We hear the terms all the time. But how do we know exactly what defines one as a Black hat or a white hat SEO.

How do we know who are good SEOs using ethical practices and who are the spammers filling Internet with garbage, in an effort to make their sites appear popular.

In general, black hat may be spotted by employing the following practices:

• Does not follow search engine rules and regulations.


• Deceptively presents content in a different visual (or non-visual) way to search engine spiders and users.


• Creates a poor user experience because he's not after the user, he's after the search engine.
  

A lot of what is now known as black hat SEO used to be a legitimate, but because these practices were abused so much, they are now banned.

Some of the common black hat techniques are:

• Meta Keyword Stuffing. Deceptively stuffing keywords in a chaotic manner into meta description and meta keywords.


• Content Keyword stuffing. Adding long lists of keywords and nothing else onto the pages will get a site penalized eventually by search engines.


• Jump Pages. A jump (or doorway) page is a page that a user will never see. It's designed entirely for the search engines. Jump pages are not static. Once a searcher lands on a jump page, they are instantly redirected to the "real" website.


• Invisible text. An example of this would be adding keywords or keyword phrases in white text on a white background in hopes of ranking higher for those keywords.


• Link Farming. Link farms pages have no other purposes than to list links of unrelated websites. They don't provide your site with any traffic and you do run the risk of having your site banned for participating.

Black Hat SEO tricks are tempting - they actually do work, well... temporarily. But it's just not worth the risk - when a site is caught using unetical prictices in order to increase ranking, it's penalized by being excluded from the search engine results, either temporarily or permanently.

Some of the common white hat techniques are:

• Good content. A well-written copy tagreting your potential users will not only attract users, but search engines as well.


• Relevant Titles and Meta Data. A good use of the title and other meta tags (description and keywords) will go a long way.


• Structural (Semantic) Mark Up. Semantically structuring your HTML helps search engines understand the content of your webpage. Using CSS to separate the design elements from the content makes for much lighter code and makes it easier for search engines to find what they are looking for, which is content.


• Effective Keyword Use. Each page must be created with with keywords and key phrases in mind. Single words are not always the most effective target, so use some multi-word key phrases that are specific to a product or service you are promoting.
  Use keywordsand key phrases in the following page elements:
  
  
  
  • Title Tag
  
  
  • Meta Description
  
  
  • Meta Keywords
  
  
  • Heading Elements (H1, H2, H3)
  
  
  • Body Text
  
  
  • Image Alt Tag
  
  
  • Text Links


• Quality Inbound Links. Links to your site are like votes. People like your site and your content and they want to link to you. Good votes (good links) are links from other web pages
  that are regarded highly by the search engines and are relevant to the content of your page. Bad votes (bad links) are links from questionable websites that don't have a good reputation or content. Those are of no use to your site.

Recently, there's been a new term floating around called "Grey hat SEO"

Some of the common grey hat techniques are:

• Paid Links. Paying someone for placing a link to your site on their site or vice versa is a questionable technique. While it's hard for the search engines to catch someone doing it, be sure that your competitors will be more than happy to report you.


• Duplicate Content. Recently, duplicate content on the web has become an increasingly significant problem for both search engines and search engine users. To address the issue many search engines have modified their algorythms and added filters to seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Many sites unknowingly create this problem by having multiple domains that go to the same website. It is important to use domain redirects to prevent this from happening.


• Micro Sites. While this can be a great "white hat" technique when used right, micro sites are being abused by some SEOs. There's a time and place for creating a microsite, versus further building out your main web site. If your site is likely to gain more interest with webmasters and bloggers by being at an arm's length from your main site, then it should be considered. It can act as an effective feeder system to reach consumers as they seek to get educated in a product category through acticles, RSS feeds and podcasts.

SEO means "Good Website Design". It takes time and patience. It will work when done right.

Have questions about SEO? Feel free to contact us at www.greatpointdesigns.com and request a quote. We only use ethical practices for promoting the websites.