White hat vs black hat SEO
“White hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.
“Black hat SEO” refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.
Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It’s just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Don’t deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Things to avoid:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Hidden text and links
- Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
- Keep page titles clear and relevant.
- Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.
- Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
- Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.
- Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.
Things to avoid:
- Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
- Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
- Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
- Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
- Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
- Duplicate content
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
Guidelines for representing your local business on Google
If the business for which you perform SEO work operates locally, either out of a storefront or drives to customers’ locations to perform service, it qualifies for a Google My Business listing. For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings.
Basic principles:
- Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
- Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.
Things to avoid
- Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
- Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses
- Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
- Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
SEO Pricing
The cost of SEO services with Niospace can vary depending on a few factors. Below, we’ll outline the main considerations we review when determining pricing :
- Keywords Of Interest
The type of business you’re in and who your customers are usually affect the keywords you’ll need to target. If you’re a local services company, the keyword you’ll be targeting often includes a city or region, making them much less competitive than a website looking to rank nationwide. Highly searched keywords with a lot of competition require more work to rank for, meaning the hours we have to put in increase as does the monthly cost of the WordPress SEO campaign. - Current Ranking Positions
Moving from page two of Google to the top of page one is much easier than going from page fifty to page one. Your current position will affect the amount of effort needed to land the positions you need to drive traffic. - eCommerce vs. Lead Generation
eCommerce websites often have hundreds of pages, if not thousands of products, making the optimization of the entire website a larger project. The bigger the eCommerce website, the more time-consuming the SEO campaign. With that being said, lead generation campaigns for highly competitive keywords can also provide their own challenges. - History of SEO Performance
If you’re currently on an upward trajectory, often SEO goals are easier to achieve. If your search engine rankings have dropped, recovering your rankings can be a larger task. We’ll review the history of your rankings and determine what it’ll take to hit your goals. - Timeline to Achieve Goals
How aggressive you’d like your brand to be, will ultimately determines how much time Niospace team will spend. If you want to achieve results in 3 months, we may suggest a more aggressive campaign than if you have a one-year timeline. During the proposal process our experts will review all factors and make determinations on how quickly we feel your brand will move into prime search positions.