The Most Essential Elements

When marketing for your business, SEO is one of the most essential elements to finding success with your online audience. A good amount of time and energy should be spent optimizing your website to be user-friendly, Google-compliant, and, most importantly, informative. SEO will help your website rank higher in search engine results when properly optimized on a regular basis. Google’s algorithms, rules, and expectations have been known to change multiple times a year. Continuous website optimizations will enhance your company’s chances of ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), local packs, and the upcoming SGE (search generative experience).

Local Pack example. Screenshot from Google. Search term: Roofing.

SEO is critical when attempting to increase your company’s visibility in the digital world. This will ultimately make your business more accessible. As a small business owner, you may wonder, “What are SEO best practices? How can I apply them to my marketing strategy?” The SEO team at Art Unlimited is here to share some of our most helpful SEO tips to make it as simple as possible for you.

White Hat Versus Black Hat SEO

It’s essential to recognize the contrast between White Hat SEO and Black Hat techniques. These two approaches represent opposing philosophies in the world of search engine optimization, with vastly different outcomes for your website’s long-term success and reputation.

White Hat

White Hat SEO refers to ethical and legitimate search engine optimization techniques that follow search guidelines and focus on providing value to users. These methods prioritize high-quality content, user experience, and natural link-building strategies. White Hat practices improve a website’s visibility through organic means, ensuring long-term success and avoiding penalties from search engines. Some key characteristics of White Hat SEO include creating informative, original content, optimizing for relevant keywords, improving site speed and accessibility, and earning backlinks through valuable partnerships and outreach.

Black Hat

In contrast, Black Hat SEO encompasses manipulative and deceptive tactics designed to exploit loopholes in search engine algorithms. These practices violate search engine guidelines and often prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability. Black Hat techniques can include keyword stuffing, cloaking (cloaking is when your website shows different content to search engines and users), hidden text, link farms, and purchasing backlinks. While these methods may yield quick results, they ultimately risk severe penalties from search engines, including de-indexing your site entirely. The consequences of Black Hat SEO can be devastating for your online presence and reputation.

Why Avoid Black Hat Tactics

While the allure of quick results may tempt some website owners to consider Black Hat SEO tactics, the risks far outweigh any potential short-term benefits. Search engines are sophisticated at detecting and penalizing manipulative practices, making Black Hat techniques not only unethical but also highly dangerous for your website’s long-term success. Here are several compelling reasons to steer clear of Black Hat SEO:

Graphic of a person in white t-shirt vs. person in a black t-shirt (to represent white hat vs black hat tactics) inside a light green circle

Search engine platforms like Google and Bing actively combat Black Hat techniques. If caught, your website could face severe penalties, including lower rankings, reduced visibility, or complete removal from search results.

Employing deceptive tactics can harm your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. Users and potential customers may lose faith in your business if they discover you’ve used unethical methods to manipulate search results.

Black Hat techniques often prioritize search engines over actual users, resulting in low-quality content and a frustrating experience for visitors. Poor user experience can lead to high bounce rates and decreased engagement.

Any gains achieved through Black Hat SEO are typically short-lived. As search engines update their algorithms, these manipulative tactics become less effective and more likely to backfire.

Some Black Hat techniques may violate laws or regulations, potentially exposing your business to legal consequences.

By avoiding Black Hat tactics and focusing on White Hat SEO strategies, you invest in the long-term success and reputation of your website. Let’s explore the six best practices that will help you achieve sustainable growth and visibility through ethical SEO techniques.

White Hat Optimization Techniques That Will Take Your Business to the Next Level

First things first. Let’s talk meta tags. Meta tags take the page’s content one step further. They help Google and other search engines understand the page and index it more easily. There are two essential meta tags to focus on: meta titles and meta descriptions.

Meta titles appear as blue links on the Search Engine Results Page. They tell the main point of the linked page.
Meta descriptions are the short paragraphs found beneath the blue titles in the SERPs. Their main purpose is to offer a brief snapshot of what the reader may expect if they visit the page. It is your “elevator pitch” that prompts the searcher to click on the link to visit your site.
Include this information for a great meta tag:

Target keyword
The location you’re targeting (if you’re marketing locally)
A call-to-action (CTA)

Example of a meta title & meta description for Art Unlimited USA from the Google Search Engine Results Page

Next up are the header tags. The use of headings for digital marketing and SEO purposes is important for several reasons. For instance, the main heading (also called the H1) works as a title for the web page. Other headings (H2s and H3s) help organize the page content to make it easier for users and Google crawl bots to read.

To optimize your header tags, make sure the page’s primary keyword appears in the H1 and the H2s, but be wary of keyword stuffing. If your keyword appears too often, Google may penalize your site, decreasing its ranking and visibility. If you’re working on local SEO, you’ll also want to include the location in the headings.

H1 example with a keyword. Screenshot example taken from AU homepage

Alt-text tags on your images serve two purposes. They make the pictures on your page accessible for those who need visual help by describing the image for them. They also help Google’s crawlers understand the topic of the page. We build out alt-text on our client sites to include the keyword and location they want to optimize for. Doing so allows Google to index the page more easily and can help increase rankings. Google rewards sites with original, quality images that are accessible to all users, including those with visual impairments.

Most importantly, provide great written content! You may have heard the saying, “Content is KING.” This is the golden rule for SEO success. Your content should have variations of the focus keyword used throughout the page. This tells Google the page is relevant to the keyword topic and ensures that readers won’t find the content repetitive or unreadable. Be sure you avoid keyword stuffing and over-saturation. This is a black hat SEO practice that sends up a red flag to Google’s algorithm. It can result in your site ranking lower in the search engine results, no matter how large your company is.

Use your resources! Google is a game-changer for SEO because it offers so many useful tools. These tools can help nail down a winning strategy. The Google tools we find most helpful are:

Each resource offers unique benefits. You can track metrics, fix site errors, enhance search engine visibility, and more.

Getting a grasp on the basics of technical SEO will help you maintain your site’s health. This part of SEO is the trickiest to master. While you need coding knowledge, there are a few techy things you can pick up to optimize your website.

When it comes to codes, here are a few you could come across:

2XX — These codes are good. You want to be seeing them!
3XX — Redirection errors happen when a URL redirects to multiple resources, and the search engine doesn’t know where to send the user.
4XX — When a 4XX error pops up, it is seen as a user error; usually, the entered URL is incorrect. Because they are harmful, it is important to pay close attention to them.
5XX — Known as server errors, 5XX codes mean your server cannot perform the requested action.

It’s important to know what technical errors can occur within your site. Then, you need to know how to avoid them so Google doesn’t penalize you. Here are some common errors you could find and how to avoid each one.

Soft 404s – These indicate that a page loaded successfully (200 OK status code), but the page does not exist, so the link was redirected to the homepage or a custom URL set by the SEO or web developer.
Not Found 404s – These happen when a page has been taken down. It is best to redirect the removed URL to a similar page to avoid having a Not Found 404.
Crawl Anomalies – A crawl anomaly generally happens when a page takes too long to load. There could also be a 400- or 500-level error. Since the search engine bots can’t crawl the page, they stop crawling your site. To fix this, you can run a Fetch as Googlebot test in Google Search Console and then fix whatever errors it gives you.