Top 6 Types of SEO: On-Page, Off-Page, Technical & Hats
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be broken into two distinct types: On-site SEO and Off-site SEO.
These two types of SEO, or “buckets”, are both important to ranking on Google (and other search engines), but you may be wondering where it’s best to spend your time.
Don’t worry — in today’s guide, I share exactly what you have to do for each bucket in order to be able to rank #1 in Google for your target keywords and make a recurring income from your business.
I’ll discuss other types of SEO such as Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO, Gray Hat SEO, Local SEO, and Negative SEO. I’ll also go over what they all mean and why you should care.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
Let’s dive in!
It’s the content you publish, the code your site is built on, and the layout of your site structure. Everything about on-site SEO is something you can produce, edit, and save.
There are three buckets of on-site SEO:
Let’s break them down.
Even though it’s the easiest to do, it is also the easiest to overlook…which can hold you back. Simple tactics not implemented during the process of on-page SEO can mean you’ll get outranked by your competition.
On-page SEO is all about keywords and involves the optimization of the following:
For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “car accident lawyer” + “city”, a well-optimized page would look something like this:
URL: www.yoursite.com/services/car-accident-lawyer-cityname
Title: City Name Car Accident Lawyers: Auto Accident Attorneys
Meta Title: City Name Car Accident Lawyers: Auto Accident Attorneys
Meta Description: City name car accident lawyers Smith & Smith can help guide you through the process of getting your life back on track after an auto accident.
Headings:
The content of that page would also include the keyword “car accident lawyer + city name” at least 3-5 times and it would be in the alt text of at least one image.
In addition to including your target keyword in the right places on your page, there’s another concept called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) optimization.
LSI is just a fancy way of saying related & synonymous keywords. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “car accident lawyer”, some LSI keywords might include:
All these keywords are related to or synonymous with the keyword “car accident lawyer.” Because of that, including them on within your content, image alt text, and section headings can help you rank for “car accident lawyer.” You can find LSI keywords using tools like LSIgraph.
A more advanced version of LSI optimization is something called TF: IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency). Like LSI, it sounds more complex than it actually is.
TF: IDF statistically measures how important a word is in a collection of documents. Wikipedia explains it well: The TF-IDF value increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the word, which helps to adjust for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general.
In short: it’s like keyword density on steroids. The more times a keyword appears across documents related to the main keyword, the more weight is put on those keywords for being important to the main concept.
Google uses TF: IDF as a ranking factor (confirmed by John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst).
TF: IDF is a bit more complicated than simply adding a few keywords to a page like you would do for LSI optimization. Instead, you need a tool that can scan the current search results looking for important keywords and how frequently they appear. It can then scan your content and compare it to the current search results to see if you need more instances of a given keyword in a certain section of your page (i.e. body content, headings, alt text, etc.). In some cases, it will even recommend fewer instances of those keywords.
That’s right — it’s possible to over-use (or keyword stuff) even LSI keywords.
One tool that can help you with TF: IDF optimization is Page Optimizer Pro. It scans the search results using TF: IDF and will show you what keywords you need more of or less of.
It even tells you if you need more or fewer headings in your article based on what’s currently ranking. It will look at the number of H2s, H3s, etc. in the current search results and find commonalities amongst them, telling you what changes you should make to your page to improve your chances of ranking based on TF: IDF.
If you want to learn more about TF: IDF and advanced on-page SEO, check out this article.
There’s more to on-site SEO than keywords: that’s where content comes in.
Let’s start with search intent because it’s arguably the single most important Google ranking factor. A user’s search intent is what they’re actually trying to find when they type something into Google.
For example, if someone searches for “best running shoes for men,” they are most likely looking for reviews and product comparisons. In other words, they’re looking for commercial information before they make a purchase.
If someone searches for “Ghost 11 size 9”, they are most likely ready to buy and are just searching for a store to make their purchase.
Google delivers a much different search results page complete with different price points for the specific shoe along with local results where searchers might be able to buy in person.
Search intent matters because it’s literally what search engines are made to do. If you are targeting “best running shoes for men” with a landing page selling only Ghost 11s, you won’t rank, because the intent doesn’t match.
You should ALWAYS research your keyword’s search intent before you ever create a page trying to rank on Google.
Search intent can be broken down into four types:
The best way to find search intent is to type your target keyword into Google and review the results. Are the pages informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial investigation?
If they match the intent you expected, then you can create the page knowing your content can satisfy users’ search intent and thus have a chance at ranking #1 on Google. If it doesn’t match what you originally thought, you can still create a page targeting that keyword, but you’ll have to rethink your approach (i.e., don’t create a “what is” guide for a keyword where people are looking to buy a product).
You’ll get better at understanding search intent as you get more practice studying search results and creating content to match them.
The other half of content SEO is quality.
Even if your page matches search intent and uses all the right keywords, if it’s poorly written, your chances of ranking are slim because the post will have poor engagement (i.e., time on page, bounce rate, etc.). Optimizing for Google means optimizing for people, too.
Of course, quality can be subjective. What is “quality content,” anyway?
Quality can be measured with the following:
All of these help you improve your content quality, and in turn, your search engine rankings. If you want to improve your content quality, you need to practice. The more you write, the more you flesh out your voice and learn what works and what doesn’t.
In general, remember: simple and easy-to-understand is almost always better than complicated explanation.
Pro Tip: I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to study the current search results. Just because content over 1,500 words with lots of media typically ranks well doesn’t mean every keyword warrants that long-form content. Sometimes you’ll search for something and see results under 300 words with no images. Writing a massive article has less of a chance of ranking in that instance because it’s not what Google wants for that keyword.
What if you have quality content that’s optimized for your keyword and matches your search intent? SEO doesn’t stop there.
Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website to allow search index robots to access, crawl, interpret, and index your website without any issues.
It’s called “technical” because it has nothing to do with the content on your site or how well you promote it, but rather with the site’s infrastructure and code.
Technical SEO includes the following:
Let’s break them down one-by-one.
Deciding on a preferred domain
A preferred domain means the domain your site redirects to when someone types “yoursite.com” in their web browser. You have four options for preferred domains:
Basically, you can choose HTTP or HTTPS and www or non-www. HTTPS is always preferred, as having an SSL certificate is now a requirement to even rank on Google. Www versus non-www is personal preference.
Whatever you choose, remember it, as that’s the version you’ll want to set all your internal links to and showcase on social media and across the web (anywhere you’re able to add the link yourself).
You also have to set the preferred URL with your hosting provider. This varies by host, so you may need to look up how your host does it.
Optimizing your robots.txt file and sitemap
Your robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers what to index and what to ignore. They look like this:
Ideally, you want crawlers to crawl every page on your site except the ones you don’t want to show up in search results, such as your tag pages or login page. Here’s an example of what I might set as my robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Copy-paste that into a notepad file, save it as “robots.txt”, then upload the file to your particular host. Once it’s uploaded, set that URL as your robots.txt file in Google Search Console. Check out this article for more information on robots.txt best practices and tutorials.
Optimizing your URL structure
By default, most WordPress URLs look like this:
www.yoursite.com/date/post-title/
This leads to long, ugly URLs that don’t work well for Google. A better solution is to change your permalinks to either of the following options:
If you use categories, the second option is usually better.
However, the best solution is to write your URLs manually for each page. This is because your target keyword might only be a few words, yet your article title might be very long, leading to long URLs that get truncated (cut off because they’re too long) in search results.
For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “RV accessories” but your article title is “The Best RV Accessories According to 30 RV Experts”, you should opt for the URL www.yoursite.com/rv-accessories/ rather than www.yoursite.com/the-best-RV-accessories-according-to-30-RV-experts/ for simplicity.
Creating proper site navigation and internal link structure
An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another. Internal links help tell Google what your pages are about (by looking at the anchor text of the link) and which pages on your site are the most important (by looking at the number of links to each page).
Proper internal links and site navigation are important for both SEO and general user experience. They guide Google’s crawl bots (and your users) throughout your website.
As a rule of thumb, every page on your site should be accessible within three clicks from your homepage. If it takes more than three clicks to get to a page, it’s probably buried too deep.
You can crawl your site for free with a website crawler tool (like Screaming Frog) to determine if any pages take too many clicks to reach from the home page. It can also reveal any orphan pages (pages on your site that have no internal links, meaning it’s impossible to reach without directly typing the URL into a web browser).
