In the small world of search engine optimization, there is a massive rift between those people who practice Organic SEO tactics and those who use Black Hat, unnatural ones. A lot of times, site owners looking for ways to rank their site often fall victim to Black Hat methods and the agencies who utilize them. Truthfully, Black Hat methods can work for a short amount of time; however, what most people do not realize is the long term effects of using these unnatural methods.
5 Facts about Organic SEO
- Organic SEO is the only way to ensure LONG TERM results.
- Buying links and paying for “sponsored listings” are not organic methods.
- If it is automated, it is not natural. Natural SEO is all done manually.
- Organic SEO is not a one time process, it takes time to develop.
- You can not rank a site with “spun” content—high quality articles are crucial.
Natural SEO does not come as easy as Black Hat SEO. There are no simple buttons in organic SEO that get you links or create content for you; however, there is an even more powerful element behind it—the human element. Bots and programs might work for some Black Hats, but these tactics lack the longevity, perseverance, and ingenuity that allows for Natural SEO to develop successfully and stay on top. There is no guarantee that other methods of cheap, effortless link building/buying will pay off long term. Any of the sites webmasters buy links from can be shut down for violating Google’s terms and agreements, and can cause a website listed on that site to be removed from the search engine all together.
Buying links or sponsored listings are not proper ways to increase site rank or traffic. Just because a site payed for a listing at the top of the search results, does not mean it has any ranking value at all. The fact is, those sponsored listings are nothing more than ads that the majority of internet users feel unsure about clicking on. The conversion rate for most pay per click ads is startlingly low, coming in at under 1%. Paying for these listings can be extremely expensive, and when compared with the cost of practicing Organic SEO, are terrible cost effectively.
Investing in Natural SEO does not lend amazing results in a day—good things take time. The processes of Organic SEO are not individualized tactics, everything builds up together. Rushing or spamming any part of the it can set a site up for future complications. Taking short cuts such as automated link building or using content spinners to help speed up the ranking process will only hurt your efforts down the road. Although it may seem a little dry sometimes, the natural approach to site rank has more benefits than most people care to work for. Many turn to Black Hat tactics over Organic SEO, and they will deal with the repercussions eventually.
Black Hat: It MIGHT work…for now.
The only reason SEO agencies that use Black Hat tactics even get clients is because they generally can get a site a ranking quickly, without much work. By utilizing spam tactics such as Xrumer blasts and blog commenting bots, they flood your site with thousands of unnatural links that will spike your ratings quickly, but only momentarily. They force you to keep paying them, warning that your rankings might drop when the SEO is done. If you stop these Black Hat methods will harm you. There will be no more flow of links to your site from their bots, causing your rankings to drop. These tactics temporarily inflate your ranking but include no long term benefits to your ranking or toward the quality of your site as a whole.
Organic SEO: Future Proof
Sites built and ranked around the spam methods of Black Hat optimization lead to falsified, inflated rankings that can disappear just as quickly as they came around. The downfall of Black Hat tactics lies in their solely temporary fix, and the riskiness of the strategies a a whole. Google specifically looks to find sites utilizing these shady methods. If you do not practice Organic SEO, Google will have no mercy when they ban your site permanently from the index. People run a huge risk when they try to optimize their site with these methods, and even if they make it through Google’s scrutiny, the links they create have no long term anchor to keep the ranking they forcefully created.
Natural SEO offers secure link building and strategies that will help your ranking continuously increase. The base methods used by White Hat SEO’s focus on the creation of unique content and the slow acquisition of natural links to real websites. Read more about our White Hat SEO methods to see why they are so crucial to a successful website.
Organic SEO’s Focus: Content
Perhaps just as important as solid link building, writing organic SEO content for your site has significant implications for not only increasing your site rank, but keeping it ranked. The differing results that come from building spam links using Black Hat tactics and updating your site with content is that content, once written, will not disappear or lose value. Old links in blog comments will be indexed and then lose value as time goes by. Quality, natural content stays on site and can get links built to it, that won’t disappear or lose value. Given, writing impressive, fresh content on a consistent basis may get difficult; however, the results will speak for all the hard work put in to it.
Social Sharing and its Effect
Great content provides the website owner with the opportunity to gain backlinks to their site from other authoritative sites that find the content worth sharing. Coupled with social shares via social media, writing good content costs nothing and will pay out over time. The great part about social media promotion of a website’s content comes from its potential to gain real followers to the site. These people are not interested in links and SEO, but rather the actual site as a whole. The domino effect of focusing on content creation for SEO purposes will lead to social shares, and eventually to loyal traffic from people who love the site because it’s something they actually care about.
What It Means for the Future
Creating stellar content that generates tons of social shares and drives organic traffic to a site sounds easy to achieve, in theory; however, the fact of the matter is that not all site owners can pull it off. This does not mean that webmasters looking for SEO results should give up on Organic SEO tactics and switch over to the dark side, though. Creating this content and posting to guest blogging sites can help you gain these natural backlinks and traffic, if you aren’t confident in your writing ability or viral potential. There is no doubt that the White Hat tactics focused on the generation of natural content will have great SEO successes regardless of your potential or knowledge of the inner-workings of the optimization process.
Time is every website owner’s vital ally in their fight to increase rankings, and the benefits of content creation come hand in hand with this aspect. Building up a site with a continuous flow of words and building links to these posts/pages at a steady rate while doing so, shows Google’s crawlers that this site is growing and should be given higher authority. Using Black Hat SEO to force a thousands links to a site in one day will look good at first to Google, but after about a week it will look obviously spammed and almost immediately lose value. When using the Organic SEO methods, the site’s original pages and links will be there forever. As the site posts more content and builds more links, the old pages will be indexed again and given equal or possibly even more value because the site is still growing, not just fading off after one massive spike in growth. These content pages with links built in to them become the anchors to the site while trying to grow and increase its rankings, and will always maintain the solid, natural links the webmaster worked hard to attain.
