Local SEO services can help your Nashville business in a variety of ways. These tactics can also take many different forms in order to do so. In fact, a successful SEO strategy will make use of multiple tactics in order to create a stronger overall effort.

However, not all of these tactics will affect your SEO standings in a positive way. There are some tactics that negatively impact the user experience of internet searches with the goal of increasing the website’s standings on search engine results pages.

These tactics are often split into two different distinctions: white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

The methods that fall into either category will have different effects on your website — on one side positively raising your rankings, and on the other hand potentially getting your website banned.

So how do you make sure you are helping your website with your local SEO services instead of harming it? You need to know the difference between white hat and black hat SEO practices.

We’ll look at some common questions relating to white hat SEO practices and black hat SEO practices:

What Is White Hat SEO?

Search engine optimization is used to increase visits to your website from interested parties. The efforts of local SEO services are aimed at getting your content to the top of relevant search queries.

Essentially, this works because search engines are set up to best serve the people using the services. A relevant search result will keep the user coming back for more.

With this in mind, search engines like Google reward those who optimize their content to better serve users.

These are honest practices that benefit the user and in turn, benefit the website. Truthful and honest means of achieving better results rankings are referred to as White Hat SEO.

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What Is Black Hat SEO?

SEO strategies change over time as Google and other search engines change the way they find and sort information. As we said earlier, this is always done with the end goal of providing the best search results for the users.

There are some techniques that are considered to be unethical. This is what is known as Black Hat SEO. These techniques work to get a website to the top of search results, but it is done through unhelpful techniques that don’t actually provide a benefit to the user.

Search engines have guidelines for how they operate. Black hat SEO goes against these stated guidelines.

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How Do You Tell the Difference Between Good and Bad Practices?

The most basic way to differentiate between white and black hat SEO practices are to consider the target of the method — is the particular practice aimed at the user or the search engine itself?

This is only a starting point, but it’s a good indication of how the particular SEO tactic might be interpreted.

Are you focusing more on the structure of the content as opposed to the information contained within the content? Is your idea of success a high ranking for a particular keyword or do you measure successful conversions?

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What Are the Benefits of White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO practices will benefit your website, the user, and the search engine itself. Users that find the information they need are likely to use that search engine again in the future, as well as do business with the website they found.

The website will also be rewarded with higher rankings in the future. A low bounce rate indicates to the search engine that the content of your website was interesting to the user.

Search engines want their users to find interesting results, so they’ll reward you by showing your pages to future users.

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Examples of White Hat SEO Tactics

Local SEO services should offer your Nashville business a variety of ways to provide value to your visitors. This can be done through inbound marketing practices such as blogging and optimized website content with quality and informative information.

There are certain web design tactics that will also benefit your SEO performance. Responsive web design makes your website easily viewed on a variety of differently-sized screens. Fast loading time also improves the visitor’s experience.

Anything that makes your website a better experience for your visitors will benefit your rankings.

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Examples of Black Hat SEO Tactics

Black hat SEO aims to get your pages to the top of search result rankings through any means necessary. One example of this is keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of cramming numerous keywords into your content without considering how it actually reads. This creates unreadable content for a user while trying to catch the attention of search engines.

There are also more nefarious tactics such as what’s known as Negative SEO. This is the practice of lowering the results rankings for your competition in order to drive your own pages up in the rankings.

This can be done by hacking a competitor’s website, making fake social media accounts, or copying a competitor’s content and making it available in multiple different places.

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These practices are unethical and can be met with some severe disciplinary actions from Google. It’s best to work with an experienced Nashville company for local SEO services like Horton Group. We’ve helped numerous businesses to properly and effectively increase their internet presence.

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