Check out Ahrefs’ guide to internal links to learn more about this practice. Ahrefs also has a site audit tool that can tell you about any orphan pages or pages that take more than three clicks.
Adding breadcrumb menus.
Breadcrumbs are a navigational tool that links hierarchically from homepage to category to sub-category, etc.. They look like this:
They’re important for SEO because they help users navigate your site and they show up in your metadata on Google (the blue, green, and black text that is your search result), which helps users understand what’s on the page and thus increase the chance they’ll click on your page over competitors. They also help Google categorize and crawl your site, which is never a bad thing.
You can use a tool like Yoast SEO to add breadcrumbs to your site (if you’re using WordPress) or you can have a developer help you set them up for you. Some themes also have them built-in, so keep an eye out for that.
Implementing structured data markup.
Structured data markup (also called Schema or Rich data) is what allows you to see added information on search results, such as recipe images, star reviews, and pricing data.
It looks like this:
Setting this up is a bit more complicated than anything I’ve covered on SEO thus far. It involves code on your site and testing that code using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure you set it up properly.
I recommend hiring a developer to help you if you can afford it. Read this article for more info.
Setting up proper canonical URLs
A canonical URL is the permanent, final URL for a page. It’s how you avoid duplicate content issues and ensure Google is indexing the proper page on your site.
In your code, it looks like this:
You would use canonical URLs if you have multiple pages on your site with very similar content, but only want one of those pages to be indexed.
For example, if you’re A/B testing a page and need to create a separate URL with nearly identical content, you’d use a canonical tag. If you’re re-publishing your blog content on another site, such as Medium, you would link back to the content on your site with a canonical tag.
Read this article by Moz to learn more, as this can also get a bit complex.
Adding SSL to make your site HTTPS
SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a certificate you can set up on your website to receive the “S” in “HTTPS” (which stands for secure”). It’s a way of encrypting your website, making it more difficult for hackers to grab your visitor’s personal data (such as credit card information).
HTTPS is now a ranking factor, so it’s crucial that you get this set up on your site immediately if you don’t already have it. You can get a free SSL certificate pretty easily and many hosting providers also provide SSL for you. Again, Google your host to see how to set up HTTPS.
Improving your site speed
A fast website doesn’t necessarily help your site rank higher, but it may prevent you from being penalized by Google. If your site loads slower than three seconds, there’s a chance Google will kick you down in the rankings.
You can test your site’s speed with tools like Pingdom, GT Metrix, and Google Page Speed. Just plug in your URL, let the tool run, then get detailed information about how fast your page is and what you need to do to fix it.
Some of the issues you can fix relatively easily. The biggest culprits of slow loading speeds (and the easiest to fix) are large, uncompressed, and/or improperly sized images, a poor hosting provider, and not using caching on your site.
Beyond that, I recommend working with a site speed developer to improve your load speeds.
Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly
Google is now crawling and indexing websites by their mobile version (called the mobile-first index). This means if your site looks and functions amazingly on desktop, but performs poorly on mobile, you won’t rank as highly and may even be penalized.
Some things to look out for:
That said, it can be hard to determine if your site is truly mobile-friendly, as most website owners can be biased as to what looks/functions well and what doesn’t. I highly recommend getting a mobile site audit on UpWork for less than $100 to see what you need to fix.
You may also want to consider hiring a developer to help you improve the mobile experience and check all the boxes on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
It’s important to develop for multiple different devices and browsers, as there are a wide range of mobile devices and operating systems accessing the mobile web.
Of course, it’s impossible to make your site work perfectly on every device, so you should take a look at your site’s analytics to see what browsers and screen sizes are used most often. This will help you narrow down which devices you should be developing for.
Here are some things to avoid doing in the mobile version of your site:
Now, let’s move on to off-site SEO.
Let’s take a look at each:
That said, you don’t just want links from every website under the sun. There’s something called Google PageRank which dictates how strong a link is. Moz measures this using a metric called Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating (DR).
These measurements aren’t perfectly aligned with Google’s true PageRank, but they give you a good idea of the overall authority of a website or page and how strong a link from that site is. The more high-quality backlinks a site or page has the higher their DA.
High DA links give you more PageRank, or authority than low DA links. Especially at the beginning of a new website, backlinks are the #1 or #2 most important Google ranking factor.
However, getting a lot of low DA links can actually do more harm than good in some cases. If you get links from Private Blog Networks or spammy website directories and Google catches you, you can actually get a penalty and be removed from their index altogether. More on that in the black hat section below.
Pro Tip: Links to specific pages you want to rank higher on Google are better than links pointing to your homepage. While homepage links can improve your DA and your rankings, it has less of an impact than page-level links when it comes to ranking specific pages.
How to build links:
Link building is an art form. There are many ways to do it, but regardless of the method, it typically involves a lot of manual outreach.
Some ways to build links include:
In general, link building usually involves some form of cold outreach, whether that’s through email, social media, or even calling people on the phone. Networking at events is another, much easier way of finding link opportunities if you have the time and money.
Of course, this is barely scratching the surface of the link building. I highly recommend you read a guide like this one by Brian Dean to learn more about building links if you’re serious about SEO.
Link building takes a lot of time and effort, but I cannot overemphasize how important it is. You can do everything right as far as on-site SEO goes, but if you don’t build at least a few links, you’ll likely never make it to page one of Google, let alone the top three results where all the clicks are.
Examples of bad link building:
The following are tactics you should always avoid when building links:
Examples of good link building:
Not all links are created equal. Obviously, you don’t want links from low-DA spammy websites, but you also don’t want irrelevant or unnatural links.
To determine if a link looks relevant and natural to Google, answer the following questions:
You want a “yes” to the first two and a “no” to the third one. Let’s dive deeper into these questions…
Relevancy is more important on a page-level than sitewide. That is, you could still get a relevant link from a blog post that relates to your site, even if the site itself wouldn’t normally relate to yours.
For example, let’s say your site is about puppies. You land a guest post on a site about cars. If you wrote a guest post about the best way to take your puppy in a car for the first time, you’ve established relevancy.
You can also establish paragraph relevancy. Even if the blog post isn’t about your topic, as long as the paragraph surrounding your link is relevant to the page being linked to, you’re OK.
For example, if you get a guest post about marketing and show an example of how your puppy website used a particular marketing tactic, that link is now relevant even in on an irrelevant website in an irrelevant blog post.
What do I mean by “natural” links? Unnatural links would be site-wide links from another site’s header, footer, or sidebar. Natural links are in-content editorial links from within the content on a blog post or page.
This is a natural-looking link:
This is an unnatural link that could potentially get your site penalized:
Now let me give you a real-life example of link building in a way that minimizes your risks of being penalized (an example that’s “white hat” — more on the SEO hats in a later section).
For my site about travel and RVing, I needed to build lots of links to establish my domain authority. I used three methods to achieve those links:
Resource pages are pages where brands and bloggers list out resources related to their website’s topic. For example, one of the pages we targeted was this resource page for RVers.
We Googled “RV resource page,” grabbed the top 50 or so results that were relevant, then got their emails and reached out with a mass-email-outreach tool called Mailshake. We either asked to be mentioned as a resource or we asked if they could link to a specific article on our site that would make a better resource than sending people to our homepage, such as our guide to living in an RV full-time.
The Skyscraper Method (my second tactic) was coined by Brian Dean. The strategy aims to create something ten times better/more up-to-date than the #1 result currently in Google, then reach out to all the sites that linked to the other results to link to yours instead (since it’s a better resource).
This method works better when the top Google results are out-of-date or simply aren’t that great. If yours is clearly better, getting them to link to you is fairly easy.
Finally, guest posting is a matter of searching Google for blogs related to your niche (either directly or indirectly), reaching out to them via email, and asking for a guest post. This post is an example of a guest post one of my colleagues wrote for his site.
What words do you use to link out from? This is called “link anchor text”.
Notes on link anchor text:
Another thing to keep in mind when building links is anchor text. Anchor text is the text that’s linking to your website. This is an example of anchor text.
There are five kinds of anchor text:
Exact-match links are the strongest link you can get but are also risky. As a rule of thumb, you want less than 5% of your backlinks to have an exact-match anchor text because having too many exact-match links raises a red flag for Google and can get you penalized.
Partial-match is great as well but also poses some risk for the same reason as exact-match links. Around 20-40% of your links can be partial-match as long as they are varied (i.e., don’t have 30 links with the same anchor text; vary it to include LSI keywords instead).
