Search Engine Optimization / SEO is all about influencing how search engines rank your website listings. Some would say that the end justifies the means and so would be ready to use any form of practice that would somehow help their search engine rankings.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the white witch and the black witch. They’re both witches, they both practice magic (supposedly) its just that one is good whereas the other is the villain and thus bad. In online marketing the use of bad and black is used to metaphorically represent good and bad SEO. Grey hat SEO is a considered an in between the two ends, and refers to practices which are sometimes good and sometimes bad.
This short article tried to discuss the difference between black hat and white hat SEO.
Search Engine Optimization / SEO is all about influencing how search engines rank your website listings. Some would say that the end justifies the means and so would be ready to use any form of practice that would somehow help their search engine rankings. Others prefer to take a more ethical approach using only legitimate and approved forms of SEO to improve rankings. It is this basic distinction in SEO practices that divides the SEO practitioners into black hat and white hat SEO’s.
Black hat SEO involves practices that webmasters or search marketers use to try to deceive or lie to the search engines. These practices usually include one or more of the following:
- Black hat SEO breaks search engine rules and regulations
- Unethically manipulate site content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.
- In the end black hat SEO creates a poor user experience for website users.
Most of what is known as Black hat SEO started off as creative and innovative practices to try to effect how search engines pick up websites to push them higher in their search rankings. Some optimizers went overboard and the excessive use of these “creative” practices and ended up being banned by Search Engines and frowned on by the SEO community in large.
Some Black Hat practices to avoid:
Overuse of Keywords (Keyword stuffing): This practice involves stuffing huge lists of keywords and very little else into websites. Search Engines will find this out and penalize you.
Hidden text: This is a system whereby webmasters “hide” keywords by putting the font color the same color of the background of the page. This creates the impression of invisible text. Search engines are no longer tricked by such a practice and they will end up banning your site rather than improving your ranking.
Face entry pages (Doorway Pages) – These “fake” pages are created for spam indexing by inserting specific results for particular keywords and search phrases. These fake entry pages are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, and gateway pages. Such practices are also known as cloaking since they redirect visitors without their knowledge. Whatever online marketing experts, search engines or clients say, Search Engine optimization should put the visitor first!
Examples of White hat SEO include:
Internal Linking:
Search engine spiders navigate your website by following text based hyperlinks on the site. Hyperlinks hidden into image maps, flash menus or fancy drop down navigation are very difficult for search engine spiders to follow. Whilst the visual aspect of the site is very important, having sites which emphasize only on the visual aspect but making it difficult for search engines to index them is self defeating. It is very important for sites to have text links at the bottom of each page as well as an XML site map.
Reciprocal linking
Linking your site with other webmasters is considered very beneficial for improving your website’s link. One must keep in mind that not every kind of link from other sites works. Only links from related sites add value to your link campaign. One should make sure that you never link to any “bad” sites such as those coming from penalized websites.
Content Creation
I cannot stress enough the importance of content in a website. A website is a means of communicating useful and valid information to visitors. If a website lacks this basic principles no matter how much you will try to work on SEO, in the long term the site will never do well with search engines. A “content rich” site is important for visitors and thus important for search engines.
Search Engine Optimization SEO
SEO comprises a holistic approach to improving the website’s friendliness, these include improvements in the sites coding such as more effective page title tags, better keyword and description Meta tags, as well as tweaking content to maximize Search Engine indexing. An effective SEO campaign should not move the website’s focus from the end user. There is no point in increasing traffic to a site which has poor content and cannot do its job of effectively transmitting the desired message.
Online Marketing Services Ltd is based in Malta and offers a wide range of SEO services to Maltese enterprises. If you would like to contact us for a fee quote or review of your site, please do so by sending us an email.