We have had clients that saw their competition ranking really well for important search terms in their industry and found that the competitors were using black hat techniques to get their strong rankings. This week Google released yet another Panda update; actually number 5 for those keeping track at home. (Credit to Barry Schwartz for his most recent Google Panda update 2.3 article).

Stay the white hat course for your SEO efforts

After researching our clients’ competitors we have found that they have been buying links on many link bait style sites that had established high domain and page authorities. What was the result? Well, as mentioned earlier, they were ranking well for very competitive terms and we began to feel pressure to implore some of those techniques ourselves but we didn’t.

We stayed with the white hat SEO techniques and have consistently seen a positive uptick on all of the terms we are targeting for our clients. It meant taking a bit longer to rank well organically for the search terms we were targeting however this week our efforts have been rewarded.

We have seen results for all of our search engine optimization clients across the board increase. In fact, our client’s competitor I mentioned earlier has fallen significantly in their rankings. It is nice to see that the sage advice from other experts on blogs like Search Engine Land and SEOMoz were correct and that we resisted the urge for the magic bullet. I imagine our client’s competitor is now scrambling to find a way to get back up on Page 1 results and that their SEO consultant is facing some tough questions as to why they have dropped out of the rankings.

So what are some of the white hat SEO tips you can use?

1. Great (and different) Title tags on every page of your site. Don’t keyword stuff them and make sure your page content matches the title tag.
2. Be sure to repeat your primary keyword multiple times on the pages you are optimizing for results.
3. Develop great content. Period. End of story. Great content will win.
4. Get inbound links with great anchor text pointing back to specific pages on your site.
   Tip: It helps to get out in the real world and network with people, then after establishing a relationship, see if there is a mutually beneficial way you can help each other with SEO efforts.
5. Review Google Webmasters Tools and find out what Google “thinks” your site is about. This tool will show you what words Google found most frequently when indexing your site, my guess is … if you haven’t looked at this tool before, you may be surprised what you find here.

If you have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) questions or would like us to come out and consult with your company please feel free to contact us and we would love to meet you and learn more about your business.