Generic links should make up the bulk of your link profile and are the least risky and most natural-looking. Branded links are also excellent and you should aim to build these if possible. Naked URL links can be received on occasion, but you probably won’t see too many of them.
Now let’s recap:
What makes a good link (summary):
A good backlink is:
You should also look try to place links on pages without a lot of other backlinks. In general, the more links there are on a page, the less powerful your individual link will be. This can’t be avoided with resource pages, but if you’re writing a guest post, try to keep links to a minimum and put your link close to the top of the page.
This part of SEO is less science and more art. I say that because the results of your efforts are much harder to measure and rely more on happy consequences than doing something to directly benefit your search rankings.
For example, running Google Ads to your pages gives the direct benefit of traffic for money. But a happy consequence of this is increased brand awareness (because more people are seeing your brand than would if you hadn’t run the ad). Over time, this brand awareness can spill over into other areas of your business.
Let’s say someone has been searching for terms related to your business for a few months. They have clicked on several of your ads and loved your products and content, then search a term for which you’re ranking #3, but don’t have any ads.
Because they’re familiar with your brand, it’s more likely they will click on your result over the #1 and #2 position results. Because you create great content, it’s likely they will stay on the page longer and won’t bounce, both of which are ranking factors.
Clicks are also a ranking factor. If you scale this up over a few hundred or a few thousand people, all clicking on your result over the other two, Google will bump you up in the search results and improve your rankings.
Compare that to building a link: it’s a lot more difficult to measure brand awareness and its impact on your rankings than it is to measure the impact of a link building campaign…but there is an impact, which is why I’m talking about it here.
Other examples of website promotion that improve brand awareness include:
Another way promotion helps SEO is by acquiring organic links from your marketing efforts. A blogger might see your Facebook post, love your content, and link to you, but you can’t forgo a link building campaign just because you get a few organic links.
More real-life examples of website promotion for SEO:
One promotion method that’s gaining traction is using Empire.kred to get influencers to promote your content. It’s essentially a “stock market” where you invest money in certain influencers. Those investments pay dividends back, and you can use those returns to send influencers on missions where they promote your content.
Here’s a video explaining how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCCtnpAUsI
Next up, we have to reblog to Medium.
Medium is a site where anyone can create and share content without setting up their own blog. Millions of people read Medium articles every month and you can capitalize on their audience.
The strategy works by copy-pasting your content from your blog to Medium. Just be sure you set a canonical link back to your site where the content was originally published as we talked about in the technical SEO section! Otherwise, Google might rank the Medium article and not your own blog post.
Another strategy is to add your content to content discovery networks like Tumblr or StumbleUpon. This has the added benefit of getting a backlink, similar to a citation if you’re working on Local SEO (more on that below).
You just sign up for an account and start sharing your content. It really is that easy!
One of my personal favorite strategies as of late is to use Quuu Promote to get other people to share your content for you for a small fee. Basically, Quuu has a tool that fills your social media feed with great content. Anyone who signs up for this tool gets hand-curated content from the people who paid to have their content reviewed and promoted through Quuu Promote.
Pro Tip: If you use Quuu Promote to promote a new article, be sure to tag anyone you mention or link to within that article. This establishes goodwill with other bloggers, which has all kinds of benefits including them sharing the post, allowing you to write a guest post for them, and more!
Of course, none of these things have an immediate impact on your search rankings. Having a viral post on social media or a wildly successful ad won’t directly improve your search rankings. It takes time to build brand awareness and trust. Over time, these activities can and will improve your rankings, so they’re worth doing in addition to “traditional” SEO activities like optimizing pages and building links.
Now we’ve discussed all the types of SEO you can directly impact, but there’s a darker type of SEO you may have to deal with if you’re starting to see success in a competitive niche.
How negative SEO works is simple: you mass-purchase extremely poor backlinks and point them all to your competitor’s site.
The way to identify a negative SEO attack is through a link auditing tool like Ahrefs. If you suddenly see a massive amount of low-quality links (from sites related to pornography, gambling, Viagra, etc.), you’re probably under a negative SEO attack.
That’s only the main type of attack. Other ways people practice negative SEO include:
Obviously, these are all against Google’s terms of service and can get you permanently de-indexed if you’re caught. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible for the person being attacked to figure out who attacked them.
Fortunately, it’s pretty rare that this will happen to you. I’ve worked with dozens of clients and have never personally seen a negative SEO attack.
That said, you should do everything in your power to protect yourself. The best way to protect yourself is to:
If you were the victim of a negative SEO attack or you just want to learn more about SEO, here’s a great article by Kinsta on negative SEO.
Fun Fact: Why do people use these hat colors to symbolize the types of SEO? In the early days of Hollywood, western films made in the United States featured heroes wearing white hats and villains wearing black. It was meant to symbolize the contrast in good versus evil, so “good” SEO is a white hat, “evil” SEO is a black hat, and neutral is grey.
Now let’s break them all down.
Examples of white hat SEO include writing relevant, high-quality content that helps search engine users find what they were searching for. It also includes promoting your website on social media to acquire organic links and using data aggregators to acquire local business citations.
White hat SEO is the highest-value activity you can do for your site. It’s the most expensive and time-consuming but has virtually no risk of getting hit with a Google penalty so you can keep your rankings for many years to come. Obviously, I highly recommend sticking to white hat strategies.
Additional white hat SEO strategies:
A real-life example of white hat SEO:
While doing keyword research one day, I noticed the keyword “RV space saving ideas” mostly had a ton of repeats. Every article had the same 20 ideas.
I created something that included those 20 ideas…plus 80 more that I either used in my RV or heard from friends. I even asked other RVers their best tips. I compiled all these storage ideas into this one article.
I also optimized the meta title to be more intriguing: 100+ RV Space Saving Ideas For Ultimate RV Organization. Finally, I used a table of contents with jump links to separate the article by location on the RV (e.g. “kitchen space saving ideas”, “bathroom storage ideas”, etc.). This helped Google create site links that add more information to your search result.
I built two links to the article from guest posts I happened to be writing anyway, then didn’t touch it for five months. By the end of the fifth month, it was ranking #1 on Google, simply because the content was better and had great on-page SEO.
That’s white hat SEO in a nutshell: Create great content optimized for search intent that’s better than the current results, build a few links, and use tricks like the table of contents and meta title copywriting to improve time on page and CTR.
When search engines first started becoming popular for finding content online, they were incredibly easy to “game.” That meant that spammers came out of the woodwork to promote spammy sites often making them show up in completely irrelevant searches.
Google has stopped much of that behavior, but black hat SEO tactics have gotten more sophisticated.
Here are some common examples of black hat SEO (some old, some still in use):
A PBN (one of the most notorious black hat tactics still in practice) is a network of websites or blogs owned by one person. Essentially you purchase a bunch of websites, throw up some content on them just so it has something, then link from all those sites back to your website in order to manipulate search rankings.
More sophisticated PBNs are harder to spot because the content may actually be of decent quality and more effort is put into website design.
PBNs do still work and the higher-quality ones are difficult to uncover, but they are extremely risky and if you’re caught, you can lose your rankings.
Black hat strategies are the lowest-cost and least time-consuming activities you can do, but they are extremely risky and somewhat stressful. You never know when you’ll wake up one day and have lost everything you’ve built.
A real-life example of Black Hat SEO:
In this example, a competitor used a black hat SEO link building campaign to mass build links and outrank a site on Google for its target keyword. Here’s what their link profile looks like:
They got dozens of links from completely irrelevant sites, and because the page only has one or two links, they’re now outranking the legitimate site for its target keyword.
This is a prime example of PBN link building and a bad one at that. Typically, PBNs are harder to find because the linking sites are at least somewhat relevant…but in this case, all the sites linking are about video game cheat codes or SEO (the article is about RV trailers).
I have a good feeling their site will be penalized eventually; it’s just a matter of time. You never know when black hat strategies like this will come back to bite you!
Examples include writing high-quality guest posts with keyword-rich anchor text, link “exchanges” (linking to another site in exchange for a link to your site), and paying for reviews, among other things.
As long as you’re undergoing these strategies with care and aren’t obviously trying to break the rules, they won’t likely result in a penalty…but be cautious when using them.
Additional grey hat SEO strategies include:
A real-life example of grey hat SEO:
I have a friend who goes to places like FinCon (the financial convention) strictly to network with people for backlinks. He gets guest posts and swaps links with people he meets.
