There is a divide in the SEO community when it comes to the colour of the hat that you wear, and there is much debate on what separates black hat from white hat SEO techniques.
So what is the difference?
White Hats always try to play nice and within the rules of the Google playground. They organically grow sites over years to build up the trust of the Search Engines. Black hatters, on the other hand, focus on getting to the top of the search engine today for a quick, short term gain.
Tell me more about White Hat SEO….
White Hat, or Ethical SEO, is basically any technique that maintains the integrity of your web site and the Search Engine Results pages (SERP). White Hat techniques can take a lot longer to achieve results but in the long term are much more sustainable and rewarding. You also evade the risk of having your web site blacklisted by the Search Engines.
White Hat SEO can be achieved by utilising four main principals:
· Internal Linking
· Reciprocal Linking (two way link exchanges)
· Genuine, engaging content
· On Site Optimisation
· Content Submission such as Articles and Press Releases (these can easily fall into a grey hat area which sits between the Black and the White)
In more detail, Internal linking is all about the strategy connecting the pages within your web site. If the search engines can’t crawl your site efficiently you are obstructing any opportunity to index the pages. Make sure that your internal linking strategy is clear and that you use both HTML and XML sitemaps on your site to help the search engines find their way to every single page.
Try to link your pages with descriptive anchor text (the text that the site visitor clicks on to navigate between pages). Anchor text plays an important part in SEO and should always describe the target page, if possible using keywords. If you have to link using images, make sure you include ALT text with the image, again ensuring use of keywords.
Another good way of getting links to your site is through a two-way link exchange, otherwise known as reciprocal linking. The value of two way links has declined a little over the last few years, but they still hold a certain amount of value in SEO. The key factor to consider with a two-way link exchange is that the links are coming from a relative content source, that is a site with content that is similar to your own. Ultimately this is where two-way link exchanges can become difficult to achieve as you can be asking site owners to promote competition within their own industry. When you plan your two-way link exchange you should also consider the Page Rank of the source page. The higher the page rank, the higher the page in terms of authority within Google. A link from a page with a high page rank is more valuable than one with a low value, however don’t rule out a page just because it has a page rank of 2 as you never know what value that page may hold in 12 months time.
The next step to White Hat SEO is content. If you write engaging content then people will naturally link to you. This is the best way to organically grow your site. This step can be time consuming but ultimately is the most rewarding.
On Site Optimisation is the back-bone of every SEO campaign. The optimisation of your site from areas such as the Title Tag and description to ALT text on images and title text on text links is the key to an effective and successful SEO campaign.
One thing to make sure is that you optimise your site and content so that it doesn’t detract from the quality presented to human visitors. The number one rule of White Hat SEO is that you write then content on your web site for humans, not for the Search Engines.
At the end of the day, you are looking to drive traffic to your web site to produce sales and enquiries and there is no real achievement in ranking number one in Google only to find that your site doesn’t capture the imagination of its visitors or produce the financial results it should.
Tell me more about the dark side….
Black Hat Optimisation techniques are designed to trick the search engines into ranking sites and pages using methods such as:
Doorway Pages
Doorway Pages are web pages added to a web site to target specific keywords or phrases, but provide little content or value to the site visitor. Effectively, the site owner hopes that when people land on these pages that they will visit the rest of the web site.
Hidden Text
The use of hidden text on a page is effectively adding text to a page in the same colour as the background it is displayed on. These days the search engines are clever enough to detect this technique
Interlinking
Interlinking is the term used for building up a network of micro sites that all link back to the site that is the main focus of the SEO campaign. There are many ways around Interlinking and it can be difficult for the search engines to detect. It is classed as black hat as it is effectively littering the internet with web site “SPAM” – although in some circumstances, if done properly the micro sites can provide valuable content to human visitors.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique used to present different content to the human visitor and the search engines. There are many different methods of cloaking and some are virtually undetectable by the search engines.
In Summary
Don’t forget that, even though some Black Hat techniques are undetectable by the search engines that you can fall into the trap of being reported to the Search Engines for using them and this could result in being banned from the listings. For this reason alone, stay away from the dark side and only practice white hat techniques. Whilst they may take longer to yield results, they offer a more sustainable, long term strategy for your Search Engine Marketing.
