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We’ve all heard that old school fashion tip, “don’t wear white after labor day!” But, here at ParadoxLabs, our SEO fashion tip is to wear your white hat every time you sit down to market your site.

The practice of SEO has been written and rewritten so many times in the past few years, SEO has become a scary and daunting undertaking for some companies. Since Google has been handing out manual penalties left and right, one thing we do know is that black hat SEO is as dead as disco.

But, some webmasters and marketers alike are still tempted to turn to the dark side. We understand the frustration that comes with marketing your site and making good SEO decisions. Keep your head up, resist temptation, and put your white hat on as we explore some real SEO tactics.

All About That Engagement

It’s no secret that SEO has turned into a game of engagement. This idea of engagement extends far beyond simply crafting engaging social posts, tweeting your followers, or doing giveaways. As marketers and business owners, we need to think of engagement as an all-encompassing idea. This means you should send engagement signals to both your customers and the search engines in all aspects of your business practices. Moz’s resident SEO Wizard, Rand Fishkin, presents a compelling case for total engagement in this video.

Engagement starts on your website by creating elegant navigations and designs to entice customers to convert, and extends to your web presence as a whole. You should practice excellent engagement as often as you can, all across the web. These are things like: crafting interesting social posts, interacting with customers reviews (whether they are positive or negative), and producing exceptional content in the form of blogs, how-to’s, etc.

Once you learn to effectively engage your customers, the marketing world is your oyster.

Write Compelling Content

By now, every marketing professional knows that content is king – it has been since the birth of SEO. Since then, content has really evolved. Gone are the days of stuffing a website page or blog post full of relevant keywords, then zooming up the rankings based on the sheer amount of matching keyword phrases. Today, companies dedicate teams of professionals to conceptualize and market awesome content.

As a business owner or marketer, you hear a lot of chatter about frequent blogging. Sure, updating your blog frequently is great, but what if you don’t have the means to pump out 5 new blog posts a week? Don’t stress! Spend your time researching and writing a phenomenal blog post – quality over quantity really does apply in this case. Your high quality blog post (or even content page on your site) will always take the throne over frequent, poorly written content.

Provide Value

The point of almost every website is to provide users with something of value – something they can use to learn, gain something from, be entertained by, or purchase. As an ecommerce business, your main objective is to provide products for your customers. Basically, you’re telling your customers, “you need my product to accomplish that.” Whether it’s selling bug spray or rocking chairs, you want customers to perceive your products as a valuable asset to their lives.

Providing your customers with value should extend far beyond your product offerings though. Your website, social media presence, interactions, customer service, and content should all provide value to your customers. It’s so important to stick to this philosophy in everything you do online.

Providing constant value to your customers is one of the best ways to gain visibility, and hopefully move up in the ever changing search results. Once that happens, your end goal of increased conversions becomes easier to meet.

Build Relationships

When you provide a service or product for sale, we all know building a strong relationship with your customers is so important. You want these people to come back and buy more, and ultimately become loyal to your brand. This idea of building good, lasting relationships extends to your web presence as well. When you create a personal bond with customers through blogging, social media, and more, you create a win-win situation for yourself. You are not only strengthening customers’ perception of your value, you are also sending trust and authority signals to the search engines.

This idea of building relationships is especially important when we think about link building. The practice of link building has become a sensitive subject for many companies and marketers. It’s no longer as easy as plugging your site into a link program, pressing start, and sitting back to watch your site skyrocket from page 400 to page one. Real link building calls for building real relationships – think of this less like “link” building, and more like “relationship” building and link earning.

How do you work to cultivate these relationship that may or may not result in a link? You could try reaching out to bloggers – send them your products for free and ask them to consider writing a blog about it if they love it! This is only one example of a genuine way to build a great relationship that may lead to an equally great link.

Feeling better?

SEO done correctly isn’t such a scary thing after all. You just need to strive to engage your audience, produce truly compelling content, provide value, and build real relationships. All of these things work in perfect harmony to create a web presence that is not only good for you, but good for your customers.

Remember, white hats never go out of style.