In fact, he’s so good at this that he’ll actually write 30-50 guest posts (all by himself) in a single month! These are 1,500+ word, high-quality articles, not just 300-word “spun” articles.
Grey hat SEO, when done well, probably won’t get you penalized. If you do a link swap here and there, it’s very unlikely it will hurt you, especially if you link swap from different websites (i.e., site A links to site B and site C links to site A).
Ultimately a grey hat tactic is really only bad if it doesn’t offer any value to real users. Links that are out of context, spammy, or harmful are the ones that will eventually get you into trouble. If your primary or secondary goal is to actually be helpful to people in your link building efforts, you should do ok.
Local SERPs (search engine results pages) typically include a Google Maps widget with local businesses, reviews, and opening times, to name a few.
Everything about nationwide SEO applies to local SEO (on-site and off-site optimization). But the big difference is citations, which are any place your business’ NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information appears together online, typically in an online directory or business listings website.
Examples of citations include social media sites, Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. Your NAPW information should be an exact match across every single citation (no mis-spelling or slight variations in address).
These help you build authority on Google because they look for consistent, trustworthy information across the internet. The more consistent the information Google finds about a business, the more likely it is to trust matching data it already has.
One of the best ways to manage a local SEO campaign is with a tool like BrightLocal, which allows you to automatically submit or update all of your citations at once from their dashboard.
The tool also allows you to audit your current NAP listings for errors or inconsistencies, which can help you fix your current setup and delete any duplicate citations.
In addition to citations, Google My Business reviews are crucial to rank in local SERPs. The more 5-star reviews you have, the higher your chance of outranking the competition. There are lots of ways to get reviews:
For example, let’s say you’re a personal injury lawyer and you want to rank for “Personal Injury Lawyer in San Diego.” You would create a Google My Business page (if you don’t already have one), then optimize that page by filling out all the information.
From there, you want to sign up for a BrightLocal account and begin building citations to your Google My Business page (and your website), then work hard to get as many 5-star reviews as possible — ask friends and family, past customers, current customers, etc.
Finally, focus on SEO like normal. Optimize your homepage or a landing page for “Personal Injury Lawyer in San Diego” (title, metadata, headings, image alt text, content, etc.), make sure your technical SEO is on-point with a site audit, and build some more links to your site.
Running ads for your business can also help with local SEO just as it can help with nationwide SEO, so consider doing that as well.
I already mentioned image alt text and include your main keyword and LSI keywords in this field. But image SEO goes beyond that. Just follow these steps:
It’s a good idea to have a plugin or tool (like WP Smush) to automatically re-size and compress your images so it’s one less thing to worry about. If you want to learn more about image SEO, check out this article on Kinsta.
The two main types of SEO to improve your rankings are on-site SEO (on-page optimization, content, and technical SEO) and off-site SEO (link building and website promotion).
We also covered negative SEO and how to avoid it, as well as the different SEO “hats” (White Hat, Black Hat & Grey Hat). In general, sticking to white hat SEO strategies is the safest way to protect your rankings over time.
Finally, image SEO is important. Compress and resize your images to get them under 150kb of data, name them properly, and don’t forget to attribute alt text that includes your main keyword or a related keyword.
Source: Rankings.io
These two types of SEO, or “buckets”, are both important to ranking on Google (and other search engines), but you may be wondering where it’s best to spend your time.
Don’t worry — in today’s guide, I share exactly what you have to do for each bucket in order to be able to rank #1 in Google for your target keywords and make a recurring income from your business.
I’ll discuss other types of SEO such as Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO, Gray Hat SEO, Local SEO, and Negative SEO. I’ll also go over what they all mean and why you should care.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- The Two Types of SEO, Why They Matter & How They Work
- What is Negative SEO & How to Avoid It
- What is Local SEO & How to Implement It
- What Black Hat, White Hat & Gray Hat SEO Means
Let’s dive in!
The 2 Broad Types of SEO: On-Site SEO and Off-Site SEO
These two forms of SEO are the foundation of all the strategies and tactics used to rank a site in Google search. On-site refers to all of the things done to a website itself, whereas off-site refers to all of the promotion that is done away from the website (but still for its benefit).On-Site SEO
The first type of SEO covers everything over which you have control or have ownership of — that is, your website.It’s the content you publish, the code your site is built on, and the layout of your site structure. Everything about on-site SEO is something you can produce, edit, and save.
There are three buckets of on-site SEO:
- On-Page SEO
- Content
- Technical SEO
Let’s break them down.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the easiest type of SEO, particularly if you don’t know anything about code or web development. It’s what most people think of when they hear “SEO”.Even though it’s the easiest to do, it is also the easiest to overlook…which can hold you back. Simple tactics not implemented during the process of on-page SEO can mean you’ll get outranked by your competition.
On-page SEO is all about keywords and involves the optimization of the following:
- Page URLs or permalinks
- Page titles
- Metadata (meta titles & descriptions)
- Headings & subheadings (H2, H3, etc.)
- Image alt text
- Content (including blog posts, service or product pages, video, infographics, podcasts, etc)
For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “car accident lawyer” + “city”, a well-optimized page would look something like this:
URL: www.yoursite.com/services/car-accident-lawyer-cityname
Title: City Name Car Accident Lawyers: Auto Accident Attorneys
Meta Title: City Name Car Accident Lawyers: Auto Accident Attorneys
Meta Description: City name car accident lawyers Smith & Smith can help guide you through the process of getting your life back on track after an auto accident.
Headings:
- How Can Car Accident Lawyers Help?
- How Much Does it Cost to Hire a Car Accident Lawyer
- Can Auto Accident Attorneys Negotiate With My Insurance?
- How to Hire an Auto Accident Attorney
The content of that page would also include the keyword “car accident lawyer + city name” at least 3-5 times and it would be in the alt text of at least one image.
In addition to including your target keyword in the right places on your page, there’s another concept called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) optimization.
LSI is just a fancy way of saying related & synonymous keywords. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “car accident lawyer”, some LSI keywords might include:
- car accident attorney
- auto accident attorney
- car crash lawyer
- car crash attorney
- car accident attorneys near me
All these keywords are related to or synonymous with the keyword “car accident lawyer.” Because of that, including them on within your content, image alt text, and section headings can help you rank for “car accident lawyer.” You can find LSI keywords using tools like LSIgraph.
A more advanced version of LSI optimization is something called TF: IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency). Like LSI, it sounds more complex than it actually is.
TF: IDF statistically measures how important a word is in a collection of documents. Wikipedia explains it well: The TF-IDF value increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the word, which helps to adjust for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general.
In short: it’s like keyword density on steroids. The more times a keyword appears across documents related to the main keyword, the more weight is put on those keywords for being important to the main concept.
Google uses TF: IDF as a ranking factor (confirmed by John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst).
TF: IDF is a bit more complicated than simply adding a few keywords to a page like you would do for LSI optimization. Instead, you need a tool that can scan the current search results looking for important keywords and how frequently they appear. It can then scan your content and compare it to the current search results to see if you need more instances of a given keyword in a certain section of your page (i.e. body content, headings, alt text, etc.). In some cases, it will even recommend fewer instances of those keywords.
That’s right — it’s possible to over-use (or keyword stuff) even LSI keywords.
One tool that can help you with TF: IDF optimization is Page Optimizer Pro. It scans the search results using TF: IDF and will show you what keywords you need more of or less of.
It even tells you if you need more or fewer headings in your article based on what’s currently ranking. It will look at the number of H2s, H3s, etc. in the current search results and find commonalities amongst them, telling you what changes you should make to your page to improve your chances of ranking based on TF: IDF.
If you want to learn more about TF: IDF and advanced on-page SEO, check out this article.
There’s more to on-site SEO than keywords: that’s where content comes in.
Content
The difference between content and on-page SEO is quality and search intent.Let’s start with search intent because it’s arguably the single most important Google ranking factor. A user’s search intent is what they’re actually trying to find when they type something into Google.
For example, if someone searches for “best running shoes for men,” they are most likely looking for reviews and product comparisons. In other words, they’re looking for commercial information before they make a purchase.
If someone searches for “Ghost 11 size 9”, they are most likely ready to buy and are just searching for a store to make their purchase.
Google delivers a much different search results page complete with different price points for the specific shoe along with local results where searchers might be able to buy in person.
