. Either you ‘play by the rules’ or you’re considered irrelevant to your niche – and your website (and business!) won’t last long.

To make matters clear, the team at SEOJury has created an infographic with SEO dos and don’ts that will definitely help you optimise your website for best results. But let’s go the extra mile and look at some examples of sites that have their SEO game on point, and some of those that don’t reach their maximum potential in gaining organic traffic.

Best examples of White Hat SEO practices

Three of the elements that weigh the most in SEO are Headings (and Subheadings as well), Content (and Keywords) and the Call-to-Action (CTA) button. If you want a starting point to evaluate your website, this is it.

1. SproutSocial.com This is a great example of SEO optimisation because, once you access this website, everything is where it’s supposed to be: there are multiple call-to-action buttons throughout the page and the message is concise: START YOUR FREE TRIAL. The headings are brief and succinct: ‘Powerful Social Media Software’, ‘Social Media Management Made Easy’ and, most important, ‘No credit card required, no software to install’.  Basically, you can understand from the headings everything you need to know in order to take the next step (or not, if this is not what you’re looking for). There is no wordiness or vagueness. As simple as that!
2. Shopify.com According to Google, Shopify is the best SEO optimised website in the e-commerce niche. What makes it amazing? It has an average loading time of 0.89 seconds, the benchmark being 2 seconds or less. It might not seem like there’s a big difference, but every millisecond counts when you have lots of visitors stressing your server’s capacity. Secondly, the headlines state clearly what you’ll find on the website: ‘The e-commerce platform made for you. Whether you sell online, on social media, in store or out of the trunk of your car, Shopify has you covered.’ The menu bar includes all the topics you could be interested in – Ways to sell, Pricing, Blogs, Resources, Help Center, Log In and the CTA button – ‘Get Started’. There is a brief description of the advantages you get by using the site and the CTA button is associated with each one. This means the visitors don’t have to scroll endlessly to sign up if they’ve decided to do so.

Famous cases of Black Hat SEO practices

SEO is all about attracting organic traffic, but if you’re trying to do it by cheating the rules, you will get penalised or even banned. That’s what happened to BMW and the BBC.

In 2006, BMW.com was no longer indexed by Google because it was caught stuffing keywords that were meant to direct the users to the website. The ban was lifted only after BMW removed all the pages that didn’t comply.

BBC.com had an easier penalty to face – they were suspected of using too many unnatural links on their site, for which some of the pages were penalised, lowering the average score of the website.

SEO rules and standards

In conclusion, there are some rules and standards that apply to all sites on the internet, even the best-known ones. There are no short cuts to the top five results in Google, and if you think you can cut corners once you get there, BMW and BBC stand as proof that you can’t.

All it takes is knowing your audience and delivering exactly what they’re searching for. And most of them want the same thing: great quality content that is easily accessible.

Have an opinion on this article? Please join in the discussion: the GMA is a community of data driven marketers and YOUR opinion counts.

Read also:

SEO copywriting: 10 tools to optimise content for search engines and readers

How to find keywords that convert: 4 routes for quality traffic