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Before we start to understand the concept of website optimization, we need to know some of the concepts and terminologies most commonly used as SEO best practices by millions of marketers around the world. Studies suggest 75% of web users don’t go past the first or second page of SERPs. If you are not ranking in the top 10 organic results for your targeted keywords, then your site is most likely going to be ineffective to drive traffic towards your business. 

Whether you are looking for a quick return on your website, or you are seeking a long-term investment. You need to follow certain methodologies that will help you in the search engine world. White hat SEO and black hat SEO denote good and bad search engine optimization practices in the digital marketing industry.

Techniques that violate search engine guidelines when practiced and used to get higher search rankings unethically are known as black hat SEO techniques. This practice is mainly focused on search engines rather than the audience itself. The consequences of such acts could impact your web presence. It could also result in the site being banned from a search engine, as well as the site getting de-indexed for using unethical tactics. 

Below are five black hat SEO practices that should be avoided:

1. Keyword Stuffing.
2. Meta Keyword Stuffing is unnaturally placing the keywords in web page metadata, page titles, or any backlink anchor text.
3. Publishing content that is duplicated, low quality, or ethically inappropriate.
4. Content Cloaking, which is adding content that doesn’t actually appear in the user’s browser. 
5. Adding unrelated website links to your website, or most commonly known as link farming.

White hat SEO is tactics used within a search engine’s terms of service to gain position in a site's search engine results page rankings. This helps maintain the integrity of your website, online rankings, and visibility in SERPs. For this, you need to know some of the key features of a White Hat SEO practice, following which your website will gain a good ranking and earn good authority:

1. Building good quality content is the most crucial element of modern-day SEO.
2. Content-relevant keywords, which are based on disciplined keyword research. 
3. Keyword-rich page titles and metadata, which should be a mandatory practice.
4. Lean code or a well-structured markup language that includes the use of keyword-rich headings on the web pages.
5. Organically earned authoritative inbound links.
6. Keeping a website’s navigation as simple as possible for visitors can result in potential conversions
7. Page load speed, mobile optimization, site responsiveness should also be a major point for consideration.

There are no hard-and-fast rules, but following some of the best practices in the SEO industry could make your website's optimization process simple and secure. This could in turn earn your organization quality leads. Learn more about how DevDigital can help your SEO efforts.