Search intent matters because it’s literally what search engines are made to do. If you are targeting “best running shoes for men” with a landing page selling only Ghost 11s, you won’t rank, because the intent doesn’t match.
You should ALWAYS research your keyword’s search intent before you ever create a page trying to rank on Google.
Search intent can be broken down into four types:
- Information keywords — the what, where, who, why, or how (“who was the first president of the US,” “what is SEO,” “how to start an online business”).
- Navigational keywords — people trying to navigate to a certain page or site (“Facebook debug tool,” “Google search console,” “beginners guide to SEO Moz”).
- Transactional keywords — people looking to buy (“Ghost 11 size 9,” “buy Samsung S10e,” “Nordstrom coupon”).
- Commercial investigation keywords — people doing research before they make a purchase (“best running shoes for men,” Mailchimp review,” “Google Docs vs Microsoft Word”).
The best way to find search intent is to type your target keyword into Google and review the results. Are the pages informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial investigation?
If they match the intent you expected, then you can create the page knowing your content can satisfy users’ search intent and thus have a chance at ranking #1 on Google. If it doesn’t match what you originally thought, you can still create a page targeting that keyword, but you’ll have to rethink your approach (i.e., don’t create a “what is” guide for a keyword where people are looking to buy a product).
You’ll get better at understanding search intent as you get more practice studying search results and creating content to match them.
The other half of content SEO is quality.
Even if your page matches search intent and uses all the right keywords, if it’s poorly written, your chances of ranking are slim because the post will have poor engagement (i.e., time on page, bounce rate, etc.). Optimizing for Google means optimizing for people, too.
Of course, quality can be subjective. What is “quality content,” anyway?
Quality can be measured with the following:
- Content length — long-form content of 1,500+ words tends to perform best. Aim to match or exceed the average word count of the current search results WITHOUT adding fluff. Thin content (fewer than 300 words) typically has a much harder time ranking.
- Readability score — the Flesch readability score gives your content a score based on grade level. It’s best to have a readability score of Grade 7 or lower to be as easy to read as possible. Use the Hemingway App to see your content’s score.
- Media — images, videos, GIFs and charts & graphs can all improve your content’s quality (if done right). It’s been found that content with at least one image ranks higher on Google than content without images. Just be sure to add only RELEVANT media.
- Formatting — a well-formatted post will have short sentences with simple wording, short paragraphs of no more than 1-3 sentences each, media to break up long walls of text, bulleted lists for easy scanning, have headings and subheadings to organize the content and use bold and italics to display key points.
All of these help you improve your content quality, and in turn, your search engine rankings. If you want to improve your content quality, you need to practice. The more you write, the more you flesh out your voice and learn what works and what doesn’t.
In general, remember: simple and easy-to-understand is almost always better than complicated explanation.
Pro Tip: I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to study the current search results. Just because content over 1,500 words with lots of media typically ranks well doesn’t mean every keyword warrants that long-form content. Sometimes you’ll search for something and see results under 300 words with no images. Writing a massive article has less of a chance of ranking in that instance because it’s not what Google wants for that keyword.
What if you have quality content that’s optimized for your keyword and matches your search intent? SEO doesn’t stop there.
Technical SEO
The third and final type of on-site SEO is technical SEO.Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website to allow search index robots to access, crawl, interpret, and index your website without any issues.
It’s called “technical” because it has nothing to do with the content on your site or how well you promote it, but rather with the site’s infrastructure and code.
Technical SEO includes the following:
- Deciding on a preferred domain (www or non-www).
- Optimizing your robots.txt file and sitemap.
- Optimizing your URL structure.
- Creating proper site navigation and internal link structure.
- Adding breadcrumb menus.
- Implementing structured data markup.
- Setting up proper canonical URLs.
- Adding SSL to make your site HTTPS.
- Improving your site speed.
- Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly.
Let’s break them down one-by-one.
Deciding on a preferred domain
A preferred domain means the domain your site redirects to when someone types “yoursite.com” in their web browser. You have four options for preferred domains:
- http://www.yoursite.com/
- http://yoursite.com/
- https://www.yoursite.com/
- https://yoursite.com/
Basically, you can choose HTTP or HTTPS and www or non-www. HTTPS is always preferred, as having an SSL certificate is now a requirement to even rank on Google. Www versus non-www is personal preference.
Whatever you choose, remember it, as that’s the version you’ll want to set all your internal links to and showcase on social media and across the web (anywhere you’re able to add the link yourself).
You also have to set the preferred URL with your hosting provider. This varies by host, so you may need to look up how your host does it.
Optimizing your robots.txt file and sitemap
Your robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers what to index and what to ignore. They look like this:
Ideally, you want crawlers to crawl every page on your site except the ones you don’t want to show up in search results, such as your tag pages or login page. Here’s an example of what I might set as my robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Copy-paste that into a notepad file, save it as “robots.txt”, then upload the file to your particular host. Once it’s uploaded, set that URL as your robots.txt file in Google Search Console. Check out this article for more information on robots.txt best practices and tutorials.
Optimizing your URL structure
By default, most WordPress URLs look like this:
www.yoursite.com/date/post-title/
This leads to long, ugly URLs that don’t work well for Google. A better solution is to change your permalinks to either of the following options:
- www.yoursite.com/post-title/
- www.yoursite.com/category/post-title/
If you use categories, the second option is usually better.
However, the best solution is to write your URLs manually for each page. This is because your target keyword might only be a few words, yet your article title might be very long, leading to long URLs that get truncated (cut off because they’re too long) in search results.
For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “RV accessories” but your article title is “The Best RV Accessories According to 30 RV Experts”, you should opt for the URL www.yoursite.com/rv-accessories/ rather than www.yoursite.com/the-best-RV-accessories-according-to-30-RV-experts/ for simplicity.
Creating proper site navigation and internal link structure
An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another. Internal links help tell Google what your pages are about (by looking at the anchor text of the link) and which pages on your site are the most important (by looking at the number of links to each page).
Proper internal links and site navigation are important for both SEO and general user experience. They guide Google’s crawl bots (and your users) throughout your website.
As a rule of thumb, every page on your site should be accessible within three clicks from your homepage. If it takes more than three clicks to get to a page, it’s probably buried too deep.
You can crawl your site for free with a website crawler tool (like Screaming Frog) to determine if any pages take too many clicks to reach from the home page. It can also reveal any orphan pages (pages on your site that have no internal links, meaning it’s impossible to reach without directly typing the URL into a web browser).
Check out Ahrefs’ guide to internal links to learn more about this practice. Ahrefs also has a site audit tool that can tell you about any orphan pages or pages that take more than three clicks.
Adding breadcrumb menus.
Breadcrumbs are a navigational tool that links hierarchically from homepage to category to sub-category, etc.. They look like this:
They’re important for SEO because they help users navigate your site and they show up in your metadata on Google (the blue, green, and black text that is your search result), which helps users understand what’s on the page and thus increase the chance they’ll click on your page over competitors. They also help Google categorize and crawl your site, which is never a bad thing.
You can use a tool like Yoast SEO to add breadcrumbs to your site (if you’re using WordPress) or you can have a developer help you set them up for you. Some themes also have them built-in, so keep an eye out for that.
Implementing structured data markup.
Structured data markup (also called Schema or Rich data) is what allows you to see added information on search results, such as recipe images, star reviews, and pricing data.
It looks like this:
Setting this up is a bit more complicated than anything I’ve covered on SEO thus far. It involves code on your site and testing that code using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure you set it up properly.
I recommend hiring a developer to help you if you can afford it. Read this article for more info.
Setting up proper canonical URLs
A canonical URL is the permanent, final URL for a page. It’s how you avoid duplicate content issues and ensure Google is indexing the proper page on your site.
In your code, it looks like this:
You would use canonical URLs if you have multiple pages on your site with very similar content, but only want one of those pages to be indexed.
For example, if you’re A/B testing a page and need to create a separate URL with nearly identical content, you’d use a canonical tag. If you’re re-publishing your blog content on another site, such as Medium, you would link back to the content on your site with a canonical tag.
Read this article by Moz to learn more, as this can also get a bit complex.
Adding SSL to make your site HTTPS
SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a certificate you can set up on your website to receive the “S” in “HTTPS” (which stands for secure”). It’s a way of encrypting your website, making it more difficult for hackers to grab your visitor’s personal data (such as credit card information).
