When Hats are More Than Just a Fashion Accessory: Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
January 4, 2013
As is with many things in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about doing things. This also applies in the world of SEO! Back in the olden days, people would come up with tricky ways to fool Google into ranking them on their search engine. Placing white text on a white page, which made the text invisible to the human eye, but readable to Google, was one of the ways people found to manipulate “the Goog”. Today, there are more sophisticated paths of manipulation. Keyword stuffing is something that we experience often with many of our new clients. This is the process of placing (stuffing) many SEO keywords into the page content and meta content of a website. Overdoing it, if you will. In SEO, many people tend to think that more is better; however with many things in life, it is more about balance. If your website content looks a little unnatural and you start foaming at the mouth when reading aloud, you probably have too many keywords stuffed into your content. If your website is linking to unrelated or spammy websites, you are exploring the deep depths of the Black Hat realm. My advice, DON’T DO IT! You aren’t going to be able to fool Google for very long, if at all, and chances are you will end up losing traction and rankings in the end. Participating in Black Hat SEO techniques will put you on the fast track to becoming black listed from Google. If you do choose to participate in these methods and fall completely off Google, I’m sorry for your loss . 😐
On the contrary, however, if you have a website where the keywords fall naturally into the content, the meta information appears organic, but still targets your keywords and you are creating quality inbound links from relevant websites, you are participating in White Hat SEO techniques. Also, when implementing optimization techniques onto your website, consider your users experience. Will your keyword optimized content make sense to the human reader? Do you have a good, strong website that is interesting and that people want to visit (and continue to visit)? If so, you are on the right track to becoming a very fashionable wearer of white hats!