SEO Strategies – White Hat vs Black Hat Techniques

There are many different techniques that are used to draw traffic to a website. Some are more savory than others, of course, and all fit into a category. There are White Hat and Black Hat techniques that are used by SEO’s and web page designers to bring attention to whatever it is you need the public to see.

The Black Hat type strategies are, as you most likely guessed, the ones that use sneaky tricks to bring readers to web pages. Think of a time when you have typed in a keyword to search and you found yourself going from page to page, link to link, finding nothing but junk and useless material most of which has little or nothing to do with what you need to know. This is done by such methods as keyword stuffing, hidden text, and paid linking.

White Hat methods are a great way for those doing honest business to attract attention to their sites by offering true results for the keywords typed in. When someone does a search and your site comes up, there should be a legitimate page there that is relevant to what the searcher is looking for. The keywords on the page should be in reasonable and appropriate percentages and the content should reflect the subject of the keywords.

Using a White Hat approach, you’ll add links, photos, videos, and other relevant information that is useful and informative and gives those searching just what they are looking for. A good site map and internal linking on your website are a few ways that you can assure a good ranking by the search engines.

Black Hat tricks are used to get the ranking higher up on the search results page, even if it’s done by placing multiple keywords where they don’t even make sense to the context of the material. The keywords are just stuffed into the articles or other web content to fool the search engine ‘bots’ into believing that the site or page contains legitimate content to take the reader to the desired information.

Although the Black Hats have been successful at times, the search engine administrators are becoming less tolerant of these dishonest and tacky techniques. Many of them have become expert at fishing out the Black Hat tactics and eliminating them from their search engines when caught. It is, indeed, the White Hats that win in the end.