HTTPS is now a ranking factor, so it’s crucial that you get this set up on your site immediately if you don’t already have it. You can get a free SSL certificate pretty easily and many hosting providers also provide SSL for you. Again, Google your host to see how to set up HTTPS.
Improving your site speed
A fast website doesn’t necessarily help your site rank higher, but it may prevent you from being penalized by Google. If your site loads slower than three seconds, there’s a chance Google will kick you down in the rankings.
You can test your site’s speed with tools like Pingdom, GT Metrix, and Google Page Speed. Just plug in your URL, let the tool run, then get detailed information about how fast your page is and what you need to do to fix it.
Some of the issues you can fix relatively easily. The biggest culprits of slow loading speeds (and the easiest to fix) are large, uncompressed, and/or improperly sized images, a poor hosting provider, and not using caching on your site.
Beyond that, I recommend working with a site speed developer to improve your load speeds.
Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly
Google is now crawling and indexing websites by their mobile version (called the mobile-first index). This means if your site looks and functions amazingly on desktop, but performs poorly on mobile, you won’t rank as highly and may even be penalized.
Some things to look out for:
- Font should be at least 14, but preferably 16-18 pixels large.
- Paragraphs should be no longer than 4 sentences to avoid massive blocks of text.
- All the content should be viewable without needing to scroll horizontally (left and right).
- Buttons should be large enough to click with your thumb and not too close to other call-to-actions, such as other buttons, links, or images that open on click.
- The menu should be easily accessible.
- Buttons and links (and basically anything clickable) should be large and spaced adequately so they are easy to use.
- Large blocks of content should be encased in accordions so that people don’t have to scroll through them.
That said, it can be hard to determine if your site is truly mobile-friendly, as most website owners can be biased as to what looks/functions well and what doesn’t. I highly recommend getting a mobile site audit on UpWork for less than $100 to see what you need to fix.
You may also want to consider hiring a developer to help you improve the mobile experience and check all the boxes on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
It’s important to develop for multiple different devices and browsers, as there are a wide range of mobile devices and operating systems accessing the mobile web.
Of course, it’s impossible to make your site work perfectly on every device, so you should take a look at your site’s analytics to see what browsers and screen sizes are used most often. This will help you narrow down which devices you should be developing for.
Here are some things to avoid doing in the mobile version of your site:
- Make a mobile responsive site (one that changes based on the user’s screen size) and not a separate mobile site.
- Do not hide content on desktop, but show it on mobile or vice versa. The content should be the same, just styled differently on the two viewing experiences.
- Do not rely on users to resize or reposition elements (or try to figure out how something should look in general). Always design and develop your mobile experience so that it’s easy for people to know how to navigate and work with your site.
- Do not make your mobile site and leave it. Always test what you have built using a service like Hotjar or Crazy Egg. Recording and reviewing how people interact with your site can help you make it even better.
Now, let’s move on to off-site SEO.
Off-Site SEO
If on-site SEO consists of things you can control, off-site SEO (also called off-page SEO) consists of things over which you have less control: namely, link building and website promotion.Let’s take a look at each:
Link Building
Backlinks are the backbone of SEO. A backlink is a link from another website pointing to your website. In general, the more links you have to your site, the better you’ll rank on Google.That said, you don’t just want links from every website under the sun. There’s something called Google PageRank which dictates how strong a link is. Moz measures this using a metric called Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating (DR).
These measurements aren’t perfectly aligned with Google’s true PageRank, but they give you a good idea of the overall authority of a website or page and how strong a link from that site is. The more high-quality backlinks a site or page has the higher their DA.
High DA links give you more PageRank, or authority than low DA links. Especially at the beginning of a new website, backlinks are the #1 or #2 most important Google ranking factor.
However, getting a lot of low DA links can actually do more harm than good in some cases. If you get links from Private Blog Networks or spammy website directories and Google catches you, you can actually get a penalty and be removed from their index altogether. More on that in the black hat section below.
Pro Tip: Links to specific pages you want to rank higher on Google are better than links pointing to your homepage. While homepage links can improve your DA and your rankings, it has less of an impact than page-level links when it comes to ranking specific pages.
How to build links:
Link building is an art form. There are many ways to do it, but regardless of the method, it typically involves a lot of manual outreach.
Some ways to build links include:
- Writing guest posts for other sites and linking back to your site from the guest post.
- Finding sites with broken links, building a page that can replace the broken link, then reaching out to let the site owners know about the broken link and your page.
- Creating a statistics roundup page and using PR to get links to the page from journalists.
In general, link building usually involves some form of cold outreach, whether that’s through email, social media, or even calling people on the phone. Networking at events is another, much easier way of finding link opportunities if you have the time and money.
Of course, this is barely scratching the surface of the link building. I highly recommend you read a guide like this one by Brian Dean to learn more about building links if you’re serious about SEO.
Link building takes a lot of time and effort, but I cannot overemphasize how important it is. You can do everything right as far as on-site SEO goes, but if you don’t build at least a few links, you’ll likely never make it to page one of Google, let alone the top three results where all the clicks are.
Examples of bad link building:
The following are tactics you should always avoid when building links:
- Never pay for links in bulk or buy from a company that is in the business of selling links.
- Avoid getting links on PBN’s.
- Avoid building links too rapidly.
- Do not create your own website or network of sites for the sole purpose of pointing links at your main website.
- If you hire someone to build links, never let them “run wild”. Always check which sites they are getting links on and verify that information.
Examples of good link building:
Not all links are created equal. Obviously, you don’t want links from low-DA spammy websites, but you also don’t want irrelevant or unnatural links.
To determine if a link looks relevant and natural to Google, answer the following questions:
- Is this a trustworthy site (meaning, do they produce quality content and look like they have a real following)?
- Is this site relevant to my site in some way?
- Does this site link to pages related to gambling, pornography, or other untrustworthy sources?
You want a “yes” to the first two and a “no” to the third one. Let’s dive deeper into these questions…
Relevancy is more important on a page-level than sitewide. That is, you could still get a relevant link from a blog post that relates to your site, even if the site itself wouldn’t normally relate to yours.
For example, let’s say your site is about puppies. You land a guest post on a site about cars. If you wrote a guest post about the best way to take your puppy in a car for the first time, you’ve established relevancy.
You can also establish paragraph relevancy. Even if the blog post isn’t about your topic, as long as the paragraph surrounding your link is relevant to the page being linked to, you’re OK.
For example, if you get a guest post about marketing and show an example of how your puppy website used a particular marketing tactic, that link is now relevant even in on an irrelevant website in an irrelevant blog post.
What do I mean by “natural” links? Unnatural links would be site-wide links from another site’s header, footer, or sidebar. Natural links are in-content editorial links from within the content on a blog post or page.
This is a natural-looking link:
This is an unnatural link that could potentially get your site penalized:
Now let me give you a real-life example of link building in a way that minimizes your risks of being penalized (an example that’s “white hat” — more on the SEO hats in a later section).
For my site about travel and RVing, I needed to build lots of links to establish my domain authority. I used three methods to achieve those links:
- Resource page link building
- The skyscraper method
- Guest posting
Resource pages are pages where brands and bloggers list out resources related to their website’s topic. For example, one of the pages we targeted was this resource page for RVers.
We Googled “RV resource page,” grabbed the top 50 or so results that were relevant, then got their emails and reached out with a mass-email-outreach tool called Mailshake. We either asked to be mentioned as a resource or we asked if they could link to a specific article on our site that would make a better resource than sending people to our homepage, such as our guide to living in an RV full-time.
The Skyscraper Method (my second tactic) was coined by Brian Dean. The strategy aims to create something ten times better/more up-to-date than the #1 result currently in Google, then reach out to all the sites that linked to the other results to link to yours instead (since it’s a better resource).
This method works better when the top Google results are out-of-date or simply aren’t that great. If yours is clearly better, getting them to link to you is fairly easy.
Finally, guest posting is a matter of searching Google for blogs related to your niche (either directly or indirectly), reaching out to them via email, and asking for a guest post. This post is an example of a guest post one of my colleagues wrote for his site.
What words do you use to link out from? This is called “link anchor text”.
Notes on link anchor text:
Another thing to keep in mind when building links is anchor text. Anchor text is the text that’s linking to your website. This is an example of anchor text.
There are five kinds of anchor text:
- Exact-match — the linked text is the exact keyword you’re trying to rank for. If you were trying to rank for “Personal Injury Lawyer in San Francisco,” the anchor text would be “Personal Injury Lawyer in San Francisco.”
