Search Engine Optimization: Black Hat vs White Hat
posted October 16, 2009 - 4:53amI have been reading and learning a lot about search engine optimization (SEO) recently and discovered that there are several methods of trying to place your website on the top of the results for search engines. These methods have been divided into the legitimate and honest versus the fraudulent and underhanded. There are also some things that one might do that could be said to fall somewhere in the middle and have been described as gray hat. This article will discuss the different methods of SEO.
Black hat SEO involves techniques that typically violate rules of the search engines themselves. The techniques may help in the short term, but as we all know, “cheaters never win.” One of the techniques is keyword stuffing where the site simply has long lists of keywords. You may sometimes see this at the bottom of sites where the text is simply one long paragraph of nothing but words. There are no sentences or coherent thoughts expressed. Another problem technique is to place keywords in white on a white background so they are invisible to users but not to the search engine spiders. Another black hat method is to create pages for the spiders that the user will never see. These are known as “doorway” or “gateway” pages. These methods may work for a while but ultimately, there is no substitute for good SEO.
Some legitimate tips to improve your search engine results are the “white hat” techniques. First of all, there is no substitute for high quality content. You will want to research your keywords extensively and use your targeted keyword in the title of your article and sprinkled throughout the content. This will help the search engines know what your article is about. But, it needed be artificial or forced. If your article is of high quality, it should be of sufficient length and cover your keyword in enough detail that the presence of your keyword in the text will seem natural. One of the biggest factors in getting your site to the top of search engines is through external links to your site. Write enough quality articles on your site, and people will start linking to them, giving your site more and more authority. Over time your site will naturally climb to the top. There are no real short cuts.
Building your own links might fall into a gray area. I would certainly classify link exchanges and paying for links as being closer to the black side of SEO than the white. Social bookmarking and writing articles on sites with links to your own work seems to be more like free advertising to me so I don’t consider it dishonest or fraudulent in any way. I think if your readers understand, and you are honest about it, that is fine. Others may feel differently. I have written an article entitled SEO Tips for Newbies that you may want to check out. You may also want to read about my SEO Experiment at my blog. The link will bring you to the original article. You can go to the main page of the blog to follow the progress to date. It is interesting, and I hope to learn a lot while sharing the information with others.
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