Types of SEO

Do you know - there are four different types of SEO that help you gain visibility on search engines? It can be difficult to know how to get started with SEO – as most of the experts believe that some strategies work and some don’t. Here are the four different types of SEO to know about -

White-Hat SEO

The term ‘white hat SEO’ refers to the ethical practices and strategies that follow the rules and guidelines of reputed search engines like – Google, Yahoo and Bing.

These practices help you improve the ranking of your website on SERPs without compromising guidelines and terms of service of Google, Bing and Yahoo. The most common tactics that include –

• Best quality content
• Mobile responsiveness
• Appropriate keywords
• Descriptive title and meta description
• Easy to navigate the site
• Backlinks from high DA sites
• High-quality & optimized images
• Internal & external links

White hat SEO techniques are favourite of Google and pretty safe. However, you need to invest time to see desirable results.

If you fail to engage in white hat SEO techniques, your site is likely to be banned by Google and other reputed search engines.

Remember that Google has millions of searches every day, and each page that appears on the top of search results provides a relevant answer to the search query.

So, it is a must to stay in the GOOD BOOKs of Google – else your website will be banned by Google. Once your website is banned, it will take months or years to re-list your website.

Implementing white hat SEO practices is no doubt the best and recommended way to improve the rank of your website.   

Black-Hat SEO

The term black hat SEO refers to the unethical practices that give quick results. These are just opposite to white hat techniques and violate the search engine guidelines.

Though not following the guidelines is not an illegal activity – it is quite risky and put your website in trouble. Some of the common black hat practices are –

• Content automation
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaking
• Hidden text or links
• Reporting a competitor
• Link schemes
• Excessive keyword usage

Ideally, the black hat strategies are meant to exploit the loopholes in the Google algorithm that can improve the rank without much work.

Most of the results are short-lived. Every time there is a new update to the Google algorithm, your site is at risk of losing its ranking.

In short, it is advised not to practice black hat SEO.

Grey-Hat SEO

The term ‘Grey hat’ is not heard a lot. It is used to describe the SEO strategies that are between black hat and white hat SEO.

Grey hat SEO can work if done in the right way. Some of the common grey hat techniques are –

• Link buying
• Cloaking
• Buying old domain
• Content duplication
• Social media automation
• Purchased followers
• Social bookmarking
• Web 2.0 submission
• Guest blogging

Many grey hat SEO techniques are being practised by webmasters. However, you need to be very cautious –as one wrong move can spoil the entire SEO.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO is completely different from a black hat, white hat and grey hat SEO. It is all about using black hat or grey hat techniques on other’s website (competitor) to cause harm.

It is a real threat numerous reputed website are dealing with. Negative SEO can take different forms such as –

• Hacking your website
• Building thousands of spammy links to your website
• Copying content from your website and distributing it across multiple sites 
• Creating a fake social media profile and ruining your reputation
• Adding malware to your site
• Editing the robots.txt file

As a webmaster, the best you can do is to use the latest tools to protect your website. Also, it is advised not to involve in any activity that harms your competitor’s ranking.