- Partial-match — the linked text partially matches the keyword you’re targeting. In this case, “check out Personal Injury Lawyers in California” would be partial-match, since it doesn’t include “San Francisco” but still includes “Personal Injury Lawyer in.”
- Generic — the linked text is something generic like “click here” or “this article.”
- Naked — the link is the naked URL with no linking text. For example, https://www.rankings.io/ is a naked URL.
- Branded — the link is your brand or company name.
Exact-match links are the strongest link you can get but are also risky. As a rule of thumb, you want less than 5% of your backlinks to have an exact-match anchor text because having too many exact-match links raises a red flag for Google and can get you penalized.
Partial-match is great as well but also poses some risk for the same reason as exact-match links. Around 20-40% of your links can be partial-match as long as they are varied (i.e., don’t have 30 links with the same anchor text; vary it to include LSI keywords instead).
Generic links should make up the bulk of your link profile and are the least risky and most natural-looking. Branded links are also excellent and you should aim to build these if possible. Naked URL links can be received on occasion, but you probably won’t see too many of them.
Now let’s recap:
What makes a good link (summary):
A good backlink is:
- Relevant to the content on the page linking out
- Partial-match, generic, or branded anchor text
- Editorial in nature (meaning it’s from within the content on the page, not in an author bio or sidebar)
- On a high DA site or page
You should also look try to place links on pages without a lot of other backlinks. In general, the more links there are on a page, the less powerful your individual link will be. This can’t be avoided with resource pages, but if you’re writing a guest post, try to keep links to a minimum and put your link close to the top of the page.
Website Promotion
The other type of off-site SEO involves website promotion, such as social media, paid to advertise, and business directories.This part of SEO is less science and more art. I say that because the results of your efforts are much harder to measure and rely more on happy consequences than doing something to directly benefit your search rankings.
For example, running Google Ads to your pages gives the direct benefit of traffic for money. But a happy consequence of this is increased brand awareness (because more people are seeing your brand than would if you hadn’t run the ad). Over time, this brand awareness can spill over into other areas of your business.
Let’s say someone has been searching for terms related to your business for a few months. They have clicked on several of your ads and loved your products and content, then search a term for which you’re ranking #3, but don’t have any ads.
Because they’re familiar with your brand, it’s more likely they will click on your result over the #1 and #2 position results. Because you create great content, it’s likely they will stay on the page longer and won’t bounce, both of which are ranking factors.
Clicks are also a ranking factor. If you scale this up over a few hundred or a few thousand people, all clicking on your result over the other two, Google will bump you up in the search results and improve your rankings.
Compare that to building a link: it’s a lot more difficult to measure brand awareness and its impact on your rankings than it is to measure the impact of a link building campaign…but there is an impact, which is why I’m talking about it here.
Other examples of website promotion that improve brand awareness include:
- Organic social media presence
- Social media ads (Facebook, YouTube, etc.)
- Advertising networks to appear on other blogs (such as OutBrain)
- Putting your business information in legit directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages
Another way promotion helps SEO is by acquiring organic links from your marketing efforts. A blogger might see your Facebook post, love your content, and link to you, but you can’t forgo a link building campaign just because you get a few organic links.
More real-life examples of website promotion for SEO:
One promotion method that’s gaining traction is using Empire.kred to get influencers to promote your content. It’s essentially a “stock market” where you invest money in certain influencers. Those investments pay dividends back, and you can use those returns to send influencers on missions where they promote your content.
Here’s a video explaining how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCCtnpAUsI
Next up, we have to reblog to Medium.
Medium is a site where anyone can create and share content without setting up their own blog. Millions of people read Medium articles every month and you can capitalize on their audience.
The strategy works by copy-pasting your content from your blog to Medium. Just be sure you set a canonical link back to your site where the content was originally published as we talked about in the technical SEO section! Otherwise, Google might rank the Medium article and not your own blog post.
Another strategy is to add your content to content discovery networks like Tumblr or StumbleUpon. This has the added benefit of getting a backlink, similar to a citation if you’re working on Local SEO (more on that below).
You just sign up for an account and start sharing your content. It really is that easy!
One of my personal favorite strategies as of late is to use Quuu Promote to get other people to share your content for you for a small fee. Basically, Quuu has a tool that fills your social media feed with great content. Anyone who signs up for this tool gets hand-curated content from the people who paid to have their content reviewed and promoted through Quuu Promote.
Pro Tip: If you use Quuu Promote to promote a new article, be sure to tag anyone you mention or link to within that article. This establishes goodwill with other bloggers, which has all kinds of benefits including them sharing the post, allowing you to write a guest post for them, and more!
Of course, none of these things have an immediate impact on your search rankings. Having a viral post on social media or a wildly successful ad won’t directly improve your search rankings. It takes time to build brand awareness and trust. Over time, these activities can and will improve your rankings, so they’re worth doing in addition to “traditional” SEO activities like optimizing pages and building links.
Now we’ve discussed all the types of SEO you can directly impact, but there’s a darker type of SEO you may have to deal with if you’re starting to see success in a competitive niche.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is an SEO-based attack on someone to force Google to penalize them. It’s a way of improving your rankings by taking out the competition rather than creating better content or building links.How negative SEO works is simple: you mass-purchase extremely poor backlinks and point them all to your competitor’s site.
The way to identify a negative SEO attack is through a link auditing tool like Ahrefs. If you suddenly see a massive amount of low-quality links (from sites related to pornography, gambling, Viagra, etc.), you’re probably under a negative SEO attack.
That’s only the main type of attack. Other ways people practice negative SEO include:
- Hacking your website
- Copying your content and distributing it all over the internet
- Creating fake social profiles and ruining your reputation online
- Removing the best backlinks your website has
Obviously, these are all against Google’s terms of service and can get you permanently de-indexed if you’re caught. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible for the person being attacked to figure out who attacked them.
Fortunately, it’s pretty rare that this will happen to you. I’ve worked with dozens of clients and have never personally seen a negative SEO attack.
That said, you should do everything in your power to protect yourself. The best way to protect yourself is to:
- Monitor your backlinks with a tool like Ahrefs consistently
- Set up Google Webmaster Tools email alerts for hacking or manual penalties
- Secure your website from Malware and hackers using Google Authenticator and keeping your plugins/apps/themes up to date at all times
- Monitor your social media mentions with a tool like Mention to identify fraud ASAP
- Use Copyscape frequently to find duplicate content
- Don’t make enemies on social media
If you were the victim of a negative SEO attack or you just want to learn more about SEO, here’s a great article by Kinsta on negative SEO.
Other Types of SEO: White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat
You may have heard of the terms White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO, and Gray Hat SEO. These terms refer to SEO tactics and how much they adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.Fun Fact: Why do people use these hat colors to symbolize the types of SEO? In the early days of Hollywood, western films made in the United States featured heroes wearing white hats and villains wearing black. It was meant to symbolize the contrast in good versus evil, so “good” SEO is a white hat, “evil” SEO is a black hat, and neutral is grey.
Now let’s break them all down.
Categories of SEO Tactics
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO refers to optimization strategies that abide by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. That is, you’re not manipulating the search results in a way that Google doesn’t like.Examples of white hat SEO include writing relevant, high-quality content that helps search engine users find what they were searching for. It also includes promoting your website on social media to acquire organic links and using data aggregators to acquire local business citations.
White hat SEO is the highest-value activity you can do for your site. It’s the most expensive and time-consuming but has virtually no risk of getting hit with a Google penalty so you can keep your rankings for many years to come. Obviously, I highly recommend sticking to white hat strategies.
Additional white hat SEO strategies:
- Creating unique studies and data to build backlinks
- Optimizing for a mobile-first experience
- Improving site loading speed
- Adding schema to your site
- Writing better meta titles and descriptions to increase CTR
- Improving your site’s user experience and navigation
A real-life example of white hat SEO:
While doing keyword research one day, I noticed the keyword “RV space saving ideas” mostly had a ton of repeats. Every article had the same 20 ideas.
I created something that included those 20 ideas…plus 80 more that I either used in my RV or heard from friends. I even asked other RVers their best tips. I compiled all these storage ideas into this one article.
I also optimized the meta title to be more intriguing: 100+ RV Space Saving Ideas For Ultimate RV Organization. Finally, I used a table of contents with jump links to separate the article by location on the RV (e.g. “kitchen space saving ideas”, “bathroom storage ideas”, etc.). This helped Google create site links that add more information to your search result.
