In this episode, we cover:

Today, we speak to Tye Odom, the founder and CEO of Whitewater Digital, a digital marketing agency in the Birmingham, Alabama area that provides a wide range of digital marketing services, including SEO consulting and training. Tye is an SEO veteran with close to a decade of experience in SEO and SEM.

In this episode, he will speak on the topic “White hat SEO: Proven Ways to Rank Consistently With Stability.”

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Ewan Watt, discusses SEO during the COVID crisis.

Show Notes Explanation

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of SEO On-Air. As you know, over 200 ranking factors are laid out by Google, and the availability of tons of growth hacks on the web can confuse anyone easily. SEO is a long-form game, and it’s essential to know which technique works really well and which of them are white hat.

We have Mr. Tye Odom to speak about proven white hat methods. He is the Director of SEO at Randall-Reilly. He has a decade of experience in search engine optimization and has a history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Tye, welcome to the show.

Time Stamp: 02:08-04:04

Q. Can you tell us more about the black hat SEO techniques that are still prevalent today but are considered as white hat tactics?

• I believe the white hat SEO is going to likely stand the test of time with Google.
• If your SEO strategies do not provide value to the users, they will be considered black hat or grey hat by Google.
• Therefore, you need to create content that’s valuable to the users and optimize your site that’s useful to the people.

Time Stamp: 04:40-06:38

Q. Can you tell us some of the white hat SEO methods that are future-proof?

• Your site architecture and authoritative content are always going to stand the test of time with Google.
• Other things like internal links on your homepage, navigation, and footer are also going to be important and future-proof.
• You always need to pay attention to the number of links on your homepage because the PageRank flows from your homepage to other pages on your site.
• The structure of the site is also an important part to consider.

Time Stamp: 07:00-08:41

Q. Do you think that adding hundreds of links to each city in a particular state at the footer of a page is valuable for sites?

• I don’t think such links at the bottom of the footer are valuable.
• Adding strategic links that are editorially given within a piece of content is always the best way to go.
• Editorial links are always more valuable than links added at the bottom of the footer.

Time Stamp: 10:26-13:40

Q. What is the safest way to rank new sites through white hat SEO?

• These days, I’d definitely put a lot of focus on the page-loading speed.
• A Google Developer’s chat states that any page that takes more than 3 seconds to load with lose half of its visitors on that page.
• Site architecture is also very important. You need to keep your homepage pretty simple.
• As you keep building PageRank, you can gradually grow the number of links on your site.
• Writing high-quality and unique content is another important thing to implement. Avoid having thin content on your site.

Time Stamp: 14:45-16:03

Q. What, according to you, the best backlink that you can get on your website?

• The best backlink that you can get is from another authoritative site that has content relevant to yours.
• You have to build relationships with websites and people from related industries so that there’s a lot common between both of you.

Time Stamp: 16:53-19:09

Q. Have you come across any situation where a negative SEO attack happened to a site?

• I’ve come across a site that was probably hit by a negative SEO attack.
• We tried looking at every last resource we can. We used a lot of different tools and created a big list so that we can disavow.
• Staying on top of your backlink profile and manually checking as many links as you can is recommended.
• Look for domains associated with a bad link neighborhood and knock them out as soon as possible.

Time Stamp: 19:40-21:11

Q. What are the recommended schemas for people to look after?

• For me, it’s about not being spammy and staying away from anything that looks manipulative.
• Don’t start adding different schemas that don’t apply to your websites. Use only the ones that go well with your industry.
• Don’t include keywords that don’t apply to your company just in hopes of getting traffic, or you’ll end up getting penalized.