If you are involved in the internet search industry at all you should be familiar with the terms Black Hat and White Hat. These are terms used daily to guide internet marketers and website owners and should be understood fully before hiring an internet marketing firm or trying to use SEO on your site. "White Hat" marketing includes all online marketing practices that are ethical and follow the rules, policies and guidelines of search engines. These are techniques that help a website earn their place on the search engine results pages the right way and over time. One SEO practice that is a great White Hat way to help your rankings is to update content on a regular basis. The search engine spiders love to crawl good content and by publishing fresh content regularly, your site is likely more beneficial to users and will rank better. Keeping an eye on the analytics of your site is another way to use appropriate measures to help with SEO. This allows you to see specifics of where you are ranking and why and can guide you to areas that need work. Link building can be a White Hat practice when done right. Providing links to other related, reputable sites and having these sites link to you can be a good move in the internet marketing world. People who want to get to the top of search engines immediately sometimes use Black Hat SEO strategies. They may get you there fast, but they will likely soon cause you to plummet just as fast. These are techniques that are against the written and unwritten rules of internet marketing and the search engines are getting better all the time at catching those using these methods. Keyword stuffing is one Black Hat technique that has been commonly used. Using keywords excessively can make content difficult to read and does not make search engines happy. Keywords must be used in SEO but must be used appropriately in the content, and in the inner workings of the site. Hidden text has even been used by some by using white text on white backgrounds. Another no-no is using a "doorway page" to trick the search engines into indexing your site higher. This is a page that the user will never really see and is created strictly for search engine spiders. While linking can be a good SEO technique, it can cross the line into Black Hat marketing if not done correctly. Using "link farming" to create links involves submitting your link to link directories that have tons of unrelated sites. Also, over exchanging links can work against you. Be sure you know just who you are dealing with when it comes to link exchange, you could end up with less than stellar results. JC Penney was in the news recently due to their attempt at SEO gone wrong. Using Black Hat style artificial link building JC Penney jumped to the top of the search results even bypassing some of the manufacturers of the products they carry. While it may have worked for a brief time, soon enough Google figured it out and in a matter of days, their rankings went from first to somewhere around fiftieth. When it comes to ethical SEO, be sure that the methods that you or your marketing agency are using are strictly white hat. While it will take longer to get the rankings that you want, you will be doing it the right way and ensuring a good reputation within Google and can maintain the results to ensure the success of your business.
Please Rate this Article 5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