I built two links to the article from guest posts I happened to be writing anyway, then didn’t touch it for five months. By the end of the fifth month, it was ranking #1 on Google, simply because the content was better and had great on-page SEO.
That’s white hat SEO in a nutshell: Create great content optimized for search intent that’s better than the current results, build a few links, and use tricks like the table of contents and meta title copywriting to improve time on page and CTR.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO refers to optimization strategies that are clearly against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In other words, you’re going against what Google wants.When search engines first started becoming popular for finding content online, they were incredibly easy to “game.” That meant that spammers came out of the woodwork to promote spammy sites often making them show up in completely irrelevant searches.
Google has stopped much of that behavior, but black hat SEO tactics have gotten more sophisticated.
Here are some common examples of black hat SEO (some old, some still in use):
- Link schemes such as paying for backlinks, leveraging link farms, or the like
- Putting text on your site and making it white to blend in with the background (yes, this used to work and some people still do it)
- Using private blog networks (PBNs) to build links
- Cloaking (using code to show one type of content to visitors and another to search engines)
- Hiding links on a page
- Spinning or automating the production of content
- Pingback spam (the practice of pinging or notifying a server multiple times in an effort to make content appear new or fresh)
- Domain redirection or squatting (buying an old domain with many linking domains and redirecting it to a page to get it to rank)
- Rich snippet markup spam
- Automated queries on Google
- Negative SEO or building malicious links to a competitor website
A PBN (one of the most notorious black hat tactics still in practice) is a network of websites or blogs owned by one person. Essentially you purchase a bunch of websites, throw up some content on them just so it has something, then link from all those sites back to your website in order to manipulate search rankings.
More sophisticated PBNs are harder to spot because the content may actually be of decent quality and more effort is put into website design.
PBNs do still work and the higher-quality ones are difficult to uncover, but they are extremely risky and if you’re caught, you can lose your rankings.
Black hat strategies are the lowest-cost and least time-consuming activities you can do, but they are extremely risky and somewhat stressful. You never know when you’ll wake up one day and have lost everything you’ve built.
A real-life example of Black Hat SEO:
In this example, a competitor used a black hat SEO link building campaign to mass build links and outrank a site on Google for its target keyword. Here’s what their link profile looks like:
They got dozens of links from completely irrelevant sites, and because the page only has one or two links, they’re now outranking the legitimate site for its target keyword.
This is a prime example of PBN link building and a bad one at that. Typically, PBNs are harder to find because the linking sites are at least somewhat relevant…but in this case, all the sites linking are about video game cheat codes or SEO (the article is about RV trailers).
I have a good feeling their site will be penalized eventually; it’s just a matter of time. You never know when black hat strategies like this will come back to bite you!
Grey Hat SEO
Grey hat SEO refers to optimization strategies that aren’t explicitly banned by the Google Webmaster Guidelines, but sort of tip-toe the line between white and black hat strategies.Examples include writing high-quality guest posts with keyword-rich anchor text, link “exchanges” (linking to another site in exchange for a link to your site), and paying for reviews, among other things.
As long as you’re undergoing these strategies with care and aren’t obviously trying to break the rules, they won’t likely result in a penalty…but be cautious when using them.
Additional grey hat SEO strategies include:
- Buying expired domains and adding content with links to your main site
- Changing the publish date without actually changing the content to keep your content “fresh”
- Creating a scholarship just to get backlinks from .edu domains
- Attacking other sites with negative SEO campaigns (more on that below; definitely not recommended)
- Linking to someone’s site in exchange for a link from another one of their sites (slightly more advanced link swapping)
A real-life example of grey hat SEO:
I have a friend who goes to places like FinCon (the financial convention) strictly to network with people for backlinks. He gets guest posts and swaps links with people he meets.
In fact, he’s so good at this that he’ll actually write 30-50 guest posts (all by himself) in a single month! These are 1,500+ word, high-quality articles, not just 300-word “spun” articles.
Grey hat SEO, when done well, probably won’t get you penalized. If you do a link swap here and there, it’s very unlikely it will hurt you, especially if you link swap from different websites (i.e., site A links to site B and site C links to site A).
Ultimately a grey hat tactic is really only bad if it doesn’t offer any value to real users. Links that are out of context, spammy, or harmful are the ones that will eventually get you into trouble. If your primary or secondary goal is to actually be helpful to people in your link building efforts, you should do ok.
Local SEO
Unlike regular SEO, which can span the entire nation, local SEO changes based on location. It’s similar to nationwide SEO but differs in that it factors in things like local citations, your Google My Business page, and local reviews.Local SERPs (search engine results pages) typically include a Google Maps widget with local businesses, reviews, and opening times, to name a few.
Everything about nationwide SEO applies to local SEO (on-site and off-site optimization). But the big difference is citations, which are any place your business’ NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information appears together online, typically in an online directory or business listings website.
Examples of citations include social media sites, Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. Your NAPW information should be an exact match across every single citation (no mis-spelling or slight variations in address).
These help you build authority on Google because they look for consistent, trustworthy information across the internet. The more consistent the information Google finds about a business, the more likely it is to trust matching data it already has.
One of the best ways to manage a local SEO campaign is with a tool like BrightLocal, which allows you to automatically submit or update all of your citations at once from their dashboard.
The tool also allows you to audit your current NAP listings for errors or inconsistencies, which can help you fix your current setup and delete any duplicate citations.
In addition to citations, Google My Business reviews are crucial to rank in local SERPs. The more 5-star reviews you have, the higher your chance of outranking the competition. There are lots of ways to get reviews:
- Ask past customers to leave a review (send an email to your customers with a link to your business page).
- Offer an incentive for reviews in your brick-and-mortar shop, such as a discount or free item. Print out ads for these incentives and hang them in your building.
- Just ask people as they come in! If they enjoyed your store, mention your GMB page and ask for a review.
For example, let’s say you’re a personal injury lawyer and you want to rank for “Personal Injury Lawyer in San Diego.” You would create a Google My Business page (if you don’t already have one), then optimize that page by filling out all the information.
From there, you want to sign up for a BrightLocal account and begin building citations to your Google My Business page (and your website), then work hard to get as many 5-star reviews as possible — ask friends and family, past customers, current customers, etc.
Finally, focus on SEO like normal. Optimize your homepage or a landing page for “Personal Injury Lawyer in San Diego” (title, metadata, headings, image alt text, content, etc.), make sure your technical SEO is on-point with a site audit, and build some more links to your site.
Running ads for your business can also help with local SEO just as it can help with nationwide SEO, so consider doing that as well.
Image SEO
Before I recap on everything we’ve learned so far, I wanted to mention image SEO. Image SEO is not often talked about, but is important and can amass to hundreds or even thousands of extra visitors (with very little effort) if done right.I already mentioned image alt text and include your main keyword and LSI keywords in this field. But image SEO goes beyond that. Just follow these steps:
- Ensure your image title is descriptive and also includes a primary or related keyword (i.e. “RV Cover for Class A” rather than “download” or a random collection of numbers like “70386832_9463785149214_5743632023747035136_n”).
- Optimize your image for optimal loading speed. Scale your images down to the size they’ll be on your site (rather than dynamically resizing them) and compress them using a tool like TinyPNG. Ideally, an image should use less than 150kb of data if possible.
- Use the correct file type for images. In general, .png is better for images with little detail or color, just as lines, text, and iconic graphics. .jpg is better for colorful images and photos.
It’s a good idea to have a plugin or tool (like WP Smush) to automatically re-size and compress your images so it’s one less thing to worry about. If you want to learn more about image SEO, check out this article on Kinsta.
Recap
There is a lot to learn to master SEO, but at its core, SEO is actually pretty simple: target the right keywords, write great content with proper search intent, promote your website to build links, and ensure your site has good navigation and internal links.The two main types of SEO to improve your rankings are on-site SEO (on-page optimization, content, and technical SEO) and off-site SEO (link building and website promotion).
We also covered negative SEO and how to avoid it, as well as the different SEO “hats” (White Hat, Black Hat & Grey Hat). In general, sticking to white hat SEO strategies is the safest way to protect your rankings over time.
Finally, image SEO is important. Compress and resize your images to get them under 150kb of data, name them properly, and don’t forget to attribute alt text that includes your main keyword or a related keyword.
Source: Rankings.io
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