SEO includes three methods:

• “White Hat”,
• “Black Hat”
• “No Hat”

White Hat SEO methods are the steps that Google recommends but in the past, they didn’t actually work to get your company ranked well. Black Hat referred to the discouraged methods that did work but were potentially dangerous to your site. “No Hat” SEO comes from people who have no idea what they are talking about and it is everywhere with bad advice.

The good news is that White Hat tactics are starting to work.

Be very wary of No Hat SEO. “No Hat” SEO is exploding and you probably get called every day from people offering it. No Hat SEO is offered by those who do not really do anything—many web designers, hosting companies, aggressive phone solicitation or email scare tactics, and now local media companies offer this type of “service”—they almost always outsource it and have no clue what they are doing.  They pretend to be smart, savvy Internet people, and they often have colorful presentations, but ultimately they give bad advice to clients. They offer up grand statements of future success but actually do nothing other than perhaps some “one-time” touches to your website and then charge you for months until you quit.

The reality is that SEO is real, it requires real work, and it’s very hard to do well.

Black Hat SEO included (and still does) the SEO geeks who pride themselves on tricking Google into getting their site ranked in top positions. They attempt to hide their methods, their real names, and their sources in a cat and mouse game with Google’s army of Black Hat sleuths. Most of the old Black hat tactics no longer work.

White Hat SEO is doing SEO according to Google’s published recommendations. The problem was that in the past, if you did what they said to do, it didn’t work well. The good news is that finally these methods are gaining traction and getting results. White Hat—while always designed to provide accurate, valid, and valuable information to Google—is finally getting the credit from Google’s algorithm that it needs to thrive.

Google is improving their algorithm to better recognize and reward real data, especially on a local level.  For years, Google’s algorithm actually rewarded the bad behavior of the Black Hat SEO geeks that they were trying to stop. Google warned people not to do this or that type of SEO or bad things would happen; however, the reality is that many of these Black Hat methods worked. Google continued to reward websites in their algorithm that were using tricky SEO strategies.

Here are some Get Found Fast DIY SEO basic things you can do now that are no cost but incredibly important and effective.

Title Tags and Meta Data – this is an old basic but many sites still are missing this very fundamental information. A page title and description give the search bots a snippet of information, which is used to capture the gist of the page information. Every page on your website should have a good keyword-inclusive title tag and description.

Consistent Company Data – there are thousands of data collection websites. These are sites that store and serve information on businesses, such as address, phone number, web address, images, hours of operation, and more. The information “out there” about your business needs to be consistent everywhere.  This is often overlooked by local businesses, and when it is inconsistent, Google doesn’t know which information is accurate. If it’s all consistent, the search engines have a higher confidence that the data is correct.

Links from other sites – Links from others are still important. If other websites link to your site and say the information on your website is valuable or true, the algorithm likes this. Links from others verify that the information on your site is good, accurate, and worthy of attention.

If you want to talk to a real SEO company that does things the right way, give us a call at Get Found Fast or click the link below to find out more about our Free SEO analysis.