Why ethical SEO is the key to growing your blog’s audience

When you’re starting out as a blogger, it can feel like the deck is stacked against you. It’s frustrating to pour tons of effort into a blog only to have your hard work pass unnoticed. Proper SEO can offer a route out of the doldrums, and there are plenty of legitimate strategies that can help you boost your blog’s place in search results. But not everyone is content to play by the rules. Some creators are willing to push the envelope and this is where black hat SEO enters the picture.?

What is SEO?

Search engines like Google and Bing are an essential component of the modern Internet. Without them, it would be far more difficult to navigate cyberspace since we could only visit a site if we knew its address. But the Web is mind bogglingly vast (there are approximately 600 million blogs out there), and even the most chronically online among us have only experienced a minute fraction of the content it offers.?

Search engines have come to play the role of a guide. We tell them what we’re looking for, be it cheap flights to Orlando, the Golden Horus name of Ramesses III, or the identity of that scary-looking bug you found in your bathroom. In response, they present us with a list of (hopefully) relevant results, with the ones at the top being the ones the search engine thinks will be the most useful to you. To create these rankings, the search engine has to analyze each potential result. Therefore, SEO is all about helping them understand why your site deserves a higher place on the list.???

SEO strategies

One thing to bear in mind is that SEO isn’t eternal and unchanging. On the contrary, it’s constantly evolving, shaped by both technological change and the desire of developers to give their search engines a competitive edge. Typical SEO strategies revolve around the strategic use of keywords and the use of links, both internal and external.?

White hat SEO vs. black hat SEO

Different search engines have different rules for evaluating content. SEO strategies that adhere to these rules are classified as white hat SEO. An example of this would be making sure that your site measures up to Google’s EEAT framework.?

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, doesn’t care as much about the rules, or it tries to game the system by following the letter of the law rather than its spirit. These strategies can include:

• Keyword stuffing. White hat SEO only uses keywords that are actually relevant to your content whereas black hat SEO uses the most popular keywords even if they’re only tenuously connected to the content. A colleague of mine once worked for a news website that was addicted to keyword stuffing. When he wrote a review of Diablo III, the post was tagged with irrelevant keywords like “Lamborghini Diablo.” Keyword stuffing can also result in unnatural prose since these terms are often repeated ad nauseam